A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  December 15

  The last time I saw pictures of a man with long hair being displayed as a trophy of the American Empire it was Che Guevara, stretched out dead on a table in a morgue in Valle Grande in the eastern Bolivian mountains. In those edgier days, in late 1967, the Bolivian Army high command wanted him dead, the quicker the better, though the CIA wanted him alive for interrogation in Panama.

  After a last chat with the CIA’s Félix Rodriguez, George Bush Sr.’s pal, a Bolivian sergeant called Terran shot Che in the throat and Rodriguez got to keep his watch. They chopped off Guevara’s hands for later checking to make sure the ID was correct. Years later, his skeleton, sans hands, was located and flown back to Havana for proper burial.

  “It is better this way,” Guevara told Rodriguez at the end. “I should never have been captured alive,” he said, showing that even the bravest weaken at times. At the moment of his capture by the Bolivian Army unit, a wounded Guevara had identified himself, telling the soldiers he was Che and worth more to them alive than dead.

  Back in 1967 most of the world mourned when Che’s capture and death seized the headlines. A million turned out in Havana to listen to Fidel Castro’s farewell speech. It’s been downhill all the way since then. The revolutionary cause has mostly gone to hell in a handcart and the next time America’s Most Wanted came out with his hands up, badly in need of a haircut, it was a mass murderer called Saddam Hussein, helped into power by the CIA a year after Guevara’s death. “I’m the President of Iraq,” he said, and then tried to cut a deal.

  I went straight from the Monday morning news clips of the US Army’s film of Saddam having his teeth checked to have my own teeth cleaned by Tom, an oral hygienist in Santa Rosa, northern California. To try to deflect Tom from his stern rebukes for my own flossing failures I mentioned the footage of Saddam with his mouth open, while someone checked out his teeth.

  Though he gave no professional opinions on the state of Saddam’s gums, it turned out Tom had spent a couple of years in Basra, in southern Iraq, imparting the elements of oral hygiene to the locals. “I’d point out to them that their gums were bleeding, and they’d sigh, and say it was Allah’s will.” Then, like millions round the world that morning we (though, of necessity, I did most of the listening) reviewed the various options awaiting Saddam.

  There were plenty of pieties in the opinion columns that Monday morning about the need for a manifestly independent tribunal where Saddam could be accorded every legal courtesy and the administration of justice would be scrupulous.

  It was impossible to read this claptrap without laughing since that same morning Wesley Clark was testifying in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a body conjured into existence by the UN Security Council. As for it being anything other than a US puppet, ICTY was looking pretty slutty that morning, since the US government had successfully bullied the court into allowing Clark to testify in the absence of public or press, in what the ICTY demurely termed a “temporary closed session” with delayed transmission of the transcript, to allow the US government to “review the transcript and make representations as to whether evidence given in open session [sic] should be redacted in order to protect the national interests of the US.” To further protect the interests of General Clark, he would only have to endure limited cross examination by Miloević, a feisty cross-examiner.

  All the US wants is for Saddam to be hauled into some kangaroo court and after a brisk procedure—in which Saddam will no doubt be denied opportunities to interrogate old pals from happier days, like Donald Rumsfeld—be dropped through a trap door with a rope tied around his neck, maybe with an Iraqi, or at least a son of the Prophet, pulling the lever.

  These pretenses at judicial propriety are absurd. I prefer the posture of the Arab-American woman who said Saddam should be put in a cage and drowned with spit.

  December 27

  It has been astounding that a world-scale monster such as Rupert Murdoch has thus far fared well at the hands of his various profilers and biographers. Criticisms of him have either been too broad-brush to be useful, or too tempered with Waugh-derived facetiousness about press barons. Murdoch is far too fearsome an affront to any civilized values to escape with mere facetiousness.

  Now at last Murdoch is properly burdened with the chronicler he deserves. The Murdoch Archipelago (just published by Simon & Schuster in the UK) is written by Bruce Page, a distinguished, Australian-raised journalist who has lived and worked in England for many years, perhaps best known for his work in leading one of the great investigative enterprises of twentieth-century journalism, the Insight team at the (pre-Murdoch) London Sunday Times.

  As an essay in understanding what the function of the press should be in a democratic society, Page’s book is an important one, focused on the world’s leading villains.

  I had some brief and vivid personal encounters with Murdoch in the late 1970s at the Village Voice and I’ve known Page for many years. In the late 1960s I shared billing with him as one of the four helmsmen of the London-based Free Communications Group, whose manifesto about the media and democracy was set forth in the first issue of our very occasional periodical, The Open Secret. (The other two helmsmen were Gus McDonald, latterly a Blair-ennobled Labour enforcer in the House of Lords, and Neal Ascherson, a very good writer.)

  I talked to Page about his book in London in mid-November in the midst of the twin invasions of Bush and Murdoch, the latter briefly alighting in London to crush a rising by some shareholders in British Sky Broadcasting who had been claiming that the company was being run by Murdoch as a private fiefdom in a manner injurious to their interests.

  It was a characteristic Murdoch performance, marked by his usual arrogance, thuggery and deception. In one particularly spectacular act of corporate contempt he first told the shareholders at the AGM that Tony Ball, moved over to make way for Murdoch’s son James, had received no severance payment, and then revealed briefly thereafter that £10 million was being paid to Ball to make sure he would not compete with Sky’s now non-existent rivals. The true function of the $10 million is more likely to ensure Ball’s future discretion, since the latter knows the whereabouts of many bodies whose disinterment might inconvenience Murdoch, throwing an unpleasing light on Sky’s unfettered (by Blair’s regulators) use of its Thatcher-derived monopoly.

  Amid his rampages at BSkyB Murdoch gave an interview to the BBC in which he placed Tony Blair on notice that the loyalty of Murdoch’s newspapers was not to be taken for granted. Referring to himself respectfully in the first person plural, Murdoch was kind enough to intimate that “we will not quickly forget the courage of Tony Blair” but then made haste to emphasize that he also enjoys friendly relations with the new Tory leader Michael Howard.

  On the mind of this global pirate is a topic in which one would have thought he would have had scant interest, namely national sovereignty. Murdoch professed himself exercised by the matter of the EU Constitution. Slipping on the mantle of Britishness, Murdoch pronounced that “I don’t like the idea of any more abdication of our sovereignty in economic affairs or anything else.”

  The Guardian found this altogether too brazen and editorialized the following Monday that “Rupert Murdoch is no more British than George W. Bush. Once upon a time, it’s true, he was an Australian with Scottish antecedents. But some time ago he came to the view that his citizenship was an inconvenience and resolved to change it for an American passport. He does not live in this country and it is not clear that he is entitled to use ‘we’ in any meaningful sense of shared endeavour. To be lectured on sovereignty by someone who junked his own citizenship for commercial advantage is an irony to which Mr Murdoch is evidently blind.”

  Then the Guardian got a bit rougher: “Readers have to be put on notice that the views expressed in Murdoch titles have not been freely arrived at on the basis of normal journalistic considerations.”

  Page’s core thesis is that Murdoch offers his target governments
a privatized version of a state propaganda service, manipulated without scruple and with no regard for truth. His price takes the form of vast government favors such as tax breaks, regulatory relief (as with the recent FCC ruling on the acquisition of Direct TV), monopoly markets, and so forth. The propaganda is undertaken with the utmost cynicism, whether it’s the stentorian fake populism and soft porn in the UK’s Sun and News of the World, or shameless bootlicking of the butchers of Tiananmen Square.

  I asked Page if he thought this a fair summary.

  PAGE: Your précis of my argument is exact. It may be worth noting that reviewers of Archipelago drawn from the still-persistent Old Fleetstrasse culture have (in the words of my old colleague Lew Chester) produced “innumerable contortions devised to miss its main argument.” Peter Preston stated that “Bruce” (we are not on first-name terms) failed to offer any thesis of how it was all done. Similarly Anthony Howard, who of course has worked many years under the Murdoch banner. You may recall the first three paragraphs of the book:

  Rupert Murdoch denies quite flatly that he seeks or deals in political favours. “Give me an example!” he cried in 1999 when William Shawcross interviewed him for Vanity Fair. “When have we ever asked for anything?”

  Shawcross didn’t take up the challenge. Rather, he endorsed Murdoch’s denial, by saying that Rupert had never lied to him.

  We can show that Murdoch was untruthful—and Shawcross far too tolerant, both in the interview and in his weighty biography of Murdoch. Not only has Murdoch sought and received political favours: most of the critical steps in the transmutation of News Limited, his inherited business, into present-day News Corp. were dependent on such things. Nor is there essential change in his operations as the new century gets under way, and he prepares his sons to extend the dynasty.

  I worked quite hard with the Simon & Schuster lawyers to make this so blunt as to show that anyone missing the point was practicing voluntary astigmatism.

  On one radio show I was put up with a certain Teresa Wise of Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting, limb of Rupert’s defunct auditors). She purported to knot her brow over the question of News Corp.’s governance, and produced one of the true standard lines: “It’s very easy to demonize Mister Murdoch …” Into the sagacious pause which would clearly have been followed by a laissez-passer, I managed to insert: “Can we have a little less of this? It is actually very difficult, and very hard work, to demonize Rupert. This is because he is in fact demonic, and he frightens a great many people in and around the media industries. Nobody should say how easy it is to demonize unless they have some working experience of the process.”

  We then had a period of silence from her.

  Murdoch often denies he is the world’s most powerful media boss. There’s a natural discretion in those who have unelected political influence: as their power lacks legitimacy, they prefer it to pass unnoticed. But it goes somewhat further in Murdoch’s case. Though his Australian-based News Corporation controls newspapers and broadcasting networks to a unique extent, and the governments of America, Australia, Britain and China treat him with great solicitude, Murdoch considers himself a simple entrepreneur ringed by relentless opponents.

  He is in reality the man for whom Margaret Thatcher set aside British monopoly law so that he could buy the Times and the Sunday Times, and to whom she later handed monopoly control of British satellite television. His newspapers supported Thatcher with ferocious zeal—but switched eagerly to Tony Blair’s side once it was clear that New Labour would leave Murdoch in possession of the marketplace advantages bequeathed by Conservative predecessors. But Murdoch (who likes a royal plural) says: “We are … not about protectionism through legislation and cronyism …”

  In similar transactions, Ronald Reagan’s right-wing administration let Murdoch dynamite US media laws and set up the Fox network, and a left-wing Australian administration let him take monopoly control of the country’s newspaper market. But to Murdoch, who thinks himself a victim of “liberal totalitarians,” this is no less than he deserves. He observes no connection between the business concessions governments award to News Corp. and the support News Corp. affords to such benefactors—deep subservience in the case of China’s totalitarian elite: “We are about daring and doing for ourselves” he believes.

  COCKBURN: But surely he retains some sense of irony, of cynicism, when he professes such nonsense?

  PAGE: In Alice in Wonderland the White Queen says she can believe “six impossible things before breakfast,” but Murdoch easily outdoes her. Sigmund Freud’s grandson Matthew, a celebrated London public-relations man, is married to Rupert’s daughter Elisabeth and has said with surprise that his father-in-law actually believes the stuff in his own newspapers.

  We may be sure Mr. Freud is not so credulous. Nor are most people who know News Corp.’s publications. The London Sun coins money. But opinion-surveys show less than one in seven readers trust what it says (however diverting).

  In legend Murdoch has an infallible popular touch, displayed in escalating circulations. But the legend misleads somewhat: Murdoch is not commercially invincible in areas where governments can’t help. The plinth of his British empire, the rigorously prurient News of the World, was selling more than six million copies when he bought it: since, half its sales have vanished, while other papers have gained. The New York Post consistently loses money, and most companies would close it.

  There are many curiosities—political, editorial, financial, fiscal—about News Corp.’s media ascendancy. But central to it is the psychology of the Murdoch family, and the credulousness Matthew Freud diagnosed. Murdoch is the man who promoted the “diaries” of Adolf Hitler, and today believes in Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction—scarcely more real, though the two dictators indeed share attributes.

  For politicians in Beijing, Washington and London this psychology makes Mr. Murdoch an ideal media ally. They have illusions to peddle: Murdoch may be relied on to believe, and try to persuade others. Beijing, for instance, asserts that China cannot prosper except by accepting totalitarian Communist rule—ignoring, therefore, the party’s matchless record of criminal incompetence. Rupert’s achievements here are notorious, but those of his son James hardly less. James’s speech celebrating in Rupert’s presence the “strong stomach” which enables them both to admire Chinese repressive techniques shocked even the rugged investors hearing it.

  It appears that Rupert considers James his successor, planning to give him command of BSkyB, the British satellite-TV broadcaster which News Corp. wants to link into a worldwide system. Such an advance in media power will require much political aid—that of the Bush administration particularly, and there is no supporter of Mr. Bush and his wars that can outdo Rupert’s enthusiasm.

  COCKBURN: It’s awful to think that we have younger Murdochs on hand to plague the planet for a few more decades.

  PAGE: Such psychology is a family tradition. Rupert inherited the basis of News Corp. from his Australian father Sir Keith Murdoch, a great propagandist in 1914–18 (the “golden age of lying”). Purportedly an independent war-correspondent, Keith Murdoch acted in fact as political agent to Billy Hughes, his country’s wartime prime minister: plotting with him to conscript thousands of young men into a bloodbath supervised by incompetent British generals.

  The plot narrowly failed—as did an anti-Semitic intrigue against the Australian general John Monash, whose volunteer divisions broke the German line. Details are an Australian concern, but we should note the success with which Rupert’s father later posed as an heroic rebel rescuing young men from ruthless generals: a pioneer feat of spin-doctoring and truth-inversion. Rupert’s media still sustain his father Keith’s mythology (“the journalist who stopped a war”). The son, born in 1931, has always lived in the shadow of a spurious hero, uncritically promoted.

  Just such narratives characterize the “authoritarian personality,” identified by Theodor Adorno, and refined by later psychologists. Growth requi
res us all to make terms with our parents’ real qualities—good or bad—and where that process fails, authoritarian qualities appear: intolerance of relationships other than dominion or submission, and intolerance of the ambiguity which equal standing implies. Such characteristics in Murdoch are shown by the testimony of many News Corp. veterans. Executives—editors specially—are ejected, regardless of quality, at a flicker of independence. Murdoch demands internally the same subservience he offers to outside power.

  Conformity is enforced by mind-games like Murdoch’s notorious telephone calls—coming to his executives at random moments, and consisting on his own part chiefly of brooding silence. The technique generates fear, and those who rebel against it are swiftly removed.

  Authoritarians often possess charm—or skill in flattery. But a strong component is swift, apparently decisive judgment: “premature closure,” or jumping to conclusions. This explains the credulousness Adorno found in authoritarians, for penetrating complex truths usually demands some endurance of ambiguity.

  COCKBURN: If the authoritarian personality is unsuited to realistic news-gathering, how has Murdoch achieved media pre-eminence?

  PAGE: Journalists are insecure, because they must trade in the unknown. Their profession, said the sociologist Max Weber, is uniquely “accident-prone.” Good management may reduce this insecurity—but the News Corp. style actually uses insecurity as a disciplinary tool. And the seeming assurance of the authoritarian has tactical benefits: Murdoch can swap one attitude for another with zero embarrassment, and it enables him to “deliver” newspapers to any power he approves of. Readers naturally grow skeptical. But this does not yet harm News Corp.’s business model.