Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires

by David Folkenflik

  The gravitational pull is inescapable. Leaders of both major Australian political parties, whether favored by News Ltd newspapers or punished by them, routinely pay their respects at News Corp’s global headquarters in midtown Manhattan when they visit the United Nations or have other official functions there.

  “Most [Australian] Labor politicians hated Rupert,” said one former senior executive who witnessed the parade of supplicants. “But they all came to New York City to kiss the ring. Prime Minister [Julia] Gillard among them.”

  AUSTRALIA IS perhaps the most fully formed demonstration of the media strategy Murdoch has pursued in other markets. A look at the nature of Murdoch’s Australian stable of papers proves revealing about his intentions elsewhere. The Australian is “by far the most detailed paper in regard to national politics,” said Robert Manne, one of the country’s leading public intellectuals. “And it’s also at a higher level of analysis, in general, than the other papers.”

  The paper is “smarter, sharper” than the others, he said, with more resources and fewer profit demands to boot. “The Australian has the personal support of Rupert Murdoch. Everyone knows it. He created the paper. He’s incredibly proud of it as one of his creations.”

  Indeed, Murdoch launched the paper in July 1964, with this mission statement printed prominently on the front page:

  Here is Australia’s first truly national newspaper. It is produced today because you want it; because the nation needs it. In these pages you will find the impartial information and the independent thinking that are essential to the further advance of our country. This paper is tied to no party, to no state, and has no chains of any kind. Its guide is faith in Australia and the country’s future.

  It will be our duty to inform Australians everywhere of what is really happening in their country; of what is really happening in the rest of the world; and how this affects our prosperity, our prospects, our national conscience and our public image.

  We shall not hesitate to speak fearlessly. We shall criticise.

  We will not be influenced when there is need to be outspoken.

  We shall praise. We shall encourage those feelings and movement in public and private life which elevate the individual and advance the nation’s welfare.

  The world news service which appears in the Australian surpasses any yet assembled in the pages of one newspaper anywhere in the world.

  The authoritative writers who will contribute regularly on topics ranging from the arts to aviation are acknowledged leaders in the subjects they will discuss. The business and financial section is organised and written by the shrewdest and best informed financial journalists in the nation.

  Vigor, truth and information without dullness will be found day by day in these columns. We believe the people of Australia will welcome the new approach to national journalism.

  This morning, we believe, we shall make thousands of friends, who as the thinking men and women of Australia will have a profound influence on the future. You are welcome to this company of progress.

  But another component emerged from the pages of the paper, unstated but no less important: the Australian is not only a chronicler but also a player in national politics. It has no peer. The Australian, known as the Oz, did not always adopt a conservative course. In 1972, it had supported the candidacy of the centrist Labor Party leader Gough Whitlam. Murdoch believed that the avid backing of his papers had played “a substantial role” in Whitlam’s win that year, as he later told the US ambassador to Australia. But along with many Australian business leaders, Murdoch grew disillusioned with Whitlam, and his papers, including the Oz, followed suit. The government’s standing seemed shaky. The Queen’s emissary to Australia, the governor general, dismissed Whitlam as prime minister, sparking a political crisis. In 1975, a group of journalists staged a strike to protest how openly the Australian’s coverage favored opposition leader Malcolm Fraser of the Liberal Party, who became prime minister.

  Under Chris Mitchell, the paper’s current editor for more than a decade, the Australian has favored smaller government with fewer regulations on business, vigorously supported the invasion of Iraq, treated increased immigration skeptically, and displayed active concern about issues affecting Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. The paper’s positions actively drive news coverage, not just editorials. And the Australian sets the tone not only for News Ltd’s other papers but also for the debate on talk radio, blogs, and TV, including Sky News Australia.

  James Chessell, a former business and media reporter for the Australian, is now deputy editor at Fairfax’s Australian Financial Review. He expressed admiration for the clarity of the Australian’s stance under Mitchell and said critics are wrong to attribute its editorial choices to meddling by Murdoch. But, he said, it’s accurate to say “someone’s probably not going to edit the Australian or the Daily Telegraph in Sydney if they haven’t risen up through News and aren’t sort of enmeshed in the culture and probably don’t have similar views to other people at News.” (“News” is how many Australians refer to News Ltd.)

  The papers do not always act in perfect lockstep. But that said, the Murdoch papers hammered away at then-Labor prime minister Gillard and her Green Party allies, and the Australian has taken the lead. Jaspan, the former editor in chief of the Melbourne Age, said aggrieved politicians never like tough coverage, but this time may have a point. “There is constant scrutiny of the Labor party by the Australian, which at times is not just forensic—it actually becomes quite caustic,” Jaspan said. “It’s quite corrosive.”

  The governing Labor Party has suffered over the past few years from infighting and policy reversals, and its popularity has dropped sharply in the polls. But Jaspan noted that Australia has fared better under its stewardship than just about any industrialized society during the global financial crisis. You’d never know that, he said, from the Australian or its sister papers.

  The Australian is not strictly partisan. It supported the rise to power of Kevin Rudd, a centrist, before a falling out with Rudd and especially his successor, Gillard. The schism was taken as a renewed warning to other politicians: stay on the right side of the company. Previously, John Howard of the Liberal Party earned the strong support of News Ltd papers, especially on fiscal matters and the Australian involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In an earlier era the Labor Party’s Paul Keating won support from the Murdochs. He had been integral to the Sydney Showground deal for Fox Studios.

  The switches back and forth between parties made Murdoch an unpredictable and incomparable force in Australian journalism and politics.

  Robert Manne was once a favorite of the political right, and hence the Murdoch press, as an anticommunist magazine editor. No more. In fall 2011, he took direct aim at the Australian with a lengthy critique in the periodical Monthly. He said the paper was intellectually dishonest and run by political bullies and climate change “denialists.”

  The paper commissioned a full book review of that critique. “What I would say is that on any given day, the Australian simultaneously produces some of the best and some of the worst journalism in this country,” wrote Matthew Ricketson, a former Australian staffer who was subsequently media editor for the rival Age. “Reading it can be disorienting, like watching a driver with one foot on the accelerator, the other on the brake.”

  Ricketson even wrote that he found Manne’s critique “persuasive overall” and encouraged readers to make up their own minds. But the newspaper fired back. Manne calculated that it published 40,000 words of response. The editor, Chris Mitchell, joined other senior editors in assailing Manne anew. “They essentially said I’d lost my mind, that I was insane,” he said, “that I was a narcissist, that I had a series of personal agendas which were driving me on.”

  The message rang loud and clear: don’t screw with the guy at the top. It is a template that Murdoch has perfected in his exploits around the globe, especially in the three English-language countries he calls home.

 
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  “THE GUTTER IS A GOOD PLACE TO BE”

  KELVIN MACKENZIE, EDITOR OF THE Sun from 1981 to 1994, may have embodied Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper instincts most faithfully of anyone on earth. Lacerating, clever, populist, punchy, and joyful, MacKenzie knew where the big boss wanted to go—and often got there first, sometimes so pungently he had to be reined in.

  In 1982, Argentina invaded the tiny Falkland Islands, held by the UK but standing just a few hundred miles off the coast of South America, and British battleships steamed to the Southern Hemisphere. The crisis unfolded like a feverish dream for MacKenzie. Roy Greenslade, an assistant Sun editor whose politics lay elsewhere, later wrote that MacKenzie’s approach to the war was “xenophobic, bloody-minded, ruthless, often reckless, black-humoured and ultimately triumphalist.” One headline taunted Argentina’s military leaders, who had taken power a few years before in a coup: “Stick it Up Your Junta!” When news broke that British torpedoes had struck an Argentine cruiser, a features editor shouted “Gotcha!” MacKenzie slapped that onto the next morning’s first editions, but misgivings soon mounted in the newsroom as it became clear that hundreds of lives would be lost. He swapped it out for another headline, asking whether 1,200 Argentinians (“Argies”) had drowned. Murdoch, patrolling the newsroom as he often did during news events of major moment, told MacKenzie the first headline should stick.

  MacKenzie was also editor when the paper made its most egregious mistake. In 1989, stands in the Hillsborough soccer stadium in Sheffield collapsed. Ninety-six people ultimately died. Police said fans at the stadium had picked the pockets of victims who had been killed or badly injured in the disaster. Police officials leaked stories to a news agency serving papers in London that fans had urinated on police responding to the emergency call and alleging that others had beaten a policeman trying to give a victim mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. McKenzie wrapped these accounts in a front-page headline: “The Truth.” It proved untrue.

  The reporter on the story, Harry Arnold, later admitted he was aghast at the headline. “That wasn’t what I’d written. I’d never used the words ‘the truth,’” he said. “So I said to Kelvin MacKenzie, ‘You can’t say that.’ And he said ‘Why not?’ and I said, ‘because we don’t know that it’s the truth. This is a version of ‘the truth.’” Arnold said MacKenzie brushed him aside: “‘Oh, don’t worry. I’m going to make it clear that this is what some people are saying.’”

  MacKenzie did not apologize for more than two decades. Even then, his concession seemed grudging. He said the Sun simply based its conclusions on what the regional news agency had learned from its police sources.

  MacKenzie once wrote a huge front-page headline claiming that a comedian had eaten a woman’s hamster. He hadn’t. As the comic’s press agent acknowledged, the negative publicity only aided the comic’s career. MacKenzie contended editors merely met readers’ expectations in creating the tabloid sensibility. “It’s always been in the gutter—and it’s quite a good place to be, actually,” MacKenzie explained. “Ordinary people are not high-minded. They basically want a bit of entertainment. They want a bit of sport. They want a bit of crime. They want a bit of expenses fiddling” by members of Parliament.

  MacKenzie boasted that the stories he published were too good to confirm. He once told me that the only story he ever double-checked involved Elton John, not yet out of the closet, paying for sex with a male prostitute. Even so, it wasn’t true. The paper had to apologize and pay damages of £1 million. Double-check? MacKenzie sputtered: Never again!

  Under Murdoch, the Sun tabloid thrived, shedding its tenuous finances of the past to become the nation’s best-selling daily paper, which it remains to this day. Its corporate sibling News of the World, the leading Sunday paper, earned the nickname News of the Screws from the satirical publication Private Eye for its emphasis on revealing affairs of the famous. Murdoch also owned two of the nation’s elite papers: the Times of London and the Sunday Times, which he acquired in 1981. But no one underestimated the importance of the tabloids, not just to the company’s bottom line but to the chairman as a reflection of his psyche. Asked under oath about his contacts with public officials, Murdoch answered: “If any politician wanted my opinion on a major matter they only had to read the editorials in The Sun.”

  Prestigious UK broadsheet newspapers—the Guardian, the Financial Times (not a true general-interest newspaper), the Independent, the Observer, the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, and the Times of London—are printed on sheets of paper about forty-eight inches across, give or take, folded in two to make pages with six columns apiece. These days, the Times of London, the Guardian, and others actually print in “compact” size, a smaller edition that’s easier for commuters to carry and read on the packed cars of London Underground trains. The size of the broadsheets signaled to readers they could expect distinguished, reasoned journalism, literate writing, thoughtful political analysis, in-depth foreign coverage, and cultural criticism, much more than they could find elsewhere.

  In the US, several leading newspaper families—the Sulzbergers of the New York Times, the Grahams of the Washington Post, and, in a previous generation, the Taylors of the Boston Globe and the Binghams of the Louisville Courier-Journal—articulated that they were stewards of a “public trust,” who stood for something beyond the bottom line. As competition waned city by city and as the reportorial core became professionalized, papers typically shed overt partisan ties on their news pages as their publishers sought to appeal to the broadest possible audiences. In recent decades, talk radio and cable news channels have taken up ideological banners.

  Heavily regulated by the government as to content, British broadcasters adhered to nonideological programming and saw news shows as a public service, not a profit center. The newspapers were fractious, contentious, and opinionated. British newspaper journalists often argued that their American cousins lost something vital in the process of shedding partisanship from the news.

  “I find American newspapers boring—and biblical,” said Simon Jenkins, the former editor in chief of Murdoch’s center-right Times of London who now writes columns for the liberal Guardian. “These are news sheets for a genre of readers who want vast slabs of information and get entertainment in a different way. And they are micro-monopolies, all of them.”

  Murdoch’s editors call these papers the “unpopular” press. His heart has always been with the scrappier tabloids—the “popular press” for which Fleet Street is perhaps better known. The midmarket daily tabloid newspaper is a peculiarly London invention that, depending on the particular title, mixes elements of TMZ.com, the Economist, ESPN, the National Enquirer, Maxim, the Huffington Post, Time, the Weekly Standard, and Politico. The ensuing coverage sounds much as though Capitol Hill, the Garment District, Hollywood, K Street, Madison Avenue, and Wall Street all met for drinks, got soused, and started to dish.

  The papers are locally produced, nationally distributed, and wildly competitive. In most American cities, the majority of those who read printed papers are subscribers, providing a guaranteed audience to publishers and, more importantly, to advertisers. By contrast, many UK readers pick up papers at newsstands, which helps explain why the front pages of tabloids rely on sensationalism, scandal, sex, violence, shock, rough-edged political satire, and celebrity watching.

  In 1989 Murdoch sketched out his philosophy: “Anybody who, within the law of the land, provides a service which the public wants at a price it can afford is providing a public service.” The immediate context for Murdoch’s remark involved British television programming, specifically the BBC, which he argued failed to satisfy viewers. But he had articulated his approach to publishing: let the people decide with their pocketbooks.

  IN DECEMBER 1989, Prince Charles, by then married to Princess Diana, telephoned his girlfriend, Camilla Parker Bowles. He expressed his desire to live eternally in her trousers, as a tampon if necessary. The conversation became infamous after the adulterous talk was publishe
d several years later, first in a Murdoch-owned celebrity magazine in Australia, later in British tabloids. The Sun initially held off, then asked readers to call in to say whether they wanted to see the transcript in print. They did. At least some of the public clearly wanted the service that Murdoch’s paper provided.

  It was never exactly clear how an Australian publication—though, as part of the Murdoch stable, one with strong British ties—had first obtained and published the conversation. Former News of the World reporter Paul McMullan said the prince’s sexual banter was captured from his portable phone by reporters sitting a few blocks away from Buckingham Palace in a converted London taxicab kitted out with a police scanner and recording devices. Portable phones at that time were not manufactured with encryption.

  For all the rapacious hunger of the tabloids, the British press faces tight regulations from the government and its own industry that its American counterparts do not. British newspapers cannot report about the details of ongoing court proceedings. An official secrets act allows the government to outlaw the publication of certain documents. Until recent years, private individuals could obtain so-called super-injunctions—effectively, gag orders preventing news organizations from publishing information they do not want to come to light. The Press Complaints Commission, set up by the industry itself, judges public challenges to coverage. And should that fail to satisfy, British libel law favors plaintiffs more strongly than does American law.

  All of these restraints lend momentum to the impulse for mischief. McMullan, a wiry, twitchy man who keeps a camera with telephoto lenses stashed in the back of his van, now runs a pub in the town of Dover, by the English Channel. But previously he flourished as a reporter at the News of the World, becoming a senior features editor and for a time living fat on expense accounts.