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

by David Folkenflik

  In 2008 Murdoch dropped by the Beijing bureau with little warning, alarming reporters. They were wary of his reputation of appeasing the country’s regime. But he had by then largely abandoned his dreams of new fortunes in China. When Murdoch sat in on an interview with a Chinese finance official, his interest was noted by both the Chinese and the Americans. But his interest proved journalistic and political rather than in furthering his own business interests.

  And Murdoch charmed staffers, especially researchers and the news clerks on the lowest rungs. The China bureau included many of Murdoch’s most lacerating critics. He never mentioned the letter of protest that Johnson and others had signed. Nor did he or Thomson ever punish a single one of them. Murdoch had personally intervened to ensure that Johnson was issued a visa by the authorities to allow him to work there after they had barred him from the country. And during that visit, Murdoch urged the bureau to think big. The year had seen epic stories, such as the deadly Sichuan earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people and a series of protests and riots in Tibet. The biggest mistake one can make when news breaks is to sit back, Murdoch said as he addressed the entire bureau. Go check it out. The worst thing that happens is you end up finding a good feature story. It was a rare explicit directive to the Journal’s China staff—but also an encouraging one: go find the story.

  EVENTUALLY THOMSON decided not to kill Barney Kilgore’s beloved A-hed, the front-page lagniappe, though he discarded the Journal’s practice of reserving space for a second front-page story that had no particular news peg. So, too, did Murdoch abandon plans to scrap the paywall. The paper tweaked its hybrid “freemium” system, in which some articles were posted outside the paywall, but the general concept survived.

  Thomson seemed more dedicated to in-depth, painstaking reporting than his new staff had given him credit for. He didn’t like it when reporters devoted a year to a project. That sounded too much like a play for a Pulitzer Prize. But he backed a multiyear project on corporate invasion of online privacy and consistently supported reporting that proved embarrassing to the ruling classes in China.

  Among the Journal’s proudest traditions was a studied distance from any whiff of partisanship. Staffers for the news pages anxiously monitored headlines, story selection, and placement for signs that the new regime would fulfill their darkest fears—that Murdoch would pull and throw punches to aid favored politicians and causes.

  In the minds of several senior editors who privately admitted reservations among themselves, a certain note had been struck by Thomson back on election night 2008. Thomson wanted the headline across the top of the front page to carry the full name of the next president: “Barack Hussein Obama.” The New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times did not include the full name in their headlines. And top news editors at the Journal beseeched Thomson not to do it. Such a headline would appear to be emphasizing the unlikelihood of the name for a president, its very otherness. The conservative controversialist Ann Coulter had uttered the name as frequently as possible in her columns and television appearances to underscore the point: the guy doesn’t just have an African father, but he has a Muslim middle name as well! Thomson let it go; the headline did not run.

  But within weeks, Thomson named Gerard Baker as his deputy. An alumnus of the Financial Times and the Times of London, Baker had been the editor of the paper’s US operations and a conservative political columnist. Baker was British, charming, literate, and well aware of the repercussions of his praise for Sarah Palin as a serious figure in the fall of 2008 in one of his final columns for the Times of London. Baker shared a core conviction with Thomson and Murdoch that most of the news media could be found on the political left. Many current and former reporters and editors for the paper privately agreed.

  Baker arrived just as Obama took office, with a firm Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. Thomson and Baker believed newspapers should serve as an oppositional force to the nation’s chief executive and wanted to cast the Journal more in that image. The paper’s new owner and two top editors further believed the Journal was populated by liberals and leftists who were blinded to their own bias. Baker told people that Thomson and he wanted to balance that reflexive liberalism. That didn’t mean he wanted to replicate Fox News in print. Baker promised instead to guide the paper’s coverage right down the middle. The Journal’s news side had for years been protected by the asperity of its conservative editorial pages, so its reporters were not subjected to the same ideological scrutiny as those at the New York Times or the Washington Post. Yet they were proud of their record, saying they believed they provided a fair report each day. Most journalists were prepared to accept or at least accommodate such corrective tweaking. But they were not always sure what to make of the editorial nudges when they occurred.

  In the spring of 2009, shortly after Obama’s controversial stimulus bill passed Congress, the paper’s new top editors ordered up a story reporting that the bill was creating so much uncertainty among companies that it threatened the economic recovery. A command to gather material for the story went out to writers across the paper. The stimulus bill included some $19 billion to encourage adopting the use of electronic medical records. A reporter working on the story told me his sources at big health IT companies said the stimulus had led to an uptick in business for their firms. But that didn’t make it into the article. Was that a journalistic choice, an ideological one, or both?

  Reporters and editors were surprised by the new senior editors’ obsession with the competition. Much of how Thomson and Baker envisioned the Journal appeared to be defined in opposition to practices elsewhere, especially the despised New York Times. Thomson thought that Times chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger exemplified passivity. When a December 2009 column by Times media critic David Carr cited concerns about the Journal editors’ conservatism, Thomson called the piece “yet more evidence that the New York Times is uncomfortable about the rise of an increasingly successful rival while its own circulation and credibility are in retreat.” He revealed that Times executive editor Bill Keller had written a letter to a national awards committee (later confirmed as the prestigious Polk Awards) questioning the basis on which Journal had won a prize for reporting from China. Thomson added, “Whether it be in the quest for prizes or in the disparagement of competitors, principle is but a bystander at the New York Times.”

  In April 2010 Thomson exacted a minor measure of revenge. The Journal’s weekend sections had improved under Thomson, with expanded space for cultural coverage and witty columns on sports. He was within three weeks of the debut of a “Greater New York” section too, competing on local stories for the first time.

  The Journal published a lifestyle piece that claimed women were attracted to men with sexually ambiguous facial features. The piece was illustrated by a series of photographs of the bottom half of men’s faces. One of the “feminine” faces was immediately recognizable, at least in media circles. It belonged to Sulzberger.

  Staffers said the idea originated with Thomson. The maneuver would serve as a mind-fuck to Sulzberger, a prank to staffers. But old-timers who cared about the paper’s traditions found the stunt contemptible, unworthy of the Journal. So did the Times. Sulzberger complained about it directly to Thomson a few days later at a dinner honoring foreign correspondents; Thomson deflected the complaint.

  “We’ve been vilified, unjustly so, and often factually incorrectly—most often factually incorrectly, by Fox News,” Scott Heekin-Canedy, then president and general manager of the New York Times Company, told me. “This is just another flavor of that.”

  Not for Thomson the hand-wringing and pants-wetting that he thought afflicted so much of the news business, with the endless whining (“whinging” in Australian and British usage) about the need for transparency and ombudsmen and the two-way conversation with the public. Thomson and Baker would put out a newspaper for Mr. Murdoch that reflected their interests and, they hoped, intrigued readers a
nd impressed advertisers. The tone was set at the top. At an event the next month at the National Press Club, Murdoch called the Times “a paper willing to do President Obama’s bidding.”

  Some Journal reporters thought some of their peers at the Times got away with a degree of voice in their writing that veered into personal views. But skepticism among many Journal reporters and many editors toward their own news executives heightened rather than abated. Thomson and Baker took a keen interest in domestic partisan politics, fights with unions specifically, and teacher unions in particular. “Those are stories that both of them knew were important to Mr. Murdoch,” a former editor who worked under them said.

  A fight in Wisconsin featured all three topics. In early 2011, the newly elected governor, Scott Walker, worked with a Republican-controlled legislature to force greater contributions from union-represented state employees toward their health care and pension costs. It was vital, Walker argued, for the state to close a growing deficit.

  Walker contended that the state’s fiscal stability also depended on stripping those unions of some decades-old prerogatives: the right to compel state payrolls to deduct and reroute membership dues to union coffers and the right to conduct collective bargaining on behalf of their members for anything other than pay. Showing political finesse in a way that undermined his declaration that his moves were driven by financial need, Walker had exempted unions for police and firefighters, which had supported his campaign.

  That proposed shift in the unions’ ability to negotiate and compel payments threatened the financial pillars of both organized labor and their Democratic allies. Thomson and Baker watched carefully for pro-labor sympathies to surface in copy from their reporters. When Thomson didn’t like the tone of a story, he would Google every person cited in it to learn more about each. If a professor had given money to Democratic candidates, Thomson said, she cannot be cited as a non-partisan source. “Robert just wants people to be identified for who they are and what they believe,” a senior Journal editor told me.

  “The Journal was nudged rightward, partly because Thomson or Murdoch, or both, rightly felt too many journalists are on the left. Lots of us are,” another editor involved in some of that coverage said. “On certain stories [the nudge] was more aggressive than others.” The question, he said, was whether the remedy for the perceived bias itself weakened or compromised coverage.

  In a front-page story on February 23, 2011, by the Washington bureau’s Neil King Jr., the first three people quoted directly (other than an allusion to Governor Walker’s antiunion sentiments) were all Republicans supportive of Walker’s challenge to the unions: Ohio governor John Kasich, new US senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and a state representative from Indiana.

  King followed the quotations with this context: “Government figures show that inflation-adjusted per capita income in six right-to-work states increased at a 6.9 percent annual rate over the past 10 years. In contrast, incomes contracted at a 0.5 percent rate in six unionized upper-Midwest states over the same period, as many high-paying automotive and other manufacturing jobs disappeared and foreign automakers concentrated nearly all of their new investment in right-to-work states.”

  Several colleagues steeped in the details of the story questioned what happened to snarl King’s usually straightforward reporting. One reporter asked, “Six right-to-work states? There were twenty-two at the time. Which ones? Why were they chosen?”

  From another piece, a day later: “The Indiana legislation would have allowed workers at unionized companies to refrain from being part of the union and paying union dues. In the view of many corporations and the Republicans in the Indiana legislature, the bill was a matter of personal freedom and a chance to boost jobs in the state. But Democrats and many union leaders viewed it as an attack on the existence of unions.”

  That characterization of corporate motivation seemed disingenuous to several reporters at the paper: companies may well have looked at the proposal through the prism of personal freedom or as a means to boost jobs, but they equally wanted to strike at the economic underpinning and resulting political strength of the unions.

  “It was often difficult to read between the lines or to know if you were overreacting to requests an editor would make,” another reporter said. “Is this a bias an editor is displaying, or is this making the story better?”

  To some, the pattern of such nudges evolved into a Rorschach test. “Late at night,” a third reporter who often covered politics recalled, “you’d get an email or call saying, ‘Gerry would want to rework the story like this.’

  “Lo and behold, all the quotes from Democratic candidates were gone,” this reporter said. “You had two minutes to say, ‘It’s ok’ and make sure they hadn’t misspelled a name when they had rewritten it.”

  Current Journal reporters and editors I spoke to said they would not talk publicly by name because they feared for their jobs. Some who had left signed nondisclosure agreements or feared they would need to return, hat in hand, to the Journal or News Corp. This was the Faustian bargain described by Ian Johnson: reporters and editors were so thankful their newsroom was spared the waves of layoffs and buyouts affecting their colleagues at places like the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and even, to a lesser extent, the New York Times, that they found it hard to argue on anything but a day-to-day, story-to-story basis. There was a cohort that could not accept working for Murdoch. They decamped for Reuters, Bloomberg News, and the Times.

  Thomson hated face-to-face confrontation and typically guided coverage through other senior editors, though he could be bullying in emails and conference calls; Baker could be quite charming and subtler but appeared to enjoy the occasional dust-up.

  On more than one occasion, Baker told editors that an article could not cite public opinion polls showing that the views of American Catholics on abortion largely mirrored those of the general US population. Polls had consistently shown the same dynamic for years, the editor objected. A reporter involved thought, It was as though he had simply willed the beliefs of Catholics away.

  Baker was convinced his colleagues were not listening closely enough to what he was trying to say. Those polls aren’t reliably reflecting what Catholics believe, Baker, himself Catholic, informed his colleague. By definition, anyone who supports abortion rights cannot receive Communion, which puts you in a specially disadvantaged position as a Catholic. It’s different than for most Protestants or Jews.

  In another instance, late at night, Thomson took exception to a story built around a study questioning the viability of the Colorado River because the research had been commissioned by an environmental group. We have to kill it, editors were told. The story endured only because Thomson weighed in so late, which meant the paper lacked any other story to fill the hole in the paper’s print edition.

  Republicans had to be quoted at least as often as Democrats, even if officials in both parties were making the same points. But the reverse was never enforced. When Democratic lawmakers fled Wisconsin and Indiana to deny Republicans a quorum in the two state legislatures, no edicts came down to find other liberals to fill the void of the missing left-of-center voices.

  For teachers’ unions, the pattern was the same. The editors’ antipathy for labor unions, strengthened, for Murdoch, by his fights to open his Wapping plant without union involvement in the 1980s in London, was additionally deepened by their belief that the problem with US education could largely be found in the intransigence of unionized teachers.

  Thomson’s eye was once caught by an article on the trend of public school districts charging parents extra for honors courses and music classes. Thomson emailed several editors with a scathing note: This completely leaves out the part where the greedy teachers’ unions are driving up the costs of everything. After some back-and-forth, an editor deftly added a passage about the burden that teacher pensions placed on school districts, which strengthened the story. Thomson had inadvertently emailed the reporter on the story, S
tephanie Simon, too. His blast raised her hackles, and she later told colleagues she didn’t feel comfortable writing about education issues anymore. Simon left for Reuters in 2012.

  As Murdoch spoke about his belief in the need to reform the educational system, in the UK as well as the US, he sided with those who would confront teachers’ unions. Some Democrats endorsed that view as well, including Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. Murdoch believed in testing students and teachers, in charter schools, in innovative approaches that might rattle some educators.

  Teach for America, Michelle Rhee’s Students First, homeschooling, and charter school activists—these were considered to be players driven by noble aspirations, arrayed against the greedy teachers’ unions. Murdoch had a financial interest in the education field. He was not the first entrepreneur to do so, nor the first media magnate. The Washington Post Company had acquired the Stanley Kaplan educational firm, and in more recent years its profits compensated for the Post’s slumping print revenues.

  Murdoch had given Joel Klein the assignment to establish News Corp as a player in digital textbooks. He quickly proved that he could make his presence count. The New York school district had two major contracts with Wireless Generation, a for-profit business offering digital curriculums, student assessment, and teacher training. Less than two weeks after News Corp hired Klein, the company acquired Wireless Generation.

  There was a lot of money at stake. In June 2011 New York State’s Education Department granted a $27 million no-bid contract to Klein and Wireless Generation. But that contract was just to be News Corp’s first big dip into far deeper waters. Murdoch had pegged the possible marketplace at nearly $700 billion. The Journal trod warily as it reported on this new venture of News Corp. But it soon had another story to cover much closer to home.