Here was the editor who had been promised, by force of law, his independence and who was trying to claim it.
Here was Murdoch, “intemperate and disagreeable,” with his “bitter animus, stridently voiced,” “deliberately seeking, through extravagance of language and extremity of views, to get a reaction or a rise,” when not otherwise “non-communicative,” appointing lieutenants who egged him on “in his impulsiveness and ape him in intolerance and rudeness,” who were constantly engaged with him “in muttered conversation,” with Murdoch’s face “framed in a scowl which seemed to stop not far short of malevolence.” Every memo from Murdoch, every conversation with him, was meant to disturb, undermine, unman, threaten, criticize, and harass. The portrait is all the more grim for Giles’ obsessive understatement:
It is important here, for the sake of accuracy, not to exaggerate by suggesting a perpetual state of guerrilla, or sometimes open, warfare between me in my office, on one side of the street, and Murdoch and Gerald Long [his lieutenant] in their offices on the other side, each visible to the other. Evans tells the story of how Murdoch would amuse visitors to his office by firing imaginary pistol shots at my back, clearly discernible through the big plate-glass windows across the street.
But finally, what Giles is describing is not a new plan or forceful business strategy being implemented by Murdoch and company, but instead a world without any plan at all, without any particular endgame other than the constant expression of Murdoch’s “restless temperament” and the implementation of his “authoritarian management” style. Which is, in part, what led to Murdoch’s biggest editorial debacle, The Hitler Diaries, which is among journalism’s all-time greatest hoaxes. Indeed, here is an important nexus: For serious journalists, Murdoch’s 1983 publication of The Hitler Diaries is a mortifying, inexplicable, credibility-destroying event; for Murdoch, it’s just one of the cons and flimflams that happen in the ad hoc, impromptu, on-the-fly news business, so why beat yourself up about it?
The diaries were concocted in Germany by a Hitler memorabilia fetishist with the tacit participation of a journalist at Gruner + Jahr, one of the biggest publishers of magazines and newspapers in Germany. The diaries were offered for sale for international publication and vetted and authenticated in a slapdash process of journalistic wishfulness and giddiness. Nobody’s journalistic wishfulness and giddiness was greater than Murdoch’s, because he’d lucked into a great journalistic theatrical event (in Britain, Hitler sells as well as sex).
As it happens, one of Britain’s greatest Hitler scholars and most respected academics, Hugh Trevor-Roper—Lord Dacre—sat on the Times’ editorial board. Murdoch dispatched him to Hamburg to pass judgment on the diaries. Although he didn’t even touch them, he gave them his imprimatur. They were duly scheduled for publication, though in a typical Murdochian this-hand-that-hand failure to communicate, the first publication was shifted from the Times to the Sunday Times. Enter Phillip Knightley, the Sunday Times’ legendary investigative reporter—the Aussie who also worked for Rupert’s father—who smelled a rat. Knightley badgered Lord Dacre, who in short order got cold feet. His hesitation, however, was communicated to the Times and not the Sunday Times—which didn’t hear that its expert no longer believed the diaries were authentic until the presses were ready to roll.
This is the point at which Murdoch struck a blow against effete and wishy-washy academics and championed journalistic immediacy and swashbuckling. Or he struck a blow against truth and focused solely on profit. Anyway, he delivered the now immortal journalistic injunction: “Fuck Dacre, publish!”
And for better or worse, he didn’t look back.
It is this strange combination of lack of doubt, impulsiveness, high-risk behavior, a striking capacity to ignore everyone else, and a disinclination to seek cover that makes him the central, even heroic, presence in his newsrooms. It is his great certitude that makes him, in the words of former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, the Sun God. He’s got dark, magical powers—insidious powers that border on mind control.
He’s the disappointed, disapproving, impatient, but constant father. A News Corp. editorship under Murdoch is a position in which your authority, your professional grade, is always temporary—you hold it only so long as he is not in the room (or the country). As soon as he arrives, you surrender it. As soon as he arrives, everything you are doing is up for immediate review. You’re reduced to a factotum. Again, not because he is so much a demanding son of a bitch, but because his is a parallel universe, which you can’t intersect with, but which, through some sort of magnetic force, controls your universe.
Neil, who has had a substantial career since leaving Murdoch—and who was among Murdoch’s most successful editors—has also made a secondary career of critiquing and analyzing Murdoch. He can’t seem to let Murdoch go. In his book Full Disclosure (and in every morsel of publicity that has linked him with Murdoch since), he essentially defines himself against Murdoch—having survived Murdoch, having been in the ring with Murdoch, having on occasion stood up to Murdoch, and finally, of course, having been spit out by Murdoch makes Neil worthy. Murdoch is his whale.
From the outside looking in, the fear, or horror, of working for Rupert Murdoch is not just of dealing with a man who will, with few exceptions, always have his way, but of being part of an organization that invariably, and necessarily, acts in his interests. In other words, the very act of professional journalism is subverted by working for him. To work for him is to do his bidding, to follow his line, to execute his desires, to support his needs, to grind his axes, to act on behalf of his empire, to carry out his policies, to be a citizen of his nation-state with all its demanding nationalism.
Of course, virtually everyone within News Corp. emphatically denies that this is so.
How can this be? How can they insist upon this unreality—it’s precisely this insistence that bedevils other journalists—while so blithely, so unrepentantly, so obviously propping up Rupert’s version of reality?
The truth is, in many ways coming to work for Murdoch as a newsperson is not entirely a bad situation to find yourself in. First of all, it’s the most successful, most thriving, and largest news organization in the world. And while it has never been the most commodious operation—it takes pride in its lack of comforts—it nevertheless allows for a pretty good standard of living. There is certainly no feeling of existential dread—Could all this go away tomorrow?—which is the feeling at so many other news organizations in the markets dominated by Murdoch. It is pretty easy, in the 60 percent of the market he controls in Australia, at his dominant papers and broadcast outlets in the United Kingdom, at the Post and at Fox News in the United States, to feel a sense of relief that you’ve made it to a safe harbor.
Granted, in many instances you would not actually have arrived at this safe harbor but grown up within it. Relatively speaking, News Corp. is a closed organization. It promotes from within. It’s suspicious of outsiders. You’re set apart at News.
You are also kept apart. Literally, in London, out at Wapping, you are sequestered. But the larger psychological apartness results from being treated with suspicion or contempt by non–News Corp. journalists. The more you commit yourself to Murdoch and News Corp., the more you are not one with the greater journalism fraternity.
Robert Thomson, the Financial Times editor whom Murdoch hired to run the Times of London, went from full-fledged member of the quality press in the highest standing to Murdoch henchman. “He is,” confided a former editor of the Times to me, “the Times editor most under Murdoch’s thumb, most willing to bend, to accommodate, to positively respond.”
But Thomson, because he came from outside, is somewhat of an exception. News Corp. originals, because they’ve never much interacted with the greater journalistic fraternity, therefore never have to think of themselves as judged by it or traitors to it. It is partly this lack of interaction that creates the sense that News Corp. people, Murdoch people, are less than top of the class, that
they have fewer options—which is why they’re at News Corp. and grateful to be there.
Jesse Angelo, the managing editor of the New York Post, is one of the rising stars in the News Corp. journalism firmament. He is a pridefully regarded figure at the New York Post in part because he went to Harvard. (Pedigree does not ordinarily exist in a Murdoch newsroom, because nobody much has one.) But, in fact, he has succeeded because he’s shed Harvard—to the point where it seems incongruous that he ever went. Angelo was James Murdoch’s best friend at the Trinity School in New York, with their friendship continuing at Harvard (James dropped out; Jesse tried to drop out, but his mother sent him back). Sponsored by the Murdochs, he went to the Sun in London as a junior reporter, then to Australia to do a stint as a reporter under Col Allan, and then to New York and “Page Six” at the Post before he was picked up on the Post’s most vaunted of sections, Business. The Post is a studied—and successful—working-class exercise for him. He’s become of the Post rather than of journalism.
When I asked him, one evening after the paper had gone to bed, who his friends were among other journalists in the city (an arguable flaw among most journalists is that they tend to associate mostly with other journalists), he at first didn’t seem to know what I was trying to ask. I was wondering, I said, if his Harvard association gave him access to the Harvard journalism mafia in New York (the very group that Murdoch hates most—and that hates Murdoch most). Answer: No. The elite at News Corp. must prove that they’ve shed any hint of elitism or, even, desire for respectability.
It is part of the character of working for Murdoch—at least if you want to be in character (and success at News Corp. demands being in character).
It’s deeply tribal. (In the early years in New York, Murdoch actually tried to slightly lessen the tribalism by suggesting that News Corp. Australians might think about living somewhere other than in the apartment complexes of Roosevelt Island, in the middle of the East River.) Loyalty has to be proved over and over again. That’s the job: to prove your loyalty. When Col Allan came from Australia to take over at the New York Post, he spent his first three months merely observing—then purged the newsroom of the people he felt were less than loyal, less than 100 percent Newsites. The company is largely run—this is most pronounced on the newspaper side of the company—by lifers, men who have no significant professional experience other than working for Murdoch.
At the CNN greenroom in New York, it is always a cocktail-party-ish affair of the city’s top-tier journalists and commentators and other chattering-class grandees. There’s always a current of people who know each other—who have worked together and socialized together for years. At the Fox News greenroom, a famously gritty place, the crowd tends to be made up of unknown experts, homegrown oddities (e.g., a former local judge who has become their legal expert), and eerily photogenic women wearing, even for TV, a vast amount of makeup. This is not just about sophistication versus populism, upscale versus downscale, but a fundamental aversion to the journalistic inner circle.
Roger Ailes, the Fox News chief, tells prospective talent coming from other networks that they ought to think twice about working at Fox, because they won’t ever be able to go back again. (In the case of the newscaster Paula Zahn, when she left Fox for CNN, Ailes made it seem like she’d been cast out—that CNN was settling for sloppy seconds.)
And yet this is not at all to say that anybody in the news business at News Corp. regards their status as second-class. Just the opposite: It’s there but for the grace of God when it comes to everybody else at other places. It’s about a noncom class and an officer class, with the noncom class being the heart and soul and purpose of this man’s army and the officers being parodies of themselves, sacrificing adventure for some attenuated, oppressive idea of respectability.
Journalism, when you work for Murdoch, is good sport. It takes only the combat seriously.
The idea of higher calling, of blah-blah responsibility, of reverential bullshit, is some class thing about trying to make the job more important than it is, and has nothing to do with making the news direct, powerful, and fun.
The effect of this, of the creation of this very clear and insular culture, is that the process itself is not open to question. The idea that someone would not understand that the organization has its interests would define someone who was not going to be part of News Corp. for very long. This is Rupert Murdoch’s newsroom—wherever it is (and wherever he is). Being Rupert Murdoch’s newsroom, pursuing Rupert Murdoch’s interests, hitting Rupert Murdoch’s enemies over the head, gives the whole place personality. Other journalists might take exception to Murdoch’s heavy hand, to Murdoch using journalism to fight his battles, but, elementally, readers don’t—in a sense, they like it; it’s a clarity that they get.
Part of the sport, for readers and for Murdoch journalists, is understanding, accepting, and getting a kick out of the fact that the news media can still crack the whip, and that making trouble is what gives it snap—readers like to know that their paper can stick it. And that when the paper uses its power, you’re part of that power—you can feel pride in that, and strength. Going after people is part of the fun—having power is fun.
When MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann attacked Fox News chief Roger Ailes on the air in 2007, Ailes informed NBC CEO Jeff Zucker that he would have both the New York Post and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly attack Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of NBC’s parent, GE. O’Reilly told viewers, “If my child were killed in Iraq, I would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt,” because GE has business in Iran, a country that the United States accuses of supporting Shiite militias in Iraq.
Murdoch, during the investigation of Conrad Black, promised to go easy on the story (killing at least one aggressive story in the New York Post) if, in return, Black’s Telegraph airbrushed criticism of Murdoch’s decision to appoint his thirty-year-old son CEO of BSkyB.
From News Corp.’s point of view, this is just about the day-today management of its news assets. If someone strikes you, you strike them back hard—it’s effective and it’s fun. If they cry uncle in the face of your demonstration of power, well, you’ve proved your point—you’ve confirmed your power. So you lock in your advantage, protecting your own position and putting something in the favor bank too.
What’s more, you have to know how to extend and leverage your power. This is about power that is best understood in a semi-feudal sense. It’s about a fiefdom that not only has its own centralized power but confers power on other people, who then return some tribute—in the form of information (hence all this actually does serve a journalistic function) or in the form of more power and the furtherance of the company’s interests.
Howard Rubenstein, for instance, has built a massive New York PR practice, one of whose chief assets is its ability to wield influence at the Post. In a perfect information loop, he represents Murdoch’s PR interests and as well represents other people who have PR interests involved with Murdoch’s Post. This is, within the Post, regarded as one of those elements that is not so much annoying as characteristic—“that’s a Rubenstein client” is a particular News Corp. status (extended to everything from major companies to local restaurants).
One of Rubenstein’s methods is to arrive in the Post’s newsroom and to cross it slowly, in public view—sometimes with a client in tow—making his way directly to the editor’s desk. The message to Post reporters is clear: Howard has grease.
If you’re embroiled in scandal, that scandal might well be mitigated at the Post if you hire Rubenstein. In 2006, for instance, the Post got wind that a student at the prestigious Collegiate School had threatened “to go Columbine” with Post reporters at its door, the school was savvy enough to hire Rubenstein and have the story downplayed.
There are greater and lesser agents of Post power. When in 2003 I wrote a book that had some less than kind things to say about the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, I was the butt of a ferocious attack on the Post’s “Page Six.” “What gives?” I asked
, calling up the page’s editor, Richard Johnson, with whom I’d been on affable terms. “Never underestimate the power of Harvey Weinstein on this page,” said Richard, more matter-of-factly than threateningly. (Weinstein, actually, had hired Johnson as a screenwriter.)
So, if designees and hustlers and bullies can come to have extrajournalistic influence and power in Murdoch newsrooms, imagine the power Murdoch himself has. It is direct from Murdoch’s lips to the page. There’s an excitement, an electrifying sense of accomplishment, when you give Murdoch what he wants, when you know that it comes directly from the boss. (It doesn’t really matter that Murdoch is often full of inaccuracies and self-serving rumors; he’s full of juicy gossip and good stories too.)
Simon Jenkins, in his book The Market for Glory, about the great newspaper proprietors, makes a point that would never be made by an American press critic—that dubious motives and good journalism might coexist. Beaverbrook, for instance, whose Daily Express displayed calculated “malice towards often innocent ‘enemies,’” as well as not necessarily warranted “generosity to friends,” was nevertheless “a master journalist,” in Jenkins’ view. “He had an instinct for news and a belief in the authority of a good reporter to command the reader’s attention.”
That’s the Murdoch position: News Corp. has to represent its proprietor’s (and, by extension, its shareholders’) interests while at the same time giving consumers what they want.
It’s a position at diametric odds with that of what Murdoch would call—using his catchall term for the sanctimonious—the “Bishops” of journalism, who, you cannot convince him otherwise, merely hide their interests while continuing to flog them, and, quite possibly because they’ve so internalized their own phoniness, more often than not fail to hold their readers’ or viewers’ attention.
The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch Page 26
