by Bruce Page
Cover
THE
MURDOCH
ARCHIPELAGO
BRUCE PAGE
in collaboration with ELAINE POTTER Copyright © 2003, 2011 by BRUCE PAGE
This electronic format is published by Tantor eBooks, a division of Tantor Media, Inc, and was produced in the year 2012, All rights reserved. For Anne
Nor houres, dayes, months, which are but rags of time
CONTENTS
Cover................................................................................................................... 1
THE MURDOCH ARCHIPELAGO.................................................................. 3
1 MAN FIT FOR POWER? 2011–2012........................................................ 8
2 A CONTINENT OF NEWSPAPERS, 1700–1960.................................... 25
3 THE SOUTHCLIFFE INHERITANCE, 1919–1953 ................................ 40
4 BLACK JACK AND THE STUDENT PRINCE, 1900–1971 .................. 68
5 TRADING TABLOID PLACES, 1969–1980 ........................................... 95
7 MR MURDOCH CHANGES TRAINS, 1969–1975............................... 120
7 AN AMERICAN NIGHTMARE, 1801–1980 ........................................ 146 8 TIMES AND VALUES, 1819–1981 ....................................................... 169 I: Attempting independence .................................................................... 169 II: Independence surrendered .................................................................. 188
9 VIRTUALLY NORMAL, 1650–1982 .................................................... 208
10 CASES OF CONSCIENCE, 1981–1982............................................... 224
11 PATRIOTIC LIKE A FOX, 1979–1985................................................ 246
12 MARGARET THATCHER’S HEROES, 1982–1989........................... 268
13 PRESENT NECESSITIES, 1983–2002................................................. 302
14 RUPERT’S ESTABLISHMENT, 1910–2003....................................... 333
15 STATESMAN – AND MEDIA SAVIOUR, 2000–2011...................... 366
16 A DROWNED CHILD, 2005–2011 ...................................................... 388
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................ 398 NOTES........................................................................................................ 401
BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................... 453 INDEX ........................................................................................................ 463
Table of Figures Figure 1 ........................................................................................................... 105
Figure 2 ........................................................................................................... 106
Figure 3 ........................................................................................................... 157
1
A MAN FIT FOR POWER? 2011–2012
“We know the right thing to do, and we always do the right thing’.
RUPERT MURDOCH, characteristically dismissing criticism
… Foul deeds will rise
Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes
HAMLET: Act I, scene II
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN In London on 19 July 2011 Rupert Murdoch appeared before the Culture, Media and Sport committee of the House of Commons. Its members were anxious to know how criminal snooping could have become routine editorial practice at the News of the World.
Mr Murdoch accepted that the thing had happened. It was utterly disgraceful. But he couldn’t give the Members of Parliament much help. He knew nothing of it until others exposed the facts, and he suggested such ignorance was quite natural. To be sure the News of the World was part of News Corporation, his global empire. But its editorial antics scarcely constituted ‘one per cent of my business’.
Without his stating it, everyone present knew that BSkyB – British Sky Broadcasting – was what counted as substantial.
For now let us pass on the notion that Rupert Murdoch doesn’t know how tabloid newspapers operate – his grasp of journalism is indeed less than usually fancied, but not in truth vestigial. A much greater fantasy is involved here: one promoted by the whole News Corporation interest with aid from battalion-strength spin-mavens, legal sages, media gurus and investment analysts; joining in because the vast, prospective, BSkyB monopoly will (if somehow preserved), spatter cash over everyone alongside, as a mighty waterfall drenches all who draw near.
And this fantasy’s enabling essence is that the News of the World (suddenly exposed as feral, and justly terminated) was never linked to BSkyB by anything more than some Newscorp equity and by the presence in both outfits – at different times, and in different extent – of leadership by Rupert Murdoch. Really, these are entities distinct in character.
The reason is well known. Laws of physics stipulate that broadcasters cannot operate without regulation, and by regulating – by distributing monopolies and powers – governments acquire responsibility. The law in Britain (and elsewhere, usually) says that television companies cannot be run by persons not of ‘fit and proper’ character’.
Such unsuitability is not easy to define, but even quite plain people can detect it when they see it. Hardly anyone would measure the team running the News of the World during our present century as fit to take charge of broadcasting. Or, indeed, of a newspaper – but in a free country the depravity or otherwise of print journalism is not within the government’s call.
Still, in broadcasting duties do exist, and under some pressure David Cameron’s government has taken action. The issue of whether News Corporation, controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his family, is fit and proper to exercise control of BSkyB – which has a 100% monopoly of the British satellite television market, and is close to matching the BBC as Britain’s largest broadcaster – has been referred for decision to Ofcom, the national communications regulator. Should Ofcom’s finding be adverse, it can simply amputate Newscorp’s right to enjoy any of BSkyB’s profits, now running at a billion pounds annually. The damage caused to Newscorp by so drastic an outcome would obviously be grievous, and possibly
– in the present state of world media industries – fatal.
And this threat has Damoclean qualities. First, because any present Ofcom judgment can be altered or reversed in consequence of findings from the three other inquiries where the News of the World is concerned: Operation Weeting, investigating the investigation of phone hacking; Operation Elveden (supervised by the Independent Police Complaints Commission), investigating improper payments to police; and Lord Justice Leveson’s broad examination of the ethical standards of the British media. All are expected to run into 2012 – but will at some point reach an end, leaving tensions perhaps reduced, or more likely intensified. Second, under Ofcom’s present constitution questions of fitness have no terminus: so long as a broadcaster operates, its licence to do so remains in issue.
As it happens neither Ofcom nor any of its regulatory ancestors has before this been made to ask whether a British broadcaster should be dumped on grounds of character. There is, officials anxiously say, a lack of ‘case law’. But having now been asked – and prompted by undeniable concerns – the question is unlikely to lose its currency. However much laundering can be done, Newscorp will be on probation for many years ahead.
There is also an internal Newscorp inquiry, with invi
gilators far better paid than the public ones. But sceptics will consider this part of the laundry works.
As we know, there’s been a remarkable turnaround – as recently as this March the media trade assumed that Rupert Murdoch had utterly persuaded the Government to leave Newscorp free to turn its 38% share of a 100% UK satellite monopoly into 100% of 100%. And James Murdoch – dining partner of ministers
– was regaling his circle with visions of British media law essentially liquidated, and of the BBC losing many of its richest assets as compulsory bargains for BSkyB.
The difference has been made by a feat of skilful and determined reporting not surpassed in British journalism’s post-WWII record (suggesting that the old watchdog still musters some independent energy).
The complete Sky takeover is a long-laid Murdoch project – one not yet sunk hopelessly. But throughout its gestation years Nick Davies and the Guardian drilled steadily into the cover-up maintained by Fleet Street and Scotland Yard, their mutual corruption shrouded in long-practised cynicism and obstruction.
“Fleet Street’ is the correct collective, both in justice to Newscorp – its tabloids not being alone as users of criminal surveillance – and in recognition of professional realities. For after four decades of Murdoch dominance a great proportion of British journalists have fed from his payroll: many exclusively so. Doubtless this helps a trade usually very rich in scolds to find virtues in Rupert which lay observers fail to see.
A comparison of the Guardian’s campaign with the Washington Post’s Watergate must in the end be made, but it is delicate and complex – except for one plain thing to be stated immediately. This is the matter of loneliness.
Until Richard Nixon’s crimes became altogether egregious and his facade of power crumbled, the Post faced quite clear prospects of commercial destruction at the government’s determined hands – and did so without any notable interest being expressed by other media concerns. (Rupert Murdoch, not yet a top-level player, was among those who saw Nixon as hard-done-by.)
For years the Guardian’s hacking story evoked no attention and no competition from any other paper except the New York Times (ranging outside its own hometurf). During 2009 the ineffable Press Complaints Commission cleared the News of the Screws of eavesdropping, but reprimanded the Guardian for its overdone investigative ambition.
Perhaps it is only journalists – reporters, particularly – for whom competition provides a special but astringent reassurance. This is no relation to the ‘boys-inthe-bus’ syndrome, and the comfort of the hunting pack, which most genuine reporters avoid. Competition may come to mind when ‘exclusive’ is crudely overapplied – for what is the use of possessing something which is valued by nobody else? But the main significance appears when the story involves some likely conflict with power and authority: ‘exclusive’ then indicates that an approaching peril is one which may have to be confronted alone.
Competition rarely tastes altogether sweet, but isolation may be worse. In this account of the Murdoch decades there are case studies in Chapter 4, Chapter 6, Chapter 9 and Chapter 10. And to these the phone-hacking saga attaches as a climactic. After long and lonely work, Nick Davies made a sequence of breakthroughs which brought many allies – some very reluctant ones – over to the Guardian’s side.
Perhaps the paper was never at such direct risk of commercial destruction as was the Post during Watergate, but the going was sufficiently tough (and nowadays most newspapers are in more commercial peril than just a minority were in those days).
* In its conclusion, this book will argue that the experience of the Guardian utterly demolished – even as it was being asserted – the Coalition’s theory of a British media system so competitive and so diversified that a vast inflation of Newscorp market-share could carry no implications for democracy. Common sense now rates this level with the axioms of flat-earth geometry.
But here there is also an immediate and positive statement to make. The Post and Watergate is a fine story, and so is the Guardian and the eavesdroppers; also the Telegraph group’s meticulous account of faked expenses at the Palace of Westminster. (Notably, in the first phone-hacking debate more than one MP acknowledged a salutary effect of the Telegraph work.)
And such stories are not found only in the records of famous newspapers and broadcasters. Trawling in the Pulitzer Prize archives will bring up many cases of small-town American media firms taking courageous issue with corrupt or incompetent officials: matters involving risk to careers and financial prospects; often the more daunting for being fought out far from the national limelight.
Some reviewers of this book’s first edition complained that its catalogue of Newscorp’s negative qualities was not ‘balanced’ by a ledger of positive instances
– and this one may draw further disapproval, as negative accumulation has been rapid since 2002. Dealing with such complaint involves checking over the trade’s notion of ‘balance’.
The real justification of newspapers and the electronic descendants we hope they will have is generated by serious (often extended) conflicts between their editorial teams and close contingent powers – political or corporate – undertaken with no prospect of a direct business reward, and in the absence of any firm calculation of success. Every genuine instance is a potential folly. And that potential, naturally, is quite frequently fulfilled.
This is what justifies the formal and informal advantages society may allow to media organisations, and it can’t be established by regular distribution of plain vanilla news and entertainment. That actually can be left to well-run government agencies, or to the advertising and public-relations apparatus which the corporate world maintains (often decently enough). What matters is the news that no government or corporation (or despotic individual) will uncover by free will: revelation made in spite of determined suppression or distortion.
Let’s note that revelation doesn’t typically confer power on its authors. On the contrary, it surrenders power to a wide community, whose responses the authors may estimate but can’t command.
So lacking these elements of folly and courage, editorial freedoms lack justification – though trainee investigators should learn that there is more than simple daring involved. ‘Courage’, wrote Flann O’Brien, can never be enough.
One trouble about it is that its possessor is hardly ever out of trouble and requires other qualities for self-extraction.
It’s not surprising, then, to look back and find that media institutions with major records of folly and self-extraction (so far) are not very numerous. An Anglophone list might read: New York Times; Washington Post; Guardian; Sunday Times (pre-Murdoch); Observer, Independent (for a brief, brilliant period); The Times (in far retrospect); recently (and most welcome) the Daily Telegraph; sometimes the Daily Mail; once upon a time the Daily Mirror and (intermittently) CBS, the BBC and Channel 4 News.
The greater part of the world’s media try to get through life peaceably, without presenting any challenging face to major beasts of state or corporation. If honour makes altruistic folly sometimes unavoidable they do the best they can, and may generate some disclosure – though rarely enough to give clear warning when Grendel’s Mother sneaks up on the mead-hall.
Newscorp is a different, quite special case. Surely no other media outfit has so luxuriated in truculence, or unleashed such furious broadsides of abuse. Yet its record – and the whole 113-year record of the Murdoch dynasty – is almost totally free from the quixotic follies and brave revelations which represent most of the real value journalism has brought to the world. Newscorp doesn’t do risky altruism, unless you count certain vigilante episodes – and even these come with a bitter twist, as in the case of Sarah Payne and the doctored mobile phone.
The fact, if seemingly paradoxical, is that Newscorp is the rare – perhaps unique – case of a media business trying to operate on a strictly rational philosophy.
In controversy, the default Murdoch position is clamorous alliance with the ascendant powe
r of the day – or the one which Rupert expects shortly to achieve that state. Once or twice our story finds Murdoch briefly embroiled with a forlorn hope – but it turns out to be a consequence of miscalculation. (See Chapter6, ‘Mr Murdoch Changes Trains’.)
Particularly while the News of the World remained afloat Newscorp distinguished itself by frantic boasting about its devastating scoops, and pitiless skills in criminal investigation. For the most part this was just barroom hype, rarely if ever involving engagement with targets showing a damaging capacity to shoot back. Many of these scoops involved hunting members of the Royal Family: a sport best practised by the kind of people who will shoot at tethered game. Many more involved stings and entrapments against minor criminals: the sting is a technique which has almost no prospect of effect against an organisation possessing serious capacity to inflict social harm (an oil multinational, say, or a hedge fund) and afterward take measures to immunise itself.
This is not to say that no journalism of any interest has come from organisations folded into the News empire. Further along in the book we have some comparison of examples. But the subject here is balance, and on overall balance Murdoch has collaborated with the major powers among which he finds himself. ‘Let somebody else annoy them’, he said when submitting to Beijing’s demand for censorship of the massacre at Tiananmen Square. Doubtless this axiom is well-rehearsed among Newscorp’s editorial executives, whose main skill, as Andrew Neil has said – from personal experience – consists in anticipating their chairman’s desires.
That task isn’t quite simple. It appears that the explosive Parliamentary expenses material was offered first to Newscorp, and was rejected. Amid his wider travails the chairman and chief executive has found time to be furious, and seemingly the irony escapes him. But if investigative journalism is conducted on the principle of avoiding offence to any but those the boss certainly wishes to offend, a database containing 2,000 or so potential bombshells will drench the heart of any loyal henchman with foreboding.
