The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  Rupert Murdoch says he saw an exciting pattern in his father’s life, and Keith certainly wished to prepare Rupert as a successor. That father and son shared a dynastic ambition is well attested. But in Rupert’s recollection things did not begin quite so happily. His school disagreed with him, and he with it. Geelong Grammar

  – in the English, or New English, mould of Eton, or Phillips Andover – likes its inmates to engage with a collective ethic, and at that time it had two offerings: Christian social idealism (a speciality – its head, James Darling, being interested in theorists like Teilhard du Chardin); and team sports (Australia’s overall secular faith, inclusive without reference to class, sex or cultural background).

  Rupert thought sport pointless and Darling insincere. Few Australians, obviously, would share the first judgment, and perhaps none the second: Sir James faced complaints when he later chaired the Australian Broadcasting Commission, but no one else accused him of insincerity. Darling admired Rupert’s mother for her concern with social values, and said the son had not inherited them. (Nor, for that matter, did her distaste for gambling transfer.) The formative experiences Rupert acknowledges are Oxford University, the Daily Express in its heroic period, and (obliquely) the Herald itself. Of these the Herald came first, though only briefly.

  Sir Keith’s bleak estimate of his own apprenticeship was accurate, David Syme’s protectionist Age having been an editorial antique. The most significant passage in media history, says Professor Michael Schudson of the University of California, is journalism’s transformation ‘from the nineteenth-century partisan press to the twentieth-century commercial-professional press’. As he says, comparison of today’s major newspapers with those of 1895 shows a professional, non-partisan pattern, where reporters rarely march ‘in step behind an editorial line set by a publisher …’

  British journalists, apt to smile at the word ‘profession’, may doubt America’s most rigorous media analyst (and ‘professional’ may not simply equal ‘good’). But Schudson’s account broadly matches Australian experience – illuminating the British, if only by contrast. It is certainly relevant to Newscorp, the democratic world’s chief instance of journalists marching in step. If that is a historic reversal, Rupert’s professional beginnings are the more interesting (especially given his later involvement with the Hitler Diaries and some other equally bizarre episodes).

  Australia’s newspaper reforms of 1910-14 set professional aspirations which afterwards grew steadily (even luxuriantly in 1945, when a training syllabus was proposed to include the rules of both Marxist analysis and the world heavyweight championship) and by the 1950s there was a settled process, known as ‘cadetship’, lasting roughly four years, centred on the role of the reporter. Belief in a native talent for this central craft is strongly held. Kay Graham of the Washington Post wrote from college wondering if she might display the good reporter’s quality, ‘given by God to a very few’; Sir Keith Murdoch looked anxiously for Rupert to display it. And in some people there is an unearthly capacity to penetrate and depict events. Stephen Crane was born six years after the American Civil War, yet veterans reading The Red Badge of Courage believed – famously – that they had served with him at Chancellorsville. Rather less famous, though, is Crane’s remark made – to Joseph Conrad, with apparent relief – after testing himself against actual war in Cuba. He said: ‘The Red Badge is all right.’

  The reality is that the gift is rare, sometimes misleading: natural reporters cannot dispense with disciplined experience any more than musicians who have it can rely on perfect pitch alone. Training consists of testing the gifted, eliminating the self-deluded and teaching competence (or humility) to the giftless majority. The first lesson is that fact-gathering is impossible; the second that something all the same can be done. It is always rough going. Arthur Christiansen, the transforming genius of the Daily Express, remembered his four years of English provincial reporting – of train crashes and witness payoffs, of trying to outsmart crooks and being heaved out of factories – as little but ‘fright, nausea, hot embarrassment and near-failure’.

  Induction on Australian metropolitan papers like the Herald was less Darwinian, but it took time – for the reporter’s game is uncertainty, and the supply of it is sparse. Though labelled as ‘news’, a newsroom’s throughput is largely predictable: events – though intrinsically unique are processed for resemblances, and enough of these are always found to construct normality. This decent material is essentially stenographic. Presentation may render it as lavish features, editorials, even advertising, but the reporter’s skills count only where ambiguity persists – in shadows inhabited by the living Elvis, crooked bankers and horses which talk. Most such items are fanciful: the norm – though crude – is not arbitrary. But young reporters find that, outside normality, truth is no special friend of likelihood. Many march on into the badlands of the Bible Code or The X-Files.

  Mental defences – against both excessive caution and excessive credulity – can be practised. I was told that, if a man jumps from the tower of the Royal Melbourne Hospital and runs off unharmed on Grattan Street, I should shut my eyes and count the bricks he falls past. (The mentor, I think, was Adrian Deamer. The answer is about 950.) Assume also that if you can think it, someone will do it: a legless, bigamous chicken-sexer will pose as a priest to marry a new girlfriend to one of his wives posing as a male. (It was a big story during my third training year: the girl just would not ‘live in sin’.)

  But, if doubts were everything, the small-town editor exposing injustice (walking out of step) would be non-existent instead of rare. Some reassurance comes from discovering that events are intractable. On my first day in the Herald newsroom (about four years after Sir Keith Murdoch died) the space abruptly filled with large men in working togs: wharf labourers, criticising recent coverage of federal wages policy. Comment – the paper’s faith in wage-restraint – they agreed was free. But recondite facts of industrial arbitration were sacred, and error had been committed. The printed outcome of their debate with the brass was highly abstruse, but not the lesson we beginners were told to draw – our own exposure to scrutiny.

  This reduces any delusions that facts are the reporter’s property (or invention: the classic allegation of authority). As experience proves the independence of events, the everyday reporter’s task eases. It shifts from divining the truth to knowing what questions may reveal it; from that to discovering where those questions are being asked, and to the knowledge that threats and denials issued elsewhere are usually best neglected. The principle is universal, but risk and practice go best step by step. Here, the Australian newsroom offered exceptional training for much of the last century. As news agencies – powerful in the US, dominant in Britain were marginal to its life, its first-hand work ranged from grassroots crime to national political shenanigans. This early exposure made the Australians, up to Rupert’s time, the best – as Christiansen thought – of the reporters drawn to ‘Fleet Street’: an international village, sustained in London by the colossal revenues of Britain’s popular press.

  Training ended with a professional grade, though it rarely took the four full years as the course could be shortened by some 25 per cent where the trainee could show proven skill or graduate qualifications, or both. Rupert’s, however, was reduced by some 90 per cent without either. George Munster in Paper Prince (1985) states that Murdoch was a Herald cadet ‘for a few months’ in 1950, between leaving Geelong Grammar and departing for England and Oxford. This time was served, as Munster dryly puts it, ‘under Sir Keith’s benevolent eye’. It might well have been impossible, given the impact of that eye, to make Rupert’s brief experience even roughly normal. If not as distressing as Christiansen’s, a cadet’s first year was designed as an uncomfortable succession of menial tasks (like listing the movements of ships). But no strenuous effort seems to have been made in that direction anyway. Rupert began by turning up for work in Sir Keith’s chauffeured car.

  Murdoch himself
has offered very few memories of the experience even to William Shawcross, the biographer to whom he has given most aid. According to that account (it roughly agrees with Munster’s) he spent about four months attending minor criminal courts in the company of another cadet, who had been at Geelong Grammar. Court reporting ranked considerably above the first menial stage, but it wasn’t something undertaken in pairs by old schoolmates. If someone couldn’t handle a story solo, he or she did humble legwork for senior staff members, and underwent rigorous instruction.

  Both Munster and Shawcross suggest that he wrote at least one court report, published anonymously. But the few months passed with no real trace; probably it was an embarrassment to everyone concerned. Certainly Rupert never reached the critical stage of solo assignments carrying a degree of risk for the paper. His ‘cadetship’ cannot have been anything more than playing briefly at journalism.

  Newspaper managers do not need professional news-gathering skills, which is why – with some exceptions – they have in modern times done as Schudson says, and left reporters broadly to their own devices. Rupert Murdoch, however, is the exception: he intervenes strenuously in editorial processes, and even those who disapprove may suppose he does so on a basis of expertise. Indeed, Murdoch himself perhaps thinks so, for the Herald period became in his own later mind a genuine professional experience.

  In 1979 he testified before the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal. The full circumstances don’t matter till we come to issues of nationality and television ownership, but much of his evidence voiced his distress over being – as he saw it – subjected to unfair competition by the Herald, ‘a company I used to work for’, speaking as if he had given a period of loyal service to Australian journalism. It was in fact only symbolically true that he had worked for the Herald, but his vehemence suggests he attached substance to it.

  A curious interlude demonstrates otherwise. Before Oxford, Murdoch had a short hitch with the Birmingham Post in the English Midlands, arranged through Sir Keith’s acquaintance with Pat Gibson, chief executive of its controlling group. There Murdoch was rebuked for inattention by the Post’s editor Charles Fenby. On departure, he wrote to Gibson that Fenby was an incompetent, ripe for dismissal.

  The urge for vengeance is odd, but more revealing is the written word as a means to it. Whether or not Herald training elevated character, it taught infallibly that a beginner who writes damaging words is their own likeliest victim: defamation must be utterly avoided till enough basic precision has been acquired just to write neutrally without heart-stopping repercussions (and that it comes quite slowly is one of Christiansen’s points). Rupert’s breezy libel on Fenby would have struck any real trainee on any newspaper as crudely suicidal. Its inaccuracy, luckily for him, was so gross as to make it ineffective – though forty years later Murdoch could recall it to Shawcross as a well-judged sally. Its significance is that Melbourne and Birmingham left him innocent of the reporter’s tradecraft.

  A good deal of this craft is only charms and amulets, but they help people cope with the peculiar insecurity of the work. Reporters cannot afford – are never finally allowed – much disengagement from the ambiguous situations they encounter. There is a famous pose of detachment, but it belongs, as most practitioners know, in movies, not in the world of experience where, as Professor Jane Richards has written, there are ‘cognitive costs of keeping one’s cool’. In an elegant piece of research she reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2000, her Stanford University team asked people to repress their emotions while viewing recorded matter known normally to be distressing. Successful reduction of distress – of involvement, that is – reduced, pro rata, the accuracy of perception and of recall: exactly the reporter’s predicament.

  Emotional tension is complicated by professional investment in the outcome of events – typically, turning out to be right requires things to turn out horribly for others. Max Weber, in one of the foundation documents of social science (Politics as a Profession), defined the reporter’s existence as ‘from all viewpoints, accident-prone’, under ‘conditions that put his self-assurance to the test in a way that has no match in any other profession’.

  Training, finally, is an exposure sufficient to weed out those whose assurance remains inadequate and whose tensions are resolved (in a psychologist’s term) by ‘premature closure’ – untruth being promoted, or truth suppressed, according to whether recklessness or timidity complicates the situation. Weber, pioneering the analysis of professions, put journalism firmly among them, but observed in it a unique lack of formal restraints against corruption. Deficiencies of integrity were not therefore ‘astounding’ – only the existence of more ‘honest journalists than the layman can suspect’.

  Technicalities such as libel apart, restraints upon newspaper journalism are indeed voluntary, and especially the submission of candidates to a test of quality. The underlying principle is Milton’s ‘liberty of unlicensed printing’ in Areopagitica – a democratic essential, as Eugene Meyer, publisher of the Washington Post, says in our epigraph. But Meyer adds that the general principle allows a newspaper’s controller to defeat the public interest in any particular. It would have been professionally ‘intolerable’, thought his daughter Katharine Graham, to make her own start as a reporter on the Post, and she went instead to Scripps-Howard’s San Francisco News. Her autobiography reveals how she and Meyer sought to insulate the test of her capacities from the impact of his status. Newsroom grapevines probably hindered them somewhat. But in the Murdoch case no similar self-denial was even attempted.

  At Oxford Rupert made his first important connection outside his immediate family – with Rohan Rivett, who had been at Oxford a generation earlier, and was running the Herald group’s London office. Naturally a London editor would counsel the chairman’s student son out of his own experience. But the Murdochs assumed a deeper bond.

  Rohan Deakin Rivett passed a golden youth and brutal young manhood, going from school to Melbourne University and on to Oxford, as a gifted scholar and athlete. He had just become a cadet journalist in 1940 when he joined the Second AIE Captured, he endured the Japanese oppression which locked many veterans into the emotional prison of White Australia. Rivett, however, survived as an advocate of opening to Asia and rapprochement with Japan.

  His middle name puts him among the connections of Alfred Deakin, main architect of federation. Australian history recycles certain names frequently – Baillieu, Bonython, Boyd, Mackerras, Myer, for instance manifesting not an aristocracy, but a durable bourgeois elite. Deakins and Rivetts are salient, for if Alfred organised the nation, his son-in-law, Rohan’s father, organised much of its scientific and intellectual life. Murdochs and Rivetts made a subset of this network. Walter, the Reverend Patrick’s scholarly brother, was Deakin’s first biographer. Some AIF veterans might have suspicions of Sir Keith, but he was an intimate of prime ministers – and Elisabeth fitted exactly the Rivett tradition of graceful social concern.

  Walter and Elisabeth saw Rohan in the way of an elder brother to Rupert, and an enduring professional ally. Sir Keith saw Rivett as an important corporate recruit. Their choices were fortunate: extensive correspondence reveals Rivett’s uncynical trust in the Murdochs, father and son. He was not a toady, but something of a boy scout. His eclectic gallery of heroes – the British socialist Aneurin Bevan, the Australian Tory Richard Casey, the cricketing genius Don Bradman – readily accommodated Sir Keith, sole author of the Herald group. (The Finks of course had vanished during Rohan’s war service.) Though Rupert castigates ‘establishments’, his own career germinated in the protective warmth of an Anglo-Australian elite.

  Rohan and Nan Rivett’s house at Sunbury-on-Thames became Rupert’s refuge in England. Here nothing showed of Charles Fenby’s would-be nemesis – Nan’s memory is of someone engagingly puppy-like, and seemingly vulnerable himself. Rivett, who had much of the teacher in him, discussed British politics and newspapers with Rupert, and advised Sir Keith on Rup
ert’s career and its dynastic implications. ‘I know you are very worried about whether Rupert should continue his Oxford course beyond this June,’ he wrote in January 1952. There was a ‘very strong temptation’ to have him in Melbourne ‘so that he can work close to you and assimilate points from your experience … Against this, I know that if unable to finish his course there will always be a personal feeling of some dissatisfaction … at not holding the University degree.’

  But domestic felicity is the principal memory, as in Keith’s relationship with the Finks before 1914. There is Rupert turning up for some laundry or for a casual meal; entertaining the children David and Rhyl with nursery games and boisterous pillow-fighting; travelling with the family to Europe. In a letter written from Oxford after Rohan’s move to Adelaide, Rupert conveys the flavour of the association:

  … I am sending by the same mail your shirts and pyjamas, for which many thanks … They saved me and it was extra kind of you to come good with them … [My letter] originally set out to tell you

  1) how much I appreciate all the wonderful kindness you have showered on me over the last eighteen months, what great friends you’ve been to me and how much easier and more pleasant it’s made life for me etcetera – all of which is meant;

  2) to wish you all the best for Adelaide and find out how you’re liking it and so on.

  … very best love and kisses to Nan, David and Rhyl.

  Given the way matters ended between them, it is no surprise that the surviving Rivetts remember Rupert’s charm through a veil of pain. But they remember it nonetheless – like others in later decades. Charm is not universally reported in corporate megastars. It has been since youth in Murdoch’s case, even by people who think he has coldly betrayed them. Some consider it the quality that led them into relationships which became disastrous. Many find it hard to link the eager Oxford student – or the surprisingly attentive, self-deprecating executive – to the tyrant one long-serving editor (Andrew Neil) described under the headline ‘RUPERT THE FEAR’. Still others puzzle over Murdoch, the virtuoso of kick-ass libertarianism, abasing himself before the gangster-bureaucrats of Beijing.