Contents:
During the ineffable Press Complaints Commission cleared the News of the Screws on eavesdropping, but reprimanded the Guardian for excessive investigative ambition. Perhaps it is only journalists — reporters, particularly — for whom competition provides a special but astringent reassurance. But the main significance appears when the story involves some likely conflict with power and authority: Competition rarely tastes altogether sweet, but isolation may be worse: The Murdoch Archipelago provides case-studies.
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. Common sense now rates this level with the axioms of flat-earth geometry. 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 archives will bring up many cases of small-town American media firms taking courageous issue with corrupt or incompetent officials: 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 often fulfilled. 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. 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.
One trouble about it is that its possessor is hardly ever out of trouble and requires other qualities for self-extraction. An Anglophone list might read: Newscorp is a different and special case.
Surely no other media outfit has so luxuriated in truculence, or unleashed such furious broadsides of abuse. 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.
Unfit and grossly improper Having to condemn particular items is a form of censorship only slightly less attractive than specifying in advance what may and may not be said. History has not been kind to either of those Murdoch forays into high policy. This is one of the most badly written books I have ever read. One trouble about it is that its possessor is hardly ever out of trouble and requires other qualities for self-extraction. The unrebellious rebel And this Newscorp idiosyncrasy adds a paradox to the Ofcom role:
In controversy, the default Murdoch position is clamorous alliance with the ascendant power of the day — or the one which Rupert expects shortly will achieve that state. Once or twice history finds Murdoch embroiled with a forlorn hope — but it only in consequence of miscalculation. 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 bar-room hype, rarely involving engagement with targets showing a damaging capacity to shoot back. Many of these scoops involved hunting members of the Royal Family: Many more involved stings and entrapments against minor criminals: This is not to say that no journalism of any interest has come from organisations folded into the News empire. But the subject here is balance, and overall balance Murdoch has collaborated with the major powers amongst which he finds himself. 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, potential bombshells will drench the heart of any loyal henchman with foreboding.
Operation of a balance depends on the coinage in use: In assessing media outfits, we find some having massive items on the dark side, with Newscorp a prominent instance.
Well, this applies to the New York Times and the Guardian: But in those cases I can find some quite enduring balance items. For Newscorp there is only piles of ephemera, and some pieces of good work by outfits Murdoch assimilated. Complaints about media dishonesty often centre on false assertion: But fabrication often fails by autodestruction. Silence is more reliably lethal. When C P Scott said that every newspaper was something of a monopoly when media ownership more diverse than ours , and that comment was free but facts quite sacred, he also said abuse of monopoly was as much a negative as a positive action —.
Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give. Well put — and on the record, thoroughly specious. It long blended into the Newscorp business model, and when the Fox network suppressed Strange Justice — giving a break to Clarence Thomas, furthest right on the Supreme Court bench and a US political heavyweight — it ran counterpoint to the redtop treatment of British actors with large celebrity but no political clout. Newscorp acts as if a sheen of CEO ruthlessness enhances the corporate image. Like his father Sir Keith Murdoch, Rupert has always been eager for stories. At critical stages in Newscorp history — the fall of the Australian government in ; the narrow survival of the British government in — suppressio veri has been decisive, and suggestio falsi counter-productive or irrelevant.
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Partisanship is usually of a kind which has been displayed for some years past without much substantial change. Newscorp is not similarly desinvolte — or not consistently so. Among its many constituent parts vivid, sometimes startling passions are found: The Fox network carried in a two-part series by Glenn Beck which accused the financier George Soros of subverting the US Constitution, and included so many tropes from classic anti-semitism that few if any major publishers would consider it legitimate exercise in free speech.
As head of Newscorp Rupert Murdoch has generated editorial support for a diverse sequence of political candidates: Yet these affiliations are volatile as well as polarised Tony Blair, for instance, having been a traitor as well as a national hero. And this Newscorp idiosyncrasy adds a paradox to the Ofcom role: But they will have to ask whether Newscorp can be reliably insubordinate to official pressure — classically, from the government in office.
Acting as gamekeeper, Ofcom must ask whether any licence-holder will make an effective poacher when the larger public interest makes it fit and proper to do so. To be sure Newscorp organs sometimes resist official orthodoxy. That may even underestimate, since Newscorp denunciation of rivals who sustain proper independence can be more hysterical than anything pleaded by the state itself in its own cause.
And few politicians support it when they take a long-term view.
It is a position seemingly congenial to Murdoch. Some technicalities, definitions and identities should be clarified. News International is the UK-registered company which holds This is considered as a controlling interest because the majority of Sky shares are in smaller packets widely-held. Sky is managed by News International which also manages the the Sun , The Times , the Sunday Times and some lesser assets like the Times supplements plus website titles which might come in handy one day. It owes its present media ascendancy to being a chimera, in the old Greek sense of a beast incorporating the body parts from quite different animals.
But through all its transmutations it has always been Rupert Murdoch in corporate form: To repeat, in no sense does News International have a real, distinct existence: A candidate accustomed to checks and balances may be very different from a long-serving emperor. Something like this, clearly, is expected of any company director or executive. But governments and regulators have usually suggested licensed broadcasters should be particularly scrupulous. This presumably is because broadcasters are given control of public assets spectrum which once in practical operation might be used to manipulate and reshape public opinion: Should someone commanding a major television company move it towards being a platform for some special ideological outlook, it would not be quite simple for regulators to take action.
James anyway suggested that regulation should largely be abolished.
Having to condemn particular items is a form of censorship only slightly less attractive than specifying in advance what may and may not be said. The task of supervision then becomes tolerable: Such regulation has never worked perfectly, but the polling evidence is that people regard British news and current-affairs programming as reasonably trustworthy. This trust includes Sky News, the only Newscorp organ to gain a reputation for objectivity: The history of News Corporation, recounted in this book, shows that Rupert Murdoch does not make even the loosest kind of match.
Regulators might expect strict legal form to restrain him, but such is not reliably the case. Passage of time will reduce that ambiguity — demolishing, for instance, the promise that in Murdoch hands The Times would retain its political non-alignment. Five years on opportunist Tory bias was so gross that its best staff walked out to found the Independent. But time also bloats costs of legal recourse, and settles gold-plate in place.
Newscorp practice from the Times to the Wall Street Journal and beyond is one of guns expertly jumped and feet sagaciously dragged. He has, to be sure, defenders. There are present employees and beneficiaries: The unions he considered so delinquent that they had no right to fair dealing. The Bancroft family who sold the Wall Street Journal to Murdoch three decades afterward might be called upper-class boobies, just as the London print unions were called oafish pirates — that is, not altogether unfairly.
The Bancrofts were turned into fair game by a reversed action of simple class-prejudice: Once identified as ruling-class individuals, the Bancrofts have no right to fair treatment from Murdoch henchpersons. Of course simple observers will notice that Rupert has by birth, education and wealth every attribute of the ruling-class as it is normally understood.
It turns out that one of their principal targets is Rupert Murdoch, who has been in combat with them ever since he left Oxford. Fantasing the man as a revolutionary seems to afford them comfort. However, it should not. In the Wall Street Journal matter this was just peripheral horseplay.
And mainly they should free themselves from the myth of Murdoch the journalistic master-mind. There is a complex literature about whether an ideal form really existed and how closely actual papers stuck to the practice of reporting the news without paying attention to whether or not it might improve the joint bottom-line. There is no space here to settle the grand arguments raging around it: My own short view is that it has sometimes worked fairly well some of the time, and had it not done so we would not possess even the battered democracy that exists today.
But in this context the central matter is that the commercial-professional concept does not and never did exist within the empire of Rupert Murdoch — and that his career has been devoted, with no small progress, to its destruction. And this devotion has been the factor raising Newscorp to its present eminence among global media concerns — enabling him to trade propaganda-journalism for political influence, exchanged in turn for major broadcasting assets with a large element of monopoly. If it should then turn out that a quite fatal blow to his creation has been struck by the Guardian — a surviving classic of the Schudson model — we may think that Sophocles has finally been outdone in irony.
Murdoch the circulation mastermind is another fantasy or bogey for innumerate politicians , and like the Establishment myth it contains obnoxious motivation. There is a branch of liberal opinion which unreasonably despises the lower orders as much as it reasonably despises tabloidism: Actually the British, proletarians and all, were already running-down their tabloid habit when Murdoch bought the News of the World in Its then six million sale down from a eight million circa had dropped well below three million when it was put out of its misery this year: Remorseless decline of the tabloid audience surely contributed to the desperation which drove the News of the Screws into reckless criminality.
He proposes that there is a pattern of behaviour by Rupert which was established by his father, Keith - the builder of the original Herald and Weekly Times empire - of using media influence to intimidate or slavishly support or both politicians who can and will deliver highly commercial special favours - contrary to the spirit and, at least once, Page alleges, contrary to the letter of the law in Britain.
In this archipelago of warped journalism, Page argues, entertainment is more important than news; investigation and disclosure of government activity and scrutiny of state institutions do not occur unless there is proprietorial advantage; the News Corporation culture uses journalism or, Page would say, the absence of genuine journalism to support Murdoch's personal obsessions and commercial interest; and this power is used in a qualitatively different way to other authoritarian proprietors such as Beaverbrook, Hearst, Rothermere, Pulitzer and Northcliffe the Packers and Fairfaxes are not examined.
Page is not entirely successful in these arguments. I am not persuaded that Murdoch is vastly different from his fellow media moguls - witness the co-operative efforts of all the big broadcasters, including Murdoch, in the US at present in working to get media regulation changed to their advantage and the close co-operation when it suits for Australian media organisations to jointly lobby Canberra. This book is more an advocate's draft brief than a clear and overpowering indictment, and too often it is a hard read.
Plato and modern Freudians are invoked at length to prove the obvious: There are lengthy soliloquies on the nature of journalism training in Britain, Australia and the US. This space might better have been used to consider other complexities: It has been the huge wealth generated by privileged commercial access to the broadcasting spectrum, controlled by government regulation, in all three democracies that has led to a vast increase in the trade in favours to media organisations.
Murdoch provoked, with his aggressive new competition in the s, a genuine revolution in Australian journalism that forced his sclerotic and conservative rivals to modernise and reform. But this reaps Murdoch no credit in this book. Page provides a thoughtful and informed review of journalism and its varying standards in the US, Britain and Australia, yet he does not consider why the News Corp tabloid style has become an article of fascination for the world's press and why this obsession with entertainment, celebrities and the trivial has been widely adopted even by the BBC and the quality broadsheets in Britain - and suitably Australianised for use here by far more than just the Murdoch press.
The dynastic issue - whether the next generation of Murdochs can maintain such a vice-like control on the empire is also not considered, yet this is an important point given that Page fears the Murdoch culture may be infectious. The strength of the book is that Page attempts with some success to thread together the activities of News Corp in four major nations, the US, Britain, China and Australia, to establish a pattern of behaviour as no one has before. Page's critical view of Keith Murdoch will not surprise those who have read Les Carlyon's fine book on Gallipoli.
The work of the Australian journalist Neil Chenoweth on the financial details of News Corp and George Munster's classic early account of Rupert Murdoch's rise in Australia are mined and appropriately acknowledged. Page offers a useful and persuasive definition of the pseudo-newspaper that is such a ubiquitous aspect of the press today - the paper that claims the rights and pretends to meet the obligations of a free press but provides few or no disclosures of importance that do not accommodate proprietorial or partisan advantage.