On Borrowed Time Page 16
Bob Hawke, who had once advised Whitlam that he would rue the day he got into bed with Murdoch, was in fact a strong supporter. Hawke blamed the conservatives who ran the Herald and Weekly Times for keeping Labor out of power in Victoria between 1955 and 1982. Even more, he resented the light that Murdoch’s rival newspapers at Fairfax – both the Sydney Morning Herald and the National Times – had shone on real or supposed corruption in the New South Wales branch of the ALP. Hawke hoped to seize the opportunity occasioned by the Murdoch takeover bid to kill or weaken two of Labor’s media enemies. He also believed that he could use his best mate, Sir Peter Abeles, a News Corp business partner in Ansett Airlines, as a political bridge to Murdoch. In his Media Mates, Paul Chadwick records a telling exchange between the prime minister and Senator John Button. Button inquired: “Why don’t you tell us precisely how you want to help your mates?” Hawke replied: “Remember they’re the only mates we’ve got.”
As Colleen Ryan has documented in her Fairfax: The Rise and Fall, Hawke’s treasurer, Paul Keating, was even more enthusiastic about the takeover, in part for the same reasons as Hawke; in part because Fairfax had raised awkward questions about Keating’s relations with the property developer Warren Anderson; and in part because, as a radical reformer, Keating wanted to inject into the economy the energy of “new money” represented by Murdoch (and Kerry Packer) and to destroy moribund “old money” interests, represented for him by both the hated Fairfax enemy and the Melbourne gentleman’s club he thought was running the Herald and Weekly Times. Keating was not merely a passive supporter of the Murdoch takeover. By secretly providing Murdoch with inside information about the government’s proposed new media laws – where the ownership of television and newspapers was to be separated – Keating actively sought to bury the Herald and Weekly Times, to thwart Fairfax’s ambitions and to facilitate News Corp’s domination of the Australian press.
There were several people who understood what the Murdoch takeover meant. Within the senior ranks of Labor, opposition came from Bill Hayden, the foreign minister. He was reduced to silence. Inside the Opposition, Ian Macphee advocated resistance. He was removed from John Howard’s shadow cabinet. A citizens’ group formed whose members included Malcolm Fraser, Patrick White, Hal Wootten, David Williamson, Veronica Brady, Dick Smith and David Penman. Their protest actions had no hope. The takeover was supported by both the Labor and the Liberal parties, and was opposed by none of the relevant gatekeepers – the Press Council, the Trade Practices Commission and the Foreign Investment Review Board. “Effective control of the media is the first step on the road to controlling the values and the future direction of our society,” the Age warned on 17 January 1987. “It is the saddest reflection imaginable on this society that virtually no one in public life – a former Prime Minister (Malcolm Fraser); a promptly disciplined Foreign Minister (Hayden) and a gagged Opposition spokesman (Macphee) excepted – has dared to speak out against the growing concentration of ownership of the Australian press.”
When the dust settled on the takeover, Rupert Murdoch controlled the sole metropolitan tabloid newspaper in every Australian state except Western Australia and the only general national broadsheet, the Australian. His company controlled approximately two thirds of the circulation of state-wide Australian newspapers. Murdoch’s only press rival, Fairfax, controlled about a quarter. As a consequence of the takeover, Australia now had a concentration of newspaper ownership unknown anywhere in the developed world beyond the party-controlled papers of the communist bloc. In the short term, Labor was rewarded with the support of the three most popular Australian newspapers, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Melbourne’s Herald and Sun, in the 1987 election. In the long term it had been midwife at the birth of what was potentially the most anti-democratic force in national life and also the most powerful future enemy of Labor.
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All of Rupert Murdoch’s biographers agree that, outside of family, his life is dominated by only two real interests – business and politics. Over the past forty years he has built two remarkable parallel empires, one expanding his media interests, the other advancing his quest for political power. These empires are closely interconnected. Parts of his media empire are used to strengthen his political influence. On occasions his political influence is used to expand his media business. Murdoch’s media empire now spans the globe, but his shadow political empire hardly extends beyond the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. In each of these, the political empire has grown gradually by trial and error and necessarily assumed a different shape. While Murdoch’s media empire has been analysed and chronicled many times, his political empire, outlined extensively only in David McKnight’s Rupert Murdoch, is less well understood.
Although in the UK Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox (until recently part of News Corporation) has a 39.1% stake in BSkyB, the hugely profitable entertainment satellite television business does not exercise any great political influence. Almost exclusively Murdoch’s influence comes through his ownership of newspapers – the quality broadsheets, the Times and Sunday Times, and his London tabloid, the Sun. Although his broadsheets consistently supported the Thatcher government, and although in turn Thatcher supported Murdoch during his epic Wapping battle with the Fleet Street print unions, there is no reason to believe that the Times and Sunday Times have wielded greater political influence than the other London quality papers. Rather, Murdoch’s political influence in the UK has for more than thirty years been chiefly exercised through the Sun.
During Thatcher’s years as prime minister, she described the support the Sun had given her government as “marvellous”. More crucially, in 1992 the Sun helped destroy Neil Kinnock’s Labour Opposition, which once had a commanding lead in the polls. Two of its headlines – before the election, “Will the Last Person to Leave Britain Please Turn Out the Lights”; after the election, “It’s the Sun Wot Won It” – are justly famous. As several witnesses before the Leveson inquiry made clear, Labour now feared Murdoch. To Kinnock’s disgust, the party’s new leader, Tony Blair, conducted a long flirtation with Murdoch, symbolised by Blair’s round-the-world journey to meet Murdoch and his News Corp staff on Hayman Island, and confirmed by his promise to weaken Britain’s cross-media ownership laws. The reward for Labour was the vicious campaign the Sun waged in 1997 against the Conservative prime minister, John Major, who had held Murdoch at arms’ length and sought to restrict his movement into terrestrial television. Major’s defeat was celebrated with the headline “It’s the Sun Wot Swung It”. What followed were twelve years of solid Sun and News Corp support for New Labour, the highlight of which was the intimate telephone collaboration between Blair and Murdoch in the month leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In 2009, News Corp decided to switch to David Cameron and the Conservatives. Cameron had already paid homage on Murdoch’s yacht moored by the Greek island Santorini. News proclaimed its turn against Labour on the day Gordon Brown addressed his party conference. In this case the influence of the Sun was used nakedly to advance News Corp’s commercial interests – their controversial proposed $12 billion bid for total control of BSkyB, whose announcement was delayed until the Conservative-led government was elected. In the following months, News Corp’s lobbyist and the responsible minister or his adviser exchanged hundreds of phone calls, emails and text messages, several in the tone of conspirators in a common cause. Only the public revulsion following reports that Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid, News of the World, had hacked into the voicemail of a murdered teenager scuttled the BSkyB bid at the eleventh hour. Temporarily, at least, Murdoch’s vast political power was paralysed.
There is no way that Murdoch could aspire to wield through the newspapers in the United States the direct kind of power he had been able to exercise through the Sun in the UK, neither through his beloved New York Post nor the more recently acquired Wall Street Journal. In the United States – where the top four proprietors control only one fifth of newspaper circulation
– press ownership is simply far too dispersed. If he was to achieve real political influence in America he had to find some other way. It is a testament to Murdoch’s ingenuity that he did.
After a failed attempt to purchase CNN, Murdoch turned his mind to creating a cable news channel of his own, which would compete with CNN and counter its supposed “left-wing bias”. The man he chose in 1995 to run the station, Fox News, was Roger Ailes, a brilliant former media adviser to Richard Nixon, a seasoned television executive and, like Murdoch, a rabid right-wing ideologue. Until Ailes, Murdoch had dominated and sometimes terrorised all the editors who worked for him, not only tabloid journeymen like Kelvin MacKenzie of the Sun, the recipient of frequent humiliating “bollockings”, but also highly intelligent and accomplished ones like Harold Evans of the Times. In Ailes, to whom for the first time in his life he is reported to have given full editorial independence and whom he is reputed to have eventually come to fear, Rupert Murdoch had finally met his equal.
The partnership between Murdoch and Ailes has been one of the most consequential in the history of American politics. It was grounded in a common political vision – the superiority of American values of free enterprise and the untrammelled free market, and the dangers to these values represented by the treasonous left-liberal, politically correct elites. It relied on Murdoch’s genius for business. In order to establish a subscriber base, for example, Murdoch inverted the established industry patterns by paying cable companies $500 million for access to their subscribers. But it relied as greatly on Ailes’ feel for television and capacity for political invention.
Fox News was genuinely original – a 24-hour conservative-populist propaganda channel, where right-wing opinion and slanted news, described in Orwellian fashion as “fair and balanced”, were delivered in a highly entertaining fashion. On Fox News, the anxiety of its white and ageing audience at the collapse of the values and prejudices they had grown up with, and their hatred for the supposed condescension of the liberal elites, were inflamed on a daily basis. Gradually, Fox News became the most popular American cable news channel. In turn, it became critical to the fortunes of the Republican Party. Fox News was a vital supporter of George W. Bush’s presidency and the most important cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq. It was the arbiter of the fate of the Republican contenders for the presidential nomination in both 2008 and 2012. And it was in attendance at the birth of the Tea Party movement which, in its insane permanent war against the presidency of Barack Obama, is currently tearing Congress and American society apart. David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, best captured the political influence Fox News has come to wield on the right of American politics: “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us. Now we’re discovering that we work for Fox.”
Fox News has been as politically significant in the United States as the Sun has been in the UK, with one important difference. As a branch of Murdoch’s shadow political empire, the Sun has, in part at least, served the interests of his business empire. Fox News did not need to serve other Murdoch commercial interests. With a handsome annual profit, it is in its own right one of the empire’s most lucrative businesses. With Fox News, Murdoch’s two great passions – media and right-wing politics – have come together in perfect harmony.
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Despite the influence he has gained in London and Washington, Murdoch has never abandoned his early ambition of shaping the political values of the country of his birth. Here the task was quite different from what had been done in the UK or the United States. Because Australia is a federation, no single tabloid could possibly play the same role as the London Sun. And because Australia is a country of modest population, even if differences in national temperament could be overcome, economies of scale determine that there could never be a commercially successful cable or satellite channel of a Fox News type, whose daily audience of a million and a half in a US population of more than 300 million is enough to turn an annual profit of more than one billion dollars. If Murdoch’s direct political influence was ever to become as significant in Australia as it was in the UK and the United States, a model different from the Sun or Fox News was needed.
By about 2010 the model had emerged. It consisted of separate halves. One was Murdoch’s flagship, the Australian, a curious hybrid newspaper that combines some characteristics of Murdoch’s quality broadsheets, the Times and the Wall Street Journal – detailed political and business coverage, extensive daily analysis, excellent arts pages – and other characteristics of Murdoch’s tabloids, the New York Post and the Sun – ideological simplicity, a pugnacious campaigning style, intimidation and character assassination of political opponents and critics. The readership of the Australian is modest, but it is the only general national daily, with by far the most extensive coverage and analysis of national affairs. As I argued at length in “Bad News”, since 2002, under the editorship of Chris Mitchell, it has become a powerful vehicle for the propagation of the fundamental Murdoch world view – free and unregulated markets, small government, American global leadership, anti–political correctness. Although it has, almost certainly, lost hundreds of millions of dollars – handsomely subsidised until recently by News Corp’s entertainment empire – as a servant of Murdoch’s political ambitions it has been worth every dollar. Because of its ideological clarity and aggression, no one within the Australian political class – politicians, business people, public servants – could afford to ignore it.
To exert maximum political influence, however, the Australian was not enough. Very gradually, no doubt instinctively rather than consciously, what News Corp has done in Australia is to turn its five state-based tabloids – the Sydney Daily Telegraph, the Melbourne Herald Sun, the Brisbane Courier-Mail, the Adelaide Advertiser and the Hobart Mercury – into a single political instrument. Of course, if they are to remain relevant these tabloids need to maintain some distinctive aspects. They must report state politics, local government, crime, community news and especially state-based sport. They must also be sensitive to differences in state temperaments – the brashness of Sydney, the frontier rawness of Brisbane, the liberalism of Melbourne, the respectability of Adelaide, the parochialism of Hobart. But, as News Corp has come to realise, in their coverage of national politics and policy and in their propagation of the Murdoch ideological agenda, there is no reason for maintaining very great differences between the News Corp metropolitan tabloids.
In part the political unification of the Murdoch tabloids has been achieved by the creation of a stable of national affairs reporters. In larger part it has been achieved by the spread of some of their most influential opinion columnists or ideology-makers from a particular tabloid to almost the entire stable. Perhaps the first example of this process of across-the-tabloid expansion at work was the neo-liberal, climate change-denying Terry McCrann. The most important instance is the right-wing provocateur Andrew Bolt, whose lengthy twice-weekly columns have spread over the past decade from the Herald Sun to the Brisbane Sunday Mail and Courier-Mail, the Advertiser and the Daily Telegraph. Of course, in the age of steady newspaper decline, a major reason for this partial national unification of the Murdoch tabloids is to cut costs. But the impact is political. What has been created, within ostensibly state-based papers, is a single Australian tabloid political voice. This is another, not sufficiently recognised, original Murdoch achievement. Through the combination of the Australian and the hydra-headed “national” tabloid, Murdoch has fashioned in Australia an instrument at least equal in potential political influence to those he fashioned in the UK and the United States.
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In 2007, Michael Wolff spent several months in Murdoch’s company. His The Man Who Owns the News is the most perceptive account of Murdoch and his empire. In it he argues that while the compulsory, prevailing myth of News Corp employees is that Murdoch is a hands-off owner, the truth is very different. “To work for him is to do his bidding, to follow his line, to execute his desires, to support his needs, to grind his
axe, 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.”
How is this accomplished? Andrew Neil worked for Murdoch for eleven years as editor of the Sunday Times and was in general treated respectfully. In his Full Disclosure he describes his relations with Murdoch like this: “Rupert has an uncanny knack of being there even when he is not. When I did not hear from him and knew his attention was elsewhere, he was still uppermost in my mind.” Many former Murdoch editors tell much the same story. If they wished to survive, they needed to internalise Murdoch’s world view. In their newspapers they always needed to seek to please him. When they woke up in the morning, they wondered what Murdoch would make of some new development. They practised a policy of “anticipatory compliance”. Despite the fact that his editors might not see him for months at a time, he was nevertheless, as one put it, “ubiquitous”, although to paraphrase George Orwell’s aphorism – “all animals are equal but some are more equal than others” – it must be the case that Murdoch has been more ubiquitous in New York or London than in Sydney, and more ubiquitous in Sydney than in Hobart.
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Evidence suggests that around late 2010, Rupert Murdoch decided to use his Australian newspapers to destroy the government of Julia Gillard. So far as I am aware, it was the first such decision with regard to federal Australian politics he had taken since 1975. One reason might have been the government’s minority status. Another was the Labor government’s relations with the Greens. In striking a formal agreement with the Greens leader, Bob Brown, Gillard had failed to follow his advice. In late April or early May 2011, Murdoch met with his Australian executives, editors and senior journalists at Carmel in California. In interviews I conducted for the Quarterly Essay Bad News, Chris Mitchell told me that on the second day of the meeting they had discussed Australian politics, while a Gillard government minister told me that he had been informed by someone who had been at Carmel that there was talk of taking the Gillard government down. In July 2011, John Hartigan, the CEO of Murdoch’s Australian operations, was interviewed on ABC television. Inadvertently, he appears to have let the cat out of the bag. “I think, you know, we’re a company of values, like most companies, and we have very implicit values, we have things that we think as a company and individually as editors that need to be done. One of them is a leadership vacuum by minority government.” Hartigan could hardly have been more explicit: the company’s editors would help undo the minority Gillard government.