Murdoch
Shawcross, William
Like so many of us, Rupert Murdoch did not get a fair start in life. His paternal grandfather was the moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Australia. His. maternal...
...The immediate crisis passed thanks to the heroic rescheduling and restructuring performed by Ann Lane, but billions remain to be repaid in February 1994...
...Dick Cheney, Irving Kristol, and Lord Rees-Mogg.1 "There are limits," he said, and we all fell about...
...He hung out his shingle in China and won the contract to print China's telephone directories...
...Other newspapers were equally small-minded...
...Perhaps there is a rusting linotype machine somewhere in the Australian outback . . . If, however, like Kane, Murdoch is a tragic figure, it is because he has squandered his talents...
...In 1968 he went to London and bought the News of the World, then the Sun, and pretty soon Private Eye was calling him the Dirty Digger...
...Furthermore, he can see that globalism has its downside...
...When, following the pattern set by Northcliffe, Murdoch bought the Times in 1981, Patrick Brogan, the paper's liberal Washington correspondent, resigned...
...In the days of hot metal he could do any job in the newsroom, from writing the front-page lead to laying out a features spread...
...Betty Riddell, a sometime Murdoch feature-writer, remembers her former boss at his best: "He was always around, both at the Mirror and at the Australian...
...and the free market, at least in information technology, a means of controlling the global village...
...Murdoch noted the perfidy...
...Certainly, in spite of his many acts of generosity to individuals and institutions, he is dangerous to know...
...Today he prints 60 million newspapers and magazines a week...
...Not even his mother would describe him as a starry-eyed idealist, but in 1964 he launched the Australian, the excellent Sydney-based national newspaper, and kept it going through years of losses...
...This missed the point...
...Murdoch himself opposes much of the liberal agenda, and he acknowledges that the News Corp...
...During his youth the puritan element was uppermost...
...Kennedy got his revenge in 1987 when he pulled a mean little stunt (involving Senator Ernest Hollings, the Appropriations Bill, and the FCC) that in effect forced Murdoch to sell the New York Post...
...The old Times had about it the odor of sanctimony...
...He liberated the Times (and with it Fleet Street) and added intellectual muscle to the New York Post...
...t is an old story...
...Yet there is room for real tears...
...Emerging as he did from such a gene pool, what chance did young Rupert have of becoming a pillar of society...
...To some of his new fellowcitizens it seemed that Murdoch had chosen the United States as a nation of convenience...
...On April 24, the Sunday Times ran a huge background piece on the diaries as a prelude to their serialization...
...Anybody," Murdoch once said, "who, within the law of the land, provides a service which the public wants at a price it can afford, is providing a public service...
...Stanley Baldwin condemned the press barons of his day for exercising "power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages...
...But during the bitter dispute that followed the move—violent picketing continued for months—Murdoch got little support from his peers...
...he asks...
...In other words, the problem is not that he has too much power—the usual charge—but that he misuses the power he has...
...Are we going to homogenize the whole world with satellite and cable, with no room for local culture...
...He ordered his sub-editors not to wear suede shoes, since he had a (no doubt irrational) theory that only "homos" wore them...
...As far as Murdoch is concerned, though, if people want pap, then pap they must have...
...Fox and Sky (his British television interest), along with the purchase of TV 1For a full account, see Erich Eichman's "Fox on the Run" in the September 1992 TAS...
...Americans," he wrote, "should remind him that allegiance means loyalty, sometimes passionate loyalty...
...His influence now extends to the meanest shack in the Third World, and that influence, drawn so often from the most prurient and violent manifestations of Western culture, is debasing...
...Now, it's all gone...
...He disapproved of dirty jokes and women in trousers...
...He has enormous power for good, but he does not use it...
...Murdoch's politics were no more pleasing to the chattering classes of Boston, where his Herald ran a rollicking campaign against Edward Kennedy, dubbed "the fat rich kid " by Howie Carr, one of the paper's columnists...
...Conscience has never made a coward of Murdoch...
...At 21, and still in England, he inherited the Adelaide News from his father...
...Say what you will about the man, at least he is not too proud to pitch his tent beyond the pale...
...Shawcross never quite answers the question he poses at the beginning of his book: "What, who, or where is his Rosebud...
...By profession Murdoch is a greedy, money-grubbing, power-seeking, status-climbing cad...
...His father, Sir Keith, was managing director of the Melbourne-based Herald and Weekly Times newspaper group and a disciple of Lord Northcliffe, the tabloid genius who horrified the British Establishment by taking over the Times in 1908, and some years later went mad...
...He told the Baltimore Sun that "no honest journalist could work for Murdoch...
...Thus liberty becomes license...
...In 1990, News Corporation's debts amounted to $7.6 billion, and the bankers .wanted their money...
...The Times and all its journalists—honest, dishonest, and mentally subnormal—might have gone under if Murdoch had not bought the paper...
...Please...
...A prudent fellow might at this stage decide to call it quits, but prudence has never been among Murdoch's vices...
...As a newspaperman Murdoch reaches millions...
...But there will be fewer differences...
...William Safire noted that Murdoch was a "citizen of the world...
...Now, it smells,, looks, and feels like a newspaper...
...it is as a newspaperman that he has made his most valuable, perhaps his only, contribution to our times, and this is true in spite of the filth of some of his tabloids...
...By 1984 he owned, in addition to the New York Post and the Boston Herald, the San Antonio Express, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Star, the Village Voice, and New York magazine...
...If in the eighties he had championed Kinnock and Dukakis instead of Thatcher and Reagan, we whose politics incline to the right would have had no hesitation in dismissing him as a scuzzball...
...He knew us all, loved us all, and he took our advice...
...Consider the incident last summer when he sacked Stephen Chao, head of Fox and creator of "Studs," for parading a male stripper before such worthies as Mr...
...It is easy to be glib about these things, but Shawcross, who is no anti-capitalist (indeed, he has been condemned by the hysterical British left for selling out to Murdoch), surelyhas a point when he says that "Murdoch is operating in a market where only the number of viewers matters...
...W illiam Shawcross has written a gripping and balanced biography, one that has the unusual distinction, given its subject, of being critical without being hostile...
...Murdoch would dispute the suggestion that standards mean nothing to him...
...Liberals condemn Murdoch's sleaze, but their real target is his politics...
...Nor does he have a skill that is in short supply...
...What emerges most forcefully from its pages is that you never know where you are with Murdoch, perhaps because he is not sure himself...
...Should the presses be stopped and the story pulled...
...At 61 he remains a driven man...
...One benefit may be that it is more peaceful...
...Now it was razor-sharp...
...Murdoch was not fleeing Communism or any other kind of tyranny, he observed...
...He is also, possibly, the most dangerous...
...But a more interesting aspect of this affair was the topic under discussion: "the threat to democratic capitalism posed by modern culture...
...What really upset sensitive New Yorkers about Murdoch's Post was not its alleged slime but its support for Reagan...
...He could also do just about any job in the print room (and, during strikes in Sydney, did...
...The Observer spiked a piece written by Bernard Levin, a Times columnist, for fear of upsetting its own printers...
...On the other hand Murdoch has made a humbug of many a conservative...
...That's not to say that Murdoch is without free will—he is, after all, human—but his life has been dominated by a mindset that is in equal (and irreconcilable) parts permissive and puritanical...
...and Mrs...
...He sacks editors for breakfast...
...T here was, moreover, always an element of piety in the liberal humbug...
...After the first edition had been printed, the then-editor, Frank Giles, rang Dacre, who now said he had serious misgivings...
...Publish...
...Precisely: if a thing is not actually against the law, do it, say it, sell it...
...In the late twentieth century, democratic capitalism and modern culture are one and the same thing...
...in between came the Times and the Sunday Times of London...
...freedom of speech freedom from restraint...
...It employs scores of honest journalists...
...He could always be talked to...
...That, in the end, is both his glory and his shame...
...Fox hasn't done Murdoch any favors...
...A senior executive, Brian MacArthur, rang Murdoch in New York and told him the bad news...
...anything that would help him gain the confidence of the wretched and vulnerable creatures—the crash victims, the failed suicides, the beaten wives—whose stories sell popular newspapers...
...Guide for a giddying $3 billion, almost sent him belly-up...
...This move ended the printing unions' stranglehold on newspaper production and enabled journalists, first on the Times, then on all the other national titles, to type their stories directly into computers and to edit them on screen...
...The star reporter there was Steve Dunleavy, a hard-drinking womanizer (later star at the New York Post) who counted among the tools of his trade a Bible, a set of rosary beads, a star of David, and a doctor's white coat...
...Since when is that skill in short supply...
...Murdoch cried all the way to the bank...
...G one to Southern California...
...Mike Royko was (of course) blunter...
...Liberals, of course, have no such inhibitions, but that doesn't mean that liberals aren't humbugs...
...FAMILY NEWSPAPER LIKE OURSELVES GAIN GREAT KUDOS LEAVING THIS MUCK ALONE STOP FORNICATION MASTURBATION FRUSTRATION UNSUITABLE FOR ADELAIDE FAMILY FIRESIDE STOP...
...And more prosperous...
...In 1983 the Times and Sunday Times bought the Hitler diaries after they had been authenticated by Lord Dacre (the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper), who was said to have staked his academic reputation on his judgment that they were genuine, which of course they were not...
...has been guilty of horrible lapses of taste...
...Murdoch listened patiently, considered the implications, and said: "F--- Dacre...
...Whether Murdoch shares in that greater prosperity remains to be seen...
...Yet Murdoch knew where to draw the line...
...What was good for the Times was good for Fleet Street...
...After the Sun came the Star...
...His contempt for the English had always been keen...
...as owner of Fox he has the potential to reach billions...
...Americans were much more to hisliking...
...What is more., he improved it...
...The Senator from Massachusetts may have beaten Murdoch on Capitol Hill, but in the brawl that followed, the Murdoch camp had the last (or best) laugh...
...He grew restless...
...Brian Haynes, the man who created Sky, told Shawcross: "Murdoch's problem is that he is a dealer now, not a creator...
...In 1985 he became a real live American, when he renounced his Australian citizenship in favor of Fox Television...
...maternal grandfather was a swashbuckler and spendthrift of Irish extraction whose gambling debts were often so great that his wife had to rent out their home and move the family into an apartment...
...The real problem is the threat posed to culture—in the East as much as in the West—by democratic capitalism...
...In 1960, however, when he was 29, Murdoch bought the Sydney Daily Mirror, a raffish tabloid whose excesses he encouraged...
...He also prints Bibles—more, indeed, than any other publisher in the English-speaking world...
...Still, harlotry can add to the gaiety of nations...
...He is the world's most attractive, most capricious, and most powerful media mogul...
...In 1986, Murdoch sacked his recalcitrant and greedy printers and moved his operations from central London to a new site with computer technology at Wapping in the East End...
...Such is his charm that grown men—grown women, too—fall hopelessly in love with him, only to be discarded and replaced by others when they have served their purpose...
...As the sixties wore on he began to tire of the left (though he did not embrace conservatism until the seventies...
...Panic...
...He had a point...
...And yet, and yet...
...Was it something I said, Fat Boy...
...This is not an argument against democratic capitalism itself but a lament over what has become of capitalist democracies, where the liberal demand for sociosexual "rights" and their attendant "freedoms" has been granted by the courts, and fed by the market...
...Adelaide was a fine upstanding city in those days, full of what the Australian satirist Barry Humphries calls "decent church-going buggers and sheilas who come across...
...When the Evil Empire began to collapse, he went shopping in Hungary and bought a raunchy scandal sheet...
...asked Carr...
...If he had remained a resident alien, he would not, under the Communications Act, have been allowed to own a broadcasting company...
...I think there is a danger...
...He was a socialist at Oxford and kept a bust of Lenin on his mantelpiece...
...His wealth is fabulous but so are his debts...
...after the Star, "!Studs...
...He is by training and temperament a newspaperman...
...One of the first things he did as a newspaper proprietor was to cable his editor with these thoughts on the second Kinsey report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female: Stuart Reid is assistant features editor of the London Sunday Telegraph...
Vol. 26 • February 1993 • No. 2
