In the first week of May 1958, a 27-year-old Rupert Murdoch walked into a boardroom secreted within Adelaide’s grand lodge of the Freemasons. He had arrived at the lodge hoping to join the ranks of another exclusive new order – television mogul – but so far it hadn’t been going well.
Commercial television’s arrival in Melbourne and Sydney in 1956 had confirmed its gamechanging potential and as Australian regulators turned to other capitals, all the major players jostled for a piece of spectrum. Pitted against the Packer family’s Consolidated Press, the Herald and Weekly Times in Melbourne (and its Adelaide-based affiliate Advertiser Newspapers), Murdoch and his own company News Ltd were placed in the familiar position of a young and hungry outsider.
“Do you think that impulsiveness, combined with your comparative youth and your fears for the future are qualities that are to be looked for in an application of that kind?” asked Antony Larkins QC, a Sydney silk acting for one of his licence rivals, Frank Packer.
Since his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, had died in October 1952, Rupert had been in a sink-or-swim fight to retain his family’s place in Australia’s media set and the 1958 hearings of the Australian Broadcasting Control Board (ABCB) was just the latest skirmish.
Sir Keith had exhausted his final years, his wealth and his influence piecing together an inheritance for his young son, who he hoped would lead a “useful altruistic and full life” in the media. Over 40 years Murdoch Sr had climbed his way up from a penny-a-line freelancer to the editor and chairman of the Herald and Weekly Times, a company he helped grow into Australia’s biggest news empire – the original “Murdoch Press”, albeit one the family never actually owned. To his admirers, Sir Keith was one of Australia’s great pressmen, a truth teller and a patriot. To his critics, he was a “cuckoo” in the Herald nest, quietly selling assets of a publicly traded company to his own private family trust.
But after his death, Murdoch Sr’s old colleagues at the Herald’s Melbourne headquarters wasted no time clawing Keith’s side hustles back into the fold. To these men, Keith offloading Herald holdings like the Adelaide-based News Ltd to his family had been outrageous theft. But to Rupert, the family firm was under threat.
After his mother sold the family stake in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail to the Herald to clear Sir Keith’s debts, Rupert moved from Oxford to Adelaide, home of News Ltd, to make his start. Although once part of the Herald chain, News Ltd’s Adelaide afternoon paper the News and its Sunday paper the Mail were soon embroiled in an all-out circulation war with the Herald-aligned Advertiser.
Facing this larger, better-resourced rival, Rupert seized any opportunity to strike back and within weeks of his arrival ran a front page story accusing his father’s old firm of making a cynical “bid for press monopoly” by pressuring his mother to sell the News and the Mail to the Advertiser. The article condemned any attempt to “corner the community’s press in the interests of any one particular group, section, party, company or clique”.
But when the ABCB started holding public hearings to consider whether and how many commercial TV licences should be granted outside Sydney and Melbourne, Murdoch took a different tack. At the first hearing in Brisbane, he inserted himself into the fray to argue against two licences being granted in each city. One would be enough, he argued. Larkins quickly swung into action, questioning Murdoch about his attempt to lay sole claim to the Adelaide market.
“You do not shrink from the fact that it is a monopoly, do you?” asked Larkins. The lawyer had a penchant for drama and wore a monocle that he would let fall to his waistcoat at particularly shocking moments.
“In one sense it is a monopoly,” Murdoch replied. “Not in the sense of the viewers. They can always turn to the ABC. They have an alternative.” Rather than encouraging better programming, Murdoch claimed, competition did the opposite. Murdoch’s feelings about monopolies had clearly undergone some evolution since the “bid for press monopoly” headline five years earlier.
“Take my own position in Adelaide, where there is a monopoly evening paper. We would claim that the paper would be an infinitely better paper, from the public’s point of view, than perhaps Sydney evening papers, where competition tends to lower standards.
“Competition does not necessarily improve quality,” Murdoch continued. “Rather, it lowers quality.”
“You think the press of each capital city would be a better press if it were controlled by monopoly? Is that your view?” Larkins replied.
“No,” Murdoch said, before adding: “It depends what you call monopoly.”
Larkins tugged the thread: was competition a bad thing only because it would force a publisher such as Murdoch to lower their standards?
“There would be a danger I would be forced to lower standards to chase the ratings,” Murdoch said.
“You would not hesitate to do it?” Larkins asked.
Murdoch said he would fight against it all the way, but when asked if it was a choice between losing money and lowering standards, he answered plainly: “Wouldn’t you?”
After days of questioning, it was finally all over, and the board delivered its report on 25 July. Murdoch’s pro-monopoly argument seemed to have prevailed. The board recommended only one licence apiece in Brisbane and Adelaide, to be held by a locally owned company without ties to any existing interstate licence holders.
Based on this criterion Murdoch’s application was in the box seat. But when the prime minister Robert Menzies’ government finally considered the report, it overruled the board and granted two licences in each city. A rumour soon spread that Menzies himself made the decision after being quietly briefed by executives from Murdoch’s rival, the Advertiser. It was, after all, an election year and he could hardly afford to alienate what was then the country’s biggest newspaper group.
Murdoch had been handed a formative lesson about power and influence in Australian politics: embracing the role of the outsider and opportunist could only take you so far. In the future, he would have to cultivate influence inside the corridors of power, but for now, it was imperative that he be the first licensee across the finish line. And he was: News Ltd’s NWS 9 launched in September, even if its state-of-the-art station caught fire twice in the rush to broadcast.
By the time it went to air, Murdoch’s Adelaide papers were embroiled in a murder case and royal commission that would divide the city, draw global media attention and eventually see News Ltd charged with the rare offence of seditious libel. The crown’s case failed after a 10-day trial.
Murdoch’s 1958 testimony hadn’t finished in Adelaide. In late July, he flew to Perth to front the ABCB once more, but found himself in an awkward position. Perth was the site of his first tentative expansion outside Adelaide and after spending days spruiking the importance of not having interstate companies owning local stations, he now sought to convince the same board to give his South Australian company a Western Australian television licence.
The young man had said many things over the course of his dealings with government institutions that year. Some, such as his thoughts on monopolies and the notion that competition would lead to lower standards, offered a glimpse of the global media proprietor he would later become.
But of all the assertions he made under oath in 1958, he saved his best for Perth: “There is no attempt to build an empire or anything like that,” he said. “It would not interest me.”
Young Rupert: the making of the Murdoch empire by Walter Marsh (Scribe, $35) is out on 1 August.
