This following is an edited extract from the just released book The Men Who Killed the News by Eric Beecher (Scribner Australia).
When Rupert Murdoch lured me away from my job as editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, then arguably the best newspaper in Australia, I was 36 and loved being a serious journalist.
It was 1987. Murdoch wasn’t the international ogre he later became (this was pre-phone-hacking, pre-Fox News), but like many journalists in the Anglosphere, I felt apprehensive about his editorial values, his voracious commerciality, and the methods he used to dispense power. I decided to accept his offer to become editor in chief of his Melbourne newspaper group because it was an exquisite challenge, or so I told myself, and because I didn’t lack ambition. Murdoch had just acquired Australia’s largest stable of newspapers, which included the Melbourne Herald, flagship of his father’s publishing empire.
It was a paper struggling to survive after losing half its circulation of 437,000 in the previous decade. My challenge — and the reason Murdoch hired me — was to attempt to revive the Herald as a quality afternoon newspaper, as his father Keith Murdoch had done 66 years earlier when he became its editor.
My flirtation with Murdoch lasted two years. I resigned when my moral compass became dysfunctional. He implored me to stay, telling me with uncharacteristic emotion as we sat together alone on a leather couch in his father’s old office, weeks before I finally quit, that he thought “we’d be working together all our lives”. But I found myself incapable of navigating the ethical hurdles that litter the path of a Murdoch editor. Also, I didn’t know how to be suitably obsequious; he told me I was “aloof”.
On many days during those two years, I felt like an infiltrator operating behind enemy lines. From the outside, and to its faithful employees, News Corporation is a respectable company that deploys journalism to challenge and scrutinise the pillars of the establishment. Behind this facade, I discovered, was a kind of medieval fiefdom where we all lived in the shadow of a proprietor whose predilections — commercial, editorial, ideological, personal, political, economic, philosophical, racial, sociological — were insinuated into every important decision and direction we took.
Harold Evans, who edited the London Times before he became another former Murdoch editor (there have been hundreds of us), identified this process as “charismatic authority”, the phrase used by the German sociologist Max Weber to describe how a leader’s courtiers are “forever attempting to win favour by guessing what the boss wanted or might applaud but might well not have asked for”.
The Herald was my first exposure to the subterranean world of media moguldom. As a newspaper insider, I was hardly surprised by Murdoch’s ambitiousness or ruthlessness, or by the compliant culture that permeated his kingdom, or even by his indifference to the concept of serious journalism. But what really disconcerted me during my time at News Corp, and has ever since, was the lurking presence of his power.
A few months after I started at the paper, Murdoch flew in from America for an Australian federal election campaign. This gave me an intimate view of a hands-on, behind-closed-doors media machinator at work, as he massaged the politicians, directed his editors, and worked over their editorials. “A propaganda sausage factory,” I wrote in my diary notes, “with Murdoch seeing and vetting no less than eight or nine election endorsement editorials, all faxed by editors to him in Sydney.”
Observing him dealing personally with political leaders, and watching him networking, I began to realise there was almost no-one anywhere who wouldn’t take his call or didn’t want to impress him.
One day in Melbourne, after the prime minister Bob Hawke had been leaving messages for him, Murdoch asked me, “Do I really need to talk to Hawke?” As the election drew near I was present for drinks in the office with the opposition leader John Howard, where Murdoch took him aside to inform him, as a courtesy, that News Corp would be endorsing his opponent, Hawke, in the upcoming election. (Howard’s party went on to lose badly.) I assumed this was Murdoch’s way of leaving the door open for future collaboration with no hard feelings. If so, it worked. Howard later became a long-serving Australian prime minister, enthusiastically supported by News Corp, and still remains one of Murdoch’s most effusive public spruikers.
Howard was adhering to the unwritten rules of engagement between senior politicians and the Murdoch empire, rules that operate on the sidelines of democracy, out of sight. One of Howard’s successors, John Hewson, discovered those rules a few years later when he became leader of Australia’s federal opposition. “I approached all the major editors at the time for a discussion,” Hewson explained. “The editor at The Australian told me, in no uncertain terms, that I needed to understand they had their agendas, so if I advanced ideas consistent with those agendas, I may — it was emphasised, just may — expect positive coverage. But if I advocated against those agendas then I could be guaranteed that I would be attacked accordingly.”
When the global sharemarket collapsed in late 1987, I watched Murdoch work the phone from a gloomy office inside the grey newspaper empire fortress built by his father in Melbourne in the 1920s.
A few days into the crisis, after taking a call from Ronald Reagan, Murdoch told some of us he had advised the president to ensure that his government and the Federal Reserve held their nerve through the economic upheaval. Meanwhile, he instructed his editors and executives to provide vigorous support during the crisis for the capitalist system in the company’s newspapers.
Exercising power was a routine part of his life. This became amusingly evident at a lunch I convened with Murdoch and a group of senior editors in a private room at The Society, a courtly Italian restaurant that had served Melbourne’s establishment since his father’s era. It was a week or so after he had bought yet another newspaper, a London daily called Today. “Why did you buy Today?” asked a junior editor with a gravelly voice. Murdoch seemed puzzled. “I didn’t buy anything today,” he replied, then realised he had misheard the question. A smile crept over his face as respectful laughter rippled across the table.
A Murdoch editor, I realised, is a footman dispensing media power on behalf of a single family. In two years at News Corp I never heard an editor or executive attempt to discuss, navigate or even acknowledge the existence of moral ambiguity, the subject that was so memorably decoded by the writer Janet Malcolm in one memorable paragraph: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”
As I watched the sausages being made inside News Corp it was obvious that morally indefensible journalism is an inevitable outcome in a news organisation that lacks an ethical compass. Journalism, by its nature, is an exercise in manipulation. If you aren’t prepared to recognise that occupational reality — even in seemingly benign choices such as who to interview or ignore, or what facts to include or leave out — how can you expect to practise your craft in good conscience?
Rupert Murdoch wasn’t the first media proprietor to capitalise on the loophole in democracy that legitimises the worst excesses of journalism. Nor did he invent the magic formula that emerged in the late 1800s when Joseph Pulitzer acquired The World in New York, and Alfred Harmsworth launched the Daily Mail in London: titillating journalism = mass audiences = abundant advertising revenue = vast profits = political power. This is the formula, in its raw simplicity, that empowered a coterie of moguls to exploit journalism to both uphold and pollute civil society, with Murdoch as its greatest exponent.
Until I joined News Corp, I’d never had to think about what ethicists describe as “moral fading”, the self-deception created by behaving unethically while maintaining the appearance of being good and moral. My only previous professional experience had been in a media organisation where the journalism was disconnected, structurally and culturally, from the business side of the business. In the Murdoch universe, where no such structural separation exists, they don’t talk about ethics and moral behaviour because such a discussion would inevitably collide with the company’s true mission: to make money at all costs.
I have often wondered what goes through the minds and consciences of otherwise dedicated professionals who find themselves inhabiting a news organisation that engages in amoral or immoral journalism. What were the private thoughts of journalists at News Corp after learning that their coworkers had spent two decades hacking into personal voicemails? Or Fox News employees on discovering, via court documents, that their colleagues and owners had promoted election denial and riots at the US Capitol to ensure viewers didn’t defect to another network? Or those at the London Sun on reading an op-ed in late 2022, written by columnist Jeremy Clarkson, describing his “cellular level” loathing of the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, and “dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her”?
For a media mogul and his underlings, flexing power without responsibility is as natural as stretching any other body muscle. I recall a meeting with my Herald editors, attended by Murdoch, where we were tossing around ideas for a public campaign to draw attention to the new look of the paper. What were the big issues in Melbourne right now, Murdoch asked the group. Someone mentioned a controversy involving teenagers jumping onto moving trains to deface the carriages with graffiti. Murdoch lit up. That’s the perfect subject for a newspaper crusade, he said. As we workshopped ideas for policies we could advocate to deter graffitists, Murdoch had a suggestion: “Capital punishment.” The room fell silent. I said we would look into it.
The kind of abuse of power that’s at the heart of this book’s subject matter is hard to see, easy to conceal, almost always denied by its perpetrators, and even glamorised in TV shows like Succession, where stereotypes of rich, flamboyant moguls are portrayed as daredevils and swashbucklers. It is an insidious editorial power that has hardly changed in style or substance in the hundred years since Vern Whaley, an editor on William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Herald Examiner, tripped over a dirty little secret of the newsroom: “We had a crime story that was going to be featured in a 96-point headline on page one. When I found the address that was in the story, that address was a vacant lot. So I hollered over at the rewrite desk, I said, ‘You got the wrong address in this story. This is a vacant lot.’ The copy chief that night was a guy named Vic Barnes. And he says, ‘Sit down, Vern.’ He says, ‘The whole story’s a fake.'”
As Vern Whaley discovered that day in Los Angeles, the exercise of media power is, by its nature, subtle and covert. Sometimes, though, it rears its head very publicly, as I discovered in 2022 when my journey through the world of journalism and publishing was disrupted — again — by a Murdoch.
