This article is an instalment in a series, Project Harmony, on Rupert Murdoch’s secret plan threatening to blow up his family.
Bell Shakespeare’s King Lear opens in Melbourne this week, so hats off to John Bell’s PR team. I don’t know how you managed to organise a Murdoch succession battle to coincide, but you have gone to the top of my list for future considerations. As reported by The New York Times, Rupert is trying to alter the family trust, ousting three of his children in favour of Lachlan having supreme power.
As Lear staggers onto stage in the Victorian arts bunker, ol’ Rupe staggers into court to fix what he should have attended to years ago, were he fully intent on keeping what remains of his empire as an entity always to the right. It was surely clear that three of the four children from his first two marriages were not on board with this, as the centre of that right passed from its institutional-globalist expression to its newer populist, heterodox form.
But the sting of the serpent’s tooth was insufficient to wake him up, it seems. It never is. Has he left it too late? That’s one question. Another is, what is he passing on and preserving? That may seem absurd, given the shadow that his empire can still cast. In Australia, of course, that cannot be doubted. But we barely matter. It is the question of what he hath wrought in the UK, with the purchase of The Sun in the 1960s and the creation of Fox News in the US in the 1990s. What would have happened had he fallen under a bus in London, a city he appears to have always loathed, before all that happened?
It is genuinely hard to know, or even essay, an answer. Murdoch is nothing like the other moguls, Conrad Black, Robert Maxwell, whom he appears to have accurately assessed as clown princes. Nor is he like his fellow paper princes, such as Kerry Packer, a man who in the futility stakes has been bested only by his son, and Warwick Fairfax junior, the farce after the tragedy.
Murdoch was perhaps lucky that his father was someone who knew why he was doing what he did, famously a communist at school and taking a bust of Lenin to Oxford, scorning all the people — James Darling, Asa Briggs — who formed him as something more than a wild colonial boy. My father remembered him as a teenager, on the Geelong station, on winter days so cold that the water in the platform fire buckets froze over, being the only one in shirtsleeves. For real or for show, even then?
The youthful leftism was, as is usual with Leninolatry, an appreciation of the power of the will in human history — and a desire to get it. Will is what Murdoch has expressed through the past 65 years, the one continuity, as a crusading liberal moderniser became an institutional anti-leftist, and now a Hanrahan-style Western civilisation doomster. The various positions he has held across the spectrum have been particular expressions of that general force.
The inevitable result of such will, separated from any content it is driving, is that it becomes its own counterforce. Fox News started as a counterweight to an undoubted cultural liberalism of the mainstream US news media, and now, having charged further through, has undermined the new right-wing centre it established. For its audience, and for the wider right generally, it has become an addiction, which is anti-will: televisual hillbilly heroin for the home-shopping channel set, gold and prepping ads interspersed by three-minute grabs of paranoia.
Murdoch has always seen his mission as anti-elitism, a form of democratisation. Attached to capital’s endless expansion, that became nihilism, one undermining all values, then undermining the vehicles that carried the annihilation itself. Look at The Sun, really a piece of nothing now; look at The Australian, the smoking ruin of a once-effective paper, a newsletter for anti-fluoride freak types, filled with blathersom, unedited op-eds filed straight to the metal.
The cheer-up answer for the left would be that Murdoch did none of this: he simply rode the tiger of hypermodernity, hanging on by its whiskers. Once democratic socialism had failed in the ’70s, the West was always going to cave in this way. Historians, if there’s enough history left, will record the unleashing of the private market, finance and technology, as the West’s felo de se. The temptation to underestimate Rupert Murdoch’s influence is there because elite liberals are so determined to overestimate it, wildly, hysterically.
This has nothing to do with Murdoch. It is liberals’ inability to think outside the circumstances of their youth and the education in post-war decades that makes Murdoch necessary. Why haven’t things gone right? Why aren’t they in charge? Why is “democracy” failing when China is succeeding? (“C’mon, get real,” one liberal close to this publication said when I suggested, hardly originally, a dozen years ago, that China would surge ahead while the West collapsed inward. “Get real.” Things got real.) It must be Mmmmmmmurdoch. Rupert, ironically, plays the same role for such people as did Trotsky for Stalin. He is the wrecker who is everywhere.
But then, well, could anybody else have gathered these forces together the way he did, and pointed them in a certain direction? There’s the rub. What did we not get because Rupert Murdoch determined that his entirely average and unremarkable opinions on the social issues of the day — he can sell to grumpy middle-aged people because he has been one for much of his life — should not be supercharged with the force of global media? What if he had determined that what Australia needed, as a national broadsheet, was not an insane rag but a pluralist and reflective outlet, hosting a wide range of opinion and dialogue, reaffirming the value of evidence? What if he had repeated that in the US and the UK?
Of those last two, I have no idea, but we would be different. He has mattered most in the country that matters least. But he would have built something that anyone would want to preserve, and that everyone could see the worth of. In that case, there would have been no need to buttress the inevitable mediocrity and diffidence of dynastic third-generation children — they themselves would have been energised by the sacred trust they were being handed.
Instead, there is the choice between what has been made and the love along the way, and the defeat from the endlessly repeated delusion that their sundering is not finally possible. It seems to be a Shakespearean time. The desperate last skirmish on the blasted heath, and the empire packed away for its parts.
Does this way madness lies for Rupert? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
