The Murdochs and me

Life just won’t be the same now the last great press baron is exiting stage right

I’d like to be writing about how the tectonic plates of Labour and Capital appear to be shifting profoundly this week. A week in which a US president has joined a picket line and several prominent journalists, including the erstwhile editor-in-chief of The Australian, have felt compelled to author plaintive think pieces arguing that neoliberalism wasn’t all bad. And that post-neoliberalism, whatever form it takes, is unlikely to be all rainbows and unicorns.

Can you imagine Bill Clinton or Barack Obama joining a picket line? Or Tony Blair? Or even Bob Hawke? And while my memory isn’t what it used to be, I’m pretty sure journalists at the Australian Financial Review and The Australian haven’t previously felt the need to nervously defend the free-market fundamentalist faith that was overwhelmingly dominant from around 1980 to 2007, and which has stubbornly refused to die even in the face of looming societal extinction.

(I don’t want to bang on about this yet again, but if you make it hard for younger people to find a steady, reasonable-paying job that facilitates home ownership, birth rates plummet. Maybe birth rates were going to plummet in recent decades anyway due to factors unrelated to the “Washington Consensus”. But telling young people that they had to get a degree and load themselves up with student debt – in many cases only to find themselves stuck doing modestly paid and often insecure work – sure hasn’t helped family formation.)     

But all that will have to wait because one of the most significant figures of the last half-century has decided to call it a day.

The Sun King
It’s difficult to overestimate just how much Rupert Murdoch – and, more broadly, the Murdoch family – dominates Australian society. Of course, Murdoch has long been a huge deal in the UK, too. And he has been a significant presence in the US since he launched Fox in the mid-1980s.

But Murdoch started his brilliant career in Australia, and it is in Australia that he remains omnipresent and, if not as omnipotent as he once was, then still remarkably potent.

Murdoch’s many critics frequently point out that Murdoch “controls 70 per cent of the Australian media”. This isn’t quite the case, especially nowadays, but it’s not that far off either. One of the most cringe-inducing experiences for Australian progressives in recent decades has been watching serving or aspiring Labor PMs holding doorstops at the servant’s entrance of Rupe’s schmick New York apartment building and tentatively declaring that, while they wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to suggest they have the Great Man’s imprimatur, they are hopeful of receiving it. (Once they quietly provide the requisite reassurance that Rupert’s business interests will be looked after appropriately.)

I presume British leftists would feel a similar sense of despondency whenever they think about just how willing Blair and Brown were to debase themselves to curry favour with Murdoch, as well as his family members and faithful retainers. (I’ve read several pathetic accounts about how schoolgirl-nervous Tony Blair was about first meeting Murdoch in Australia and attempting to convince him that he had nothing much to fear from “New” Labour.) 

I’m not sure this proves anything much, but let me tell you just how intertwined this Australian’s existence has been with the Murdochs.

1971 – I’m born a couple of months before Rupert’s favourite child, Lachlan.

Weirdly enough, Lachlan shares a birthday – but not a birth year – with his fellow Australian media scion James Packer. It’s a testament to both their parents that the “main” Murdoch children – Elizabeth, James, and Lachlan – have turned out far saner than the real James Packer, or the fake Kendall, Roman and Siobhan Roy.   

1972 – Murdoch – who was a Leninist while studying at Oxford – backs Labor leader Gough Whitlam in an Australian federal election, which Whitlam narrowly wins, ending a quarter of a century of staid, centre-right rule. (For the younger Australians and non-Australians of all ages, Whitlam was basically a mix of JFK and Bernie Sanders and Australia was profoundly transformed during his chaotic, three-year premiership.)

1975 – Murdoch, then in his mid-forties and – as is the wont of middle-aged ex-Marxists – veering hard to the Right, turns savagely on Whitlam. (As the popular mythology goes, young, left-leaning Murdoch journalists who handed in copy even vaguely supportive of Whitlam would belatedly discover it had been rewritten by their terrified bosses.)

1983 – I start my high school education at a pricey but obscure private school on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. In my year, there is a blonde girl called Sarah O’Hare. I will remain oblivious to this fact for many years. But long afterwards, I will be informed that Mrs Lachlan Murdoch went to my school for a couple of years.

(As an aside, a good female friend from my schooldays – one who appears to have led a charmed existence so far and may be about to embark on an exciting, high-profile second act – once turned to me with a heavy sigh and declared that no matter what she or her former classmates achieved in their lives, it was unlikely to measure up to marrying a Murdoch.)

At this juncture, I fear people will think I grew up “comfortable” in the independently wealthy sense. Sadly, I – and most of my classmates – only grew up comfortable in an upper-middle class “parents earned enough to send you to an eye-wateringly expensive school” way. A disproportionately large number of my schoolmates’ fathers owned newsagents. None, as far as my recollection goes, owned newspapers.

I’ve just Googled Sarah Murdoch’s Wikipedia page, which indicates she left my school to study ballet at a performing arts college, only becoming a model at 17. Anyway, I’m assuming her parents were also “affluent comfortable”, not “multi-millionaire comfortable”.

(Another aside: Other private schools boast about alums who are High Court judges, captains of industry, government ministers and world-famous artists. My alma mater has Sarah Murdoch (née O’Hare) and some guy who was briefly famous decades ago for the catchphrase he declaimed during advertorials – “But wait, there’s more!” )     

2009-2011 – Following a long stint working for the Packers, I find myself transforming into that most hated of all creatures – a “Murdoch journalist”. Except, I’m not really a Murdoch journalist in the sense I’m spewing out inflammatory content about raping and pillaging migrant gangs, or left-leaning politicians with totalitarian, dictatorial ambitions, or treacherous, overfed public broadcasters. (Or, indeed, reporting on the bon mots of big-titted Page Three girls.)

Among the many things Murdoch owns in Australia is the licence to GQ. Unlike its (extant) US and UK equivalents, the Australian GQ print magazine was almost entirely a fashion mag created and consumed by young or youngish gay men. At least during my tour of duty, there were a lot of articles about ridiculously expensive watches, the latest men’s fashion trends, and the cultural impact of Mad Men. There were few articles – from either a Right or Left perspective – about the great political issues of the day.

Time grows short, so let me wrap up by outlining what I do and don’t admire about Murdoch.

Good Rupert
*This is trivial, but I’m always impressed by Australians who maintain a strong Australian accent (and patois, perspective and sense of humour) despite living overseas for decades. This is a refreshing change from the much greater number of aspirational Australians who immediately start speaking in a British-Australian or American-Australian hybrid accent after a two-hour layover at Heathrow or LAX.

*His thick skin and lack of pretension. Murdoch cops criticism on the chin and has never sued a journalist, no matter how vicious or inaccurate the contumely heaped upon him.

Given his stranglehold on the British political system, Murdoch could be Lord Murdoch, if not King Murdoch, by now. But in stark contrast to many of his fellow press barons, he’s never been interested in accumulating honours. Lachlan – and, in happier times, James – used to defend their father by saying he was anti-establishment. Once again, this obviously isn’t quite true, but it’s not entirely false either. Murdoch really does seem to be altogether unconcerned by what people – including members of the Establishment – think of him.

*The sheer scale of his accomplishments. Or his unrivalled Nietzschean will to power, if you want to put in more online, alt-right terms.

I mean, come on, this is a guy who inherits a couple of small newspapers based in one of the smallest cities of one of the world’s smallest – in population terms – nations and creates what will almost certainly turn out to have been the last, great, globe-spanning legacy media empire. He’s only now retiring (sort of – I presume the “Chairman Emeritus” retains the right to overrule the whippersnapper CEO whenever it takes his fancy) at an age when most people are long dead.

*His love of journalism, especially print journalism. As is well-publicised, Murdoch is capable of being ruthlessly pragmatic, including with his own children. We all know what happened with James, but it should also be remembered Lachlan left the family business for a decade after Rupert sided with a couple of senior employees over his son during a no-holds-barred power struggle.

But even Murdoch’s harshest critics would have to concede he has an irrational love for newspapers and has been willing to cross-subsidise unprofitable mastheads, such as The Australian, that do a lot of important work.

(Incongruously, The Australian has frequently provided a platform for Indigenous Australian activists and has consistently championed the cause of “closing the gap” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians since it was launched in 1964.)

BTW, I’m not sure how much of a future News Corp’s struggling print properties will have now News Corp is under new(ish) management.        

Bad Rupert
Neoliberalism can’t be laid entirely at Murdoch’s feet, but he did back Thatcher to the hilt. In recent decades, almost all of his publications have taken either a strongly neoconservative or, at best, neoliberal line. And Murdoch was famously a rabid supporter of the necons’ disastrous military adventurism.

As we’ll get to shortly, Murdoch isn’t quite as all-powerful as is widely believed. Nonetheless, just suppose he’d instructed his ever-compliant editors and CEOs to take an anti-war line instead of a pro-war one around the start of the Millennium. In that case, it’s entirely possible that trillions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of lives, would never have been pissed up against the wall.     

Misunderstood Rupert
Eleventy gazillion think pieces have been published over the last week about the Sun King’s retirement. One of the most insightful I’ve read was in, of all places, The Guardian. In an article entitled, “Murdoch brainwashed Britain. That’s the comforting tale the left tells itself. But is it true?”, Gaby Hinsliff made the oft-overlooked point that Murdoch’s outsized success had little to do with him somehow magically converting people who would otherwise have been Social Justice Warriors into frothing-at-the-mouth reactionaries and much to do with him serving up content that appealed strongly to his – often working and lower-middle class – audiences’ prejudices and interests. (A sniffy retailer once famously told Murdoch, “Your readers are our shoplifters,” when being pressed to buy advertising space.)

Or as Hinsliff more eloquently puts it:

The Murdoch press has earned a fearsome reputation among progressives as a kind of giant toad squatting in the road, blocking the way to everything from higher taxes to gay rights and, above all, closer relations with Europe…  

The comforting story [the Left] tells itself after every lost election is that without Murdoch or the Mail it could have won, as if Britain would be a liberal utopia if only the tabloids hadn’t somehow brainwashed everyone. To see Murdoch as a wizard of such supernatural gifts is to misunderstand the origins of his power: put simply, people.

Wondering what would happen in British politics if Murdoch’s iron grip lessened? Just look around: it’s already happened. Power has been quietly ebbing for years away from his titles, alongside the rest of the mainstream media, towards Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube, platforms founded primarily by liberal tech bros… It’s new, not old, media increasingly driving the political volatility that has so destabilised western democracies, by taking what Murdoch did – giving the punters what they seem to want – to new extremes. His genius lay in a gut feeling for what angered or moved or titillated millions, long before algorithms made that easy to work out. He grasped the desire to be entertained, and to feel as if you mattered. (Both the serious investigations into matters of high public importance that his Sunday Times pursued and the tub-thumping at the Sun made their respective readers, in different ways, feel powerful and influential by association.) He confirmed his audience’s prejudices but hardly invented them, growing stronger the more politicians avoided confronting him, and by association, them.