Murdoch's World (5 page)

The paper commissioned a full book review of that critique. “What I would say is that on any given day, the
Australian
simultaneously produces some of the best and some of the worst journalism in this country,” wrote Matthew Ricketson, a former
Australian
staffer who was subsequently media editor for the rival
Age
. “Reading it can be disorienting, like watching a driver with one foot on the accelerator, the other on the brake.”

Ricketson even wrote that he found Manne's critique “persuasive overall” and encouraged readers to make up their own minds. But
the newspaper fired back. Manne calculated that it published 40,000 words of response. The editor, Chris Mitchell, joined other senior editors in assailing Manne anew. “They essentially said I'd lost my mind, that I was insane,” he said, “that I was a narcissist, that I had a series of personal agendas which were driving me on.”

The message rang loud and clear: don't screw with the guy at the top. It is a template that Murdoch has perfected in his exploits around the globe, especially in the three English-language countries he calls home.

3

“THE GUTTER IS A GOOD PLACE TO BE”

KELVIN MACKENZIE, EDITOR OF THE
Sun
from 1981 to 1994, may have embodied Rupert Murdoch's newspaper instincts most faithfully of anyone on earth. Lacerating, clever, populist, punchy, and joyful, MacKenzie knew where the big boss wanted to go—and often got there first, sometimes so pungently he had to be reined in.

In 1982, Argentina invaded the tiny Falkland Islands, held by the UK but standing just a few hundred miles off the coast of South America, and British battleships steamed to the Southern Hemisphere. The crisis unfolded like a feverish dream for MacKenzie. Roy Greenslade, an assistant
Sun
editor whose politics lay elsewhere, later wrote that MacKenzie's approach to the war was
“xenophobic, bloody-minded, ruthless, often reckless, black-humoured and ultimately triumphalist.” One headline taunted Argentina's military leaders, who had taken power a few years before in a coup:
“Stick it Up Your Junta!” When news broke that British torpedoes had struck an Argentine
cruiser, a features editor shouted “Gotcha!” MacKenzie slapped that onto the next morning's first editions, but misgivings soon mounted in the newsroom as it became clear that hundreds of lives would be lost. He swapped it out for another headline, asking whether 1,200 Argentinians (“Argies”) had drowned. Murdoch, patrolling the newsroom as he often did during news events of major moment, told MacKenzie the first headline should stick.

MacKenzie was also editor when the paper made its most egregious mistake. In 1989,
stands in the Hillsborough soccer stadium in Sheffield collapsed. Ninety-six people ultimately died. Police said fans at the stadium had picked the pockets of victims who had been killed or badly injured in the disaster. Police officials leaked stories to a news agency serving papers in London that fans had urinated on police responding to the emergency call and alleging that others had beaten a policeman trying to give a victim mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. McKenzie wrapped these accounts in a front-page headline: “The Truth.” It proved untrue.

The reporter on the story, Harry Arnold, later admitted he was aghast at the headline. “That wasn't what I'd written. I'd never used the words ‘the truth,'” he said. “So I said to Kelvin MacKenzie, ‘You can't say that.' And he said ‘Why not?' and I said, ‘because we don't know that it's the truth. This is a version of ‘the truth.'” Arnold said MacKenzie brushed him aside: “‘Oh, don't worry. I'm going to make it clear that this is what some people are saying.'”

MacKenzie did not apologize for more than two decades. Even then, his concession seemed grudging. He said the
Sun
simply based its conclusions on what the regional news agency had learned from its police sources.

MacKenzie once wrote a huge front-page headline claiming that a
comedian had eaten a woman's hamster. He hadn't. As the comic's press agent acknowledged, the negative publicity only aided the comic's career. MacKenzie contended editors merely met readers' expectations
in creating the tabloid sensibility.
“It's always been in the gutter—and it's quite a good place to be, actually,” MacKenzie explained. “Ordinary people are not high-minded. They basically want a bit of entertainment. They want a bit of sport. They want a bit of crime. They want a bit of expenses fiddling” by members of Parliament.

MacKenzie boasted that the stories he published were too good to confirm. He once told me that the only story he ever double-checked involved Elton John, not yet out of the closet, paying for sex with a male prostitute. Even so, it wasn't true. The paper had to apologize and pay damages of £1 million. Double-check? MacKenzie sputtered: Never again!

Under Murdoch, the
Sun
tabloid thrived, shedding its tenuous finances of the past to become the nation's best-selling daily paper, which it remains to this day. Its corporate sibling
News of the World
, the leading Sunday paper, earned the nickname
News of the Screws
from the satirical publication
Private Eye
for its emphasis on revealing affairs of the famous. Murdoch also owned two of the nation's elite papers: the
Times of London
and the
Sunday Times
, which he acquired in 1981. But no one underestimated the importance of the tabloids, not just to the company's bottom line but to the chairman as a reflection of his psyche. Asked under oath about his contacts with public officials, Murdoch answered:
“If any politician wanted my opinion on a major matter they only had to read the editorials in
The Sun
.”

Prestigious UK broadsheet newspapers—the
Guardian
, the
Financial Times
(not a true general-interest newspaper), the
Independent
, the
Observer
, the
Sunday Times
, the
Telegraph
, and the
Times of London
—are printed on sheets of paper about forty-eight inches across, give or take, folded in two to make pages with six columns apiece. These days, the
Times of London
, the
Guardian
, and others actually print in “compact” size, a smaller edition that's easier for commuters to carry and read on the packed cars of London Underground trains. The size of the broadsheets signaled to readers they could expect distinguished,
reasoned journalism, literate writing, thoughtful political analysis, in-depth foreign coverage, and cultural criticism, much more than they could find elsewhere.

In the US, several leading newspaper families—the Sulzbergers of the
New York Times
, the Grahams of the
Washington Post
, and,
in a previous generation, the Taylors of the
Boston Globe
and the Binghams of the Louisville
Courier-Journal
—articulated that they were stewards of a “public trust,” who stood for something beyond the bottom line. As competition waned city by city and as the reportorial core became professionalized, papers typically shed overt partisan ties on their news pages as their publishers sought to appeal to the broadest possible audiences. In recent decades, talk radio and cable news channels have taken up ideological banners.

Heavily regulated by the government as to content, British broadcasters adhered to nonideological programming and saw news shows as a public service, not a profit center. The newspapers were fractious, contentious, and opinionated. British newspaper journalists often argued that their American cousins lost something vital in the process of shedding partisanship from the news.

“I find American newspapers boring—and biblical,” said Simon Jenkins, the former editor in chief of Murdoch's center-right
Times of London
who now writes columns for the liberal
Guardian
. “These are news sheets for a genre of readers who want vast slabs of information and get entertainment in a different way. And they are micro-monopolies, all of them.”

Murdoch's editors call these papers the “unpopular” press. His heart has always been with the scrappier tabloids—the “popular press” for which Fleet Street is perhaps better known. The midmarket daily tabloid newspaper is a peculiarly London invention that, depending on the particular title, mixes elements of
TMZ.com
, the
Economist
, ESPN, the
National Enquirer, Maxim
, the Huffington Post,
Time
, the
Weekly Standard
, and
Politico
. The ensuing coverage
sounds much as though Capitol Hill, the Garment District, Hollywood, K Street, Madison Avenue, and Wall Street all met for drinks, got soused, and started to dish.

The papers are locally produced, nationally distributed, and wildly competitive. In most American cities, the majority of those who read printed papers are subscribers, providing a guaranteed audience to publishers and, more importantly, to advertisers. By contrast, many UK readers pick up papers at newsstands, which helps explain why the front pages of tabloids rely on sensationalism, scandal, sex, violence, shock, rough-edged political satire, and celebrity watching.

In 1989
Murdoch sketched out his philosophy: “Anybody 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.” The immediate context for Murdoch's remark involved British television programming, specifically the BBC, which he argued failed to satisfy viewers. But he had articulated his approach to publishing: let the people decide with their pocketbooks.

IN DECEMBER 1989,
Prince Charles, by then married to Princess Diana, telephoned his girlfriend, Camilla Parker Bowles. He expressed his desire to live eternally in her trousers, as a tampon if necessary. The conversation became infamous after the adulterous talk was published several years later, first in a Murdoch-owned celebrity magazine in Australia, later in British tabloids. The
Sun
initially held off, then asked readers to call in to say whether they wanted to see the transcript in print. They did. At least some of the public clearly wanted the service that Murdoch's paper provided.

It was never exactly clear how an Australian publication—though, as part of the Murdoch stable, one with strong British ties—had first obtained and published the conversation. Former
News of the World
reporter Paul McMullan said
the prince's sexual banter was captured from his portable phone by reporters sitting a few blocks away from Buckingham Palace in a converted London taxicab kitted out with a police scanner and recording devices. Portable phones at that time were not manufactured with encryption.

For all the rapacious hunger of the tabloids,
the British press faces tight regulations from the government and its own industry that its American counterparts do not. British newspapers cannot report about the details of ongoing court proceedings. An official secrets act allows the government to outlaw the publication of certain documents. Until recent years, private individuals
could obtain so-called super-injunctions—effectively, gag orders preventing news organizations from publishing information they do not want to come to light. The Press Complaints Commission, set up by the industry itself, judges public challenges to coverage. And should that fail to satisfy, British libel law favors plaintiffs more strongly than does American law.

All of these restraints lend momentum to the impulse for mischief. McMullan, a wiry, twitchy man who keeps a camera with telephoto lenses stashed in the back of his van, now runs a pub in the town of Dover, by the English Channel. But previously he flourished as a reporter at the
News of the World
, becoming a senior features editor and for a time living fat on expense accounts.