The
fissured mogul
Gideon Haigh
Graham
Stewart
THE HISTORY OF THE TIMES: Volume VII: The Murdoch Years
HarperCollins, $69.95 hb, 727 pp, 0007184387
In
the first volume of his memoirs, In Time of Trouble, Claude
Cockburn described his introduction to The Times of the
1930s, on a visit to its foreign desk. There he found one sub-editor
reciting Plato’s Phaedo from memory, while another translated
it into Chinese: they had a bet it could not be done without loss
of nuance. Another sub-editor, a grammarian of Polynesian previously
employed as a professor of Chinese metaphysics at the University
of Tokyo, spent the entire evening over a two-line item concerning
the Duke of Gloucester’s arrival in Kuala Lumpur. ‘There
are,’ he explained to Cockburn, ‘eleven correct ways
of spelling Kuala Lumpur, and it is difficult to decide which
should receive the, as it were, imprimatur of The Times.’
For such a big deal, ‘the imprimatur of The Times’
has not always been wisely bestowed. The newspaper cosied up to
the Confederacy during the American Civil War; it was approving
of Hitler in the 1930s, and of Stalin in the 1940s. But never
in the paper’s history has that imprimatur traded at an underestimate.
Thus the journal of record’s seventy-year commitment to recording
its journalising, Donaldson Jordan’s The Thunderer in
the Making (1935) being the first instalment, Graham Stewart’s
The Murdoch Years the latest.
Rupert Murdoch, of course, is always good box office. By my count,
his fissured features have appeared on the cover of ten books
in the last five years: The Murdoch Years even has recourse
to the same image as did Neil Chenoweth in his Virtual Murdoch
(2001). By fitting Murdoch into the continuum of The Times’s
history, however, Stewart offers a different perspective on the
mogul. He shares the limelight with, and even occasionally surrenders
it to, the first five editors of News Corporation’s period
of ownership. Harold Evans, Charles Douglas-Home, Charles Wilson,
Simon Jenkins and Peter Stothard are all given solid, satisfying
and artful due in measured biographical sketches. Journalists
at The Times during Wilson’s reign likened their windowless,
elongated and congested premises to a ‘hunter killer submarine
patrolled by a gifted but periodically tyrannical captain’.
Douglas-Home’s brother, we learn, published a book that ‘ruthlessly
parodied his parents although he was saved from parental wrath
primarily because each recognised the cruel portrait of their
spouse but not of themselves’.
Stewart is the author of Burying Caesar (2001), an admirable
account of Winston Churchill’s rivalry with Neville Chamberlain.
The Murdoch Years is patchier. Against the general elegance
and restraint of the prose, the book is overlong, allocating too
much space to the times rather than to The Times. Nor does
Stewart’s air of Apollonian detachment always convince: on
occasion, he might even be essaying a longer prose version of
that famous parody of the classic Times leader: ‘The
crucifixion was not a good thing, but then it was not altogether
a bad thing either.’ A good example is Stewart’s summary
of the chaos preceding publication of the faked Hitler diaries
in April 1983, where the Sunday Times ignored a change
of mind by its designated expert Lord Dacre: ‘The proprietor,
having placed credence on Dacre’s original endorsement, was
cutting about his eleventh hour doubts and told [deputy editor
Brian] MacArthur to publish.’ Yet if you enjoyed Robert Harris’s
Selling Hitler (1986), you’ll recall that Murdoch’s
reported response was: ‘Fuck Dacre. Publish.’ Rendering
this as paraphrase is rather like reporting ‘This Be the
Verse’ rather than quoting it: ‘Philip Larkin was cutting
about parents, whom he felt passed faults onto children, and sceptical
of their good intentions.’ It also has the effect of diminishing
the crassness of Murdoch’s mistaken judgment. Stewart tracks
News Corporation’s abiding sensitivity about the diaries
débâcle, from the fact that The Times and
the Sunday Times studiously ignored Harris’s best-selling
book, to their ongoing campaign to cast Dacre as scapegoat, even
unto his death three years ago, when the obituary was headlined
as ‘Hitler diary hoax vic-tim dies at 89’. But in doing
so, News Corporation was surely more than, as Stewart puts it,
‘needlessly ungracious’. One of his themes is how The
Times was transformed from ‘an institution’ into ‘a
newspaper’: this fiasco, surely, was when its track record
and traditions were set at nought.
All
the same, it is hardly surprising that the Murdoch who emerges
is not the Richelieu of, say, Bruce Page’s The Murdoch
Archipelago (2003), or the Punch and Judy impresario of Outfoxed
(2005), by Robert Greenwald and Alexandra Kitty. The Times would
scarcely exist today had not Murdoch acquired it from Lord Thomson
in March 1981. At the time, it was a horribly stuffy and poorly
managed paper. Its processes were so archaic that the foreign
desk was forbidden from making inter-national phone calls; its
subbing was so rigid that the title of the first Sex Pistols single
was amended in a review to Anarchy in the United Kingdom. Worse
still, it had been badly debilitated by decades of strikes and
sabotage wrought by the Fleet Street printing unions — the
Society of Graphical Trades (SOGAT) and the National Graphical
Association (NGA) — at its Gray’s Inn Road headquarters.
Stewart relates the story of Lord Thomson introducing himself
to a stranger in a lift at Gray’s Inn Road: ‘I’m
Roy Thomson and I own this paper.’ The stranger turned out
to be a machine-room official. ‘I’m Reg Brady,’
he replied, ‘and I run this paper.’ Murdoch detractors,
on the ‘my enemy’s enemy’ principle, have been
bizarrely indulgent toward the print unions. Page, for example,
argues that Murdoch’s strategy of spiriting his papers to
new facilities at Wapping was based around secrecy, provocation
and deliberate avoidance of ‘patient and humane reorganisation’.
Yet Stewart’s account suggests that the provocations ran,
pretty overpoweringly, the other way.
For those in The Times office at the unions’ zenith,
every day involved some concession to absurdity. A secretary picking
up a broken typewriter caused immediate alarm. ‘Oh my God,’
said colleagues. ‘Don’t do that, you’ll bring SOGAT
out on strike.’ For journalists in the field, like Robert
Fisk in the Middle East putting his life at risk on an almost
daily basis, it was soul-destroying: ‘Periodically a message
would be returned thanking him for his report and apologising
for the fact the unions had called another strike and so it would
not be appearing after all.’ The climactic exposé
of the Sunday Times’s famous campaign against Distillers
over the harmful effects of thalidomide was, thanks to a stoppage,
read by next to no one.
The unions were destroyed not by Murdoch’s duplicity but
by arrogance, typified by the senior official who, when shown
around Wapping at the end of 1984 with 100 colleagues, stated
airily: ‘When will you get it through your thick heads, we
will never let you use it? You may as well put a match to it —
or we’ll do it for you.’ In the decade before the move,
The Times lost 96.5 million papers to industrial action, and a
standard edition featured five misprints a page; afterwards it
lost none, and misprints dwindled to one every three pages. How
much sympathy can be felt for those who extracted such a ransom
from the public, journalists, distributors and newsagents, let
alone the pro-prietor and shareholders? As Stewart reports, the
response to Wapping did not stop at the violent and venomous picket.
There were many fellow travellers, from the public libraries who
took it upon themselves to prohibit The Times, to the universities
where professors who had merely contributed Op-Eds were subjected
to demonstrations, boycotts and orders to ‘apologise’.
One had the glass door to his lecture theatre smashed; another
had mud flung at him. Would those who perpetrated the greatest
act of arson since the Blitz at News International’s Deptford
newsprint warehouse really have been amenable to ‘patient
and humane reorganisation’?
Where Murdoch’s machiavellianism is concerned, Stewart is
a sceptic. In their classic account of the thrills and spills
of The Sun, Stick It Up Your Punter (1999), Peter Chippindale
and Chris Hoare present Murdoch as a force of nature: ‘To
keep his total control, Murdoch ruled by silence. His strategy
was to make all his editors feel that his phone call, from whichever
part of the Empire he was currently inhabiting, was the most important
event of their day of the week.’ The editors of The Times
deny similar interventions, and Stewart says that ‘if the
paper’s wires were pulled to a particular and cynical strategy,
it was hard to comprehend what the agenda was’. Evans, often
held up as a martyr to Murdoch meddling, is curtly dismissed:
‘Who was writing the cheques? It was as if Evans had confused
editing the newspaper with owning it.’
Stewart is also prepared to put the case against the perceptions
that The Times stays its hand in criticisms of China because
of News Corporation’s Star TV interests there. The Times
infamously failed to report Star’s decision to discontinue
carrying the BBC World Service; it was late, and lax, in covering
HarperCollins’ abandonment of Chris Patten’s controversial
memoir, East and West (1998). Stewart sedulously reviews
the paper’s general China coverage in the relevant periods,
and finds some worthwhile counter-examples, such as that the Chinese
deputy prime minister walked out of an interview with Peter Stothard
when dissidents were mentioned, and Jonathan Mirsky’s damning
obituary of Deng Xiaoping, which likened him to a mafia chieftan.
The explanations of Mirsky’s steady disillusionment and eventual
resignation, however, fail to convince. It is clear that The
Times finds covering its boss supremely awkward; more strangely,
that it reports him in an ad hoc way, so that nobody knows quite
how far they can go.
Indeed, having acknowledged the changing nature of The Times,
from Establishment pillar to commercial enterprise, Stewart does
not wholly succeed in making the leap himself, so as to delineate
the newspaper’s changed role within the Murdoch empire, from
flagship to escort, from cash drain to cash cow, and what exactly
the imprimatur of News Corporation may be taken as implying, as
distinct from that of The Times.
Gideon
Haigh is a Melbourne-based author and journalist.
