Janice Sutherland, “Murdoch (Part 1)” (2013)
Here be the story of the rise and rise of the global media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his empire News Corporation as told by this 2-part bare-bones documentary in conventional voice-over chronological narrative enlivened with interviews with notable reporters, media personalities, politicians and others who knew or worked with him. It’s a fascinating story of an outsider, starting off as a metaphorical kid in the playground with nearly all the disadvantages of a bullied victim who turns the tables on his oppressors and beats them all. The sting though is that the victim internalises the tactics of the bullies and in the quest to defeat them at their own game, becomes a bully himself to the detriment of all.
The tale begins with RM’s childhood, part of which he spent at boarding school where he was shunned by fellow students because of his relatively lowly background as a child of a newspaper proprietor compared to their grazier aristocracy origins. His self-concept of himself as an outsider, reinforced by attending Oxford University which was his boarding school writ larger, together with a desire to avenge himself and his father, Sir Keith Murdoch., on fuddy-duddy establishment bullies must have been forged during this time. RM inherits “The Adelaide News”, a small newspaper, on his father’s death in 1952 and begins his domination of the print news media almost immediately, starting with Sydney in the late 1950s, locking horns with the influential Fairfax and Packer media families; going national with “The Australian” in 1964; and infiltrating the UK media scene through a backdoor ruse concocted with the Carr family, owners of “News of the World”, to stop UK media-man Robert Maxwell from buying that paper in 1968. Outfoxing the Carr family by buying the paper’s shares and owning “News of the World” outright, our man becomes unstoppable, gobbling newspapers across Australia, the UK and the US, and later creating an all-embracing media entertainment empire by buying TV stations, movie studios, music recording and publishing labels, and book publishers.
With his voracious appetite for news, news and more news – though not in the way I understand such an appetite – RM introduces his formula of success based on sex, sensational crime stories and political scandal together with an egotistical and authoritarian style of leadership that brings with it an organisational culture of self-censorship, people competing to please the boss, and outright and unabashed support and promotion of political regressive and undemocratic ideologies, values and policies with an expectation of reciprocation of favours from the politicians so promoted. Beginning in 1972 with his support for – and later vilification of – Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister of Australia (1972 – 1975), RM begins to intrude into politics in the countries where his newspapers are operating, seeing himself as a king-maker to the extent of sending PR men over to Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s with the aim of making her over as a future British PM. In the process the print news media is moulded into a propaganda arm of undemocratic corporate political forces.
The low point of the documentary surely comes with RM’s building of a new newspaper office in Wapping, London, equipped with new printing technology which the wily proprietor uses to break the power of print labour unions over the British news media. Especially insidious here is the British government’s role in assisting RM in busting the voices of newspaper workers, akin to Thatcher’s earlier crushing of coal mining unions, by providing huge numbers of police to break up union protests and picketing.
The documentary’s style is fairly basic and looks a bit slap-dash in the manner of a TV current affairs article. It does feature interesting archival news reels that give some idea of what the Australian newspaper business was like in the mid-twentieth century: robust, competitive, racy and reflective of Australian society’s interests and insecurities at the time. Public interest in crime, gangsters and scandals may have influenced RM to run with the mix of salacious and sensational news reporting in his early acquisitions and stick with it long after its expiry date. In the 1950s, such a template was a cheeky schoolboy’s one-fingered salute to the musty elites of the time; by the 1970s this formula is looking very tarnished; and by the 2010s the formula has wrought enormous damage to Western cultural discourse and society by emphasising hysterical emotion, shock, fear and insecurity and using those reactions to influence public opinion and direct it to support regressive, violent and tyrannous politics. Of course, this all gives RM even more power over politicians and the public alike.
I’m hoping that Part 2 of this series will devote some time to evaluating RM’s legacy to news reporting, his harmful influence on media, culture and politics in the Anglosphere, and above all his personality and ethics (whatever those are) but I’m not holding my breath. Although I have only seen half the documentary, already I have a sense of the underlying tragedy of the Murdoch story: that a man who must surely understand what it is like to be spurned, mistreated and made to feel inferior does not use his power and talent to crusade on behalf of others similarly oppressed but instead uses what he has to avenge himself for purely egotistical reasons, concentrate power in and around himself, and impose a new and more sinister form of oppression on society and culture.