Misdirected honour for the knight of the gutter

In recent years, senior churchmen in Ireland have been the objects of some very good investigative reporting and the victims of some very nasty tabloid journalism. In the wave of scandals and revelations that has washed over them in the 1990s, they have learned a great deal about the media.

Most of them - rightly in some cases - deplored sensationalism, cheap shots, the invasion of privacy, the conflation of fact and opinion, the transformation of news into "infotainment". They deplored the corrosive effect of tabloid journalism on public debate and public values.

This week, at a ceremony in Beverly Hills, California, Rupert Murdoch was made a Knight Commander of Saint Gregory. It is one of the Church's highest honours for lay people, an award personally approved by the Pope. Murdoch was chosen, apparently, for his donations to charity. But he is, nevertheless, the same Rupert Murdoch who is responsible for the explosion of sensationalism, vulgarity, cruelty, cynicism, and tat in modern journalism. Few people in modern history have done so much to undermine public morality. Murdoch's newspapers, the Sun, the News of the World, the New York Post and many others - have devalued print journalism. His television shows - like the tabloid TV news programme A Current Affair in the US - virtually invented infotainment - the presentation of news as a form of amusement.

His organs have gloried in mass violent death (remember the "GOTCHA!" front page of the Sun when the Argentinian ship the Belgrano was sunk during the Falklands war). They have delighted in gruesome crimes ("Headless Body in Topless Bar" - the New York Post).

They have paid vast sums of money to paparazzi to spy on and harass people going about their private lives. They have been responsible for deliberate fabrications. They have coarsened politics by abusing, ridiculing and lying about people with liberal or left-wing ideas. They have pandered, as in Murdoch's page three girls, to the crudest sexism.

Perhaps worse than any of this, Murdoch has been an egregious hypocrite. His newspapers have been full of stern moralising in their editorial columns and of soft pornography on the other pages. Even his own right-wing political convictions have been sacrificed to his greed.

In 1993, he gave a speech saying that satellite television "has proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere". Then, when the Chinese totalitarian regime objected to his Star TV satellite system broadcasting BBC World News because the BBC had made a documentary critical of Mao Zedong, he dropped the News rather than risk his commercial interests in China.

And he has undermined democratic politics with his ruthless use of power and money. In New York, where it's often easier to see how these things work, Murdoch's ability to trade the support of his newspapers for political favours is quite brazen. In 1996, for instance, he wanted Time Warner Cable, the biggest cable TV system in Manhattan, to carry the Murdoch-controlled Fox News channel.

Since Time Warner had merged with Ted Turner, who owns the rival CNN channel, it didn't want to carry Fox News. So the governor, George Pataki, the mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, and the senator, Alfonse D'Amato, all of whom had benefited from Murdoch media support in their election campaigns, called Time Warner on his behalf.

When this had no effect, the state attorney general served a subpoena on Time Warner and the mayor threatened to revoke its franchise. Amazingly enough, Fox News is now on Time Warner cable.

Never once has Murdoch's vast media empire used its power to protect the weak or the poor. Never has it tried to further the Christian values of tolerance, kindness, or respect. Whenever he has seen a profit in the abuse of a vulnerable minority, the exploitation of a lurid misfortune or the sensationalising of a macabre crime, Murdoch has pursued it to the death. He has not even been a good conservative. It is ironic that just before the Catholic Church announced its decision to bestow a papal knighthood on Murdoch, an Indian court issued a summons for him to answer charges of being a purveyor of dirty movies.

The Indians may not be right, but they are at least consistent: Murdoch has made much of his fortune from selling sexual titillation. He has also sold an ideology of aggressive individualism that runs counter to everything the church teaches its faithful to believe.

But Rupert Murdoch's wife is a fervent Catholic, and he makes donations to approved charities. There has been persistent speculation that he may himself convert to Catholicism. And he has, after all, extraordinary power. If Tony Blair and the Labour Party in Britain are willing to do almost anything to avoid Murdoch's wrath - and they are - why shouldn't the church play up to an ageing man's desire for flattery?

Well, for one thing, because that's not what the church is for. If organised religion has a role in developed societies, it is to go against the grain, to influence the moral climate in the direction of seriousness, subtlety and responsibility.

A church that regards, say, family planning as sinful but does not see the kind of calculated undermining of common decencies that Murdoch has engaged in for four decades as a barrier to being honoured by the Pope simply doesn't seem up to the job. Denouncing sins in general is easy work. Facing up to vastly wealthy and powerful people like Murdoch and putting names on their actions is hard. But if the church can't do it, who can?

The church has, of course, a long record of applying different rules to the rich and powerful, overlooking, for instance, the sexual misdeeds of members of the Kennedy family. But Murdoch is different. He is not, in person, a notorious sinner. He is something much worse - a man whose business activities have polluted the very springs of public morality.

The church knows that the area he has operated in is crucial to its own future. Cardinal Ratzinger spoke recently of how "language and behaviour are shaped in a very special way in the entertainment world of the media". Who has done more to shape them in a way that is hostile to religious values than Murdoch?

There's another reason why the Church should not be in the business of sucking up to Rupert Murdoch - naked self-interest. The global media beast that he has created is an omnivorous animal, which devours all before it and feeds on the dead bodies of once-powerful collective institutions.

Ask John Major. Ask Queen Elizabeth. Ask Tony Blair in a few years' time when he flies too close to the Sun and gets his wings burned. But at least when the church next finds itself being trampled on, it will have the consolation of knowing that the charger is being ridden by a Knight Commander of Saint Gregory.