ANALYSIS:US shareholders of News Corp are rebelling over the sleaze from Murdoch's UK interests
ALMOST 30 years ago, after Rupert Murdoch saved the Boston Heraldfrom closing, I was one of the young cub reporters hired by the newly arrived, mostly imported News Corp management.
We called our overly enthusiastic, peripatetic bosses with English and Australian accents Murdochians, maybe because it sounded like Manchurian.
One day, I covered a murder in Charlestown, the neighbourhood portrayed in Ben Affleck's film The Town.
The girlfriend of one of the town’s most notorious bank robbers had been found shot dead in her flat while her infant slept in an adjacent bedroom.
I was busy typing when one of the Murdochians, a guy with a Cockney accent, sidled up to my desk. “Hey, mate,” he sang cheerfully, “did this kid see his mother get shot?”
I told him that was impossible. The homicide detectives told me the mother was shot dead in a separate part of the flat, and that her baby was in a bedroom, quite a distance away, with the door closed.
“Besides,” I said, “the baby is just a couple of months old.”
The Murdochian nodded, seemingly satisfied with the explanation, and a few hours later I was standing in JJ Foley's, the Herald'swatering hole, with those same homicide detectives when the first edition came in.
The headline: MOM GUNNED DOWN IN FRONT OF TERRIFIED TOT.
To his credit, the Murdochian changed the headline for the second and third editions after I complained. And his cheerful ambivalence about accuracy seems positively quaint as the sickening stench from Murdoch’s UK titles waft over this side of the Atlantic.
Despite the huge, if often corrosive, effect he’s had on US culture, especially journalism, Rupert Murdoch remains something of a caricature here in the US.
A hero to the right, a villain to the left, he is an enigma to most Americans, who gaze at his reptilian smirk and ask, “Who the heck is that guy?”
Mention Fox News, however, and most Americans will react, either with a nodding smile – you betcha! – or a head-shaking frown. Fox News is quintessentially Murdochian: tabloid TV with a right-wing ideology.
Still, there’s a sense here that Murdoch is not nearly as right-wing as he appears, that he is cynical about power, in a Slobodan Milosevic kind of way: if Democrats are willing to play ball with him, he’ll kiss their behinds too. More often, it’s politicians doing the bum kissing, as no one wants Fox News after them.
Murdoch’s arc of media acquisition in the US is similar to how he came to dominate the Australian and UK markets. He starts down-market, styles himself a champion of the working stiff, then moves up the food chain to buy more respectable titles, all with his eyes on the prize: television.
In 1976 he bought the New York Post, a venerable paper founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801. Murdoch turned it into a sensationalist tabloid, complete with lurid stories and screaming headlines, such as HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.
The Posthas never won awards for ethical journalism. Still, in comparison to its English cousins, the Postseems relatively tame. But, given how many of those editors with English and Aussie accents still people News Corp's US newsrooms, people are starting to ask: did phone hacking happen here?
As he did in purchasing the Times(of London), Murdoch saw buying the Wall Street Journalas a path to respectability. His entreaty to get Bloomingdale's to advertise in the Post was rejected by one of that upscale retailer's execs, who sniffed: "Rupert, your readers are our shoplifters."
The Wall Street Journalis the bible of the Masters of the Universe, the Captains of Capitalism who, when they're not showering politicians on both sides of the aisle with money just to hedge their bets, love to flick on Fox and watch such fair and balanced commentators as Sarah Palin go on about how that foreign-born Muslim who cheated his way to the presidency is ruining the country.
Murdoch always saw buying into the debt-inducing newspaper industry as a stepping stone to the revenue stream that is TV. He became a US citizen precisely so he could buy TV stations, and prevailed on his mostly Republican friends to weaken regulation. Ted Kennedy went to war with him on it and suffered the slings and arrows of Murdochian commentators ever after.
Fox News figured out that half of America doesn’t want to be told what’s going on, they want to be told they’re right. About Obama. About taxes. About religion. About all them there foreigners slipping over the border.
Whether they realise Murdoch is a tax-dodging foreigner who became a US citizen the old-fashioned way – by paying for it – is anyone’s guess.
While Murdoch uses Fox and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journalto rail against taxes, David Cay Johnston, a columnist for Reuters, dryly notes that Murdoch is a master at avoiding his fair share: News Corp earned $10.4 billion in profits over the last four years, and should have paid $3.6 billion in taxes. But Johnston found that News Corp used tax shelters to collect almost $5 billion in tax refunds.
Of course, you won’t find the hyenas on Fox bleating on about any of this, or about Murdoch journalists offering money for the phone numbers of 9/11 victims – not while they can talk about President Obama trying to tax the country to death.
Ken Auletta, esteemed media critic for the New Yorkermagazine, says Murdoch is ultimately responsible for the slime, from sea to shining sea.
“He fathered a tabloid culture on three continents that revelled in the kind of news that could produce screaming headlines,” Auletta wrote. “He celebrated reporters and editors who generated such stories, and he sneered at ‘boring’ newspapers that avoided them. There is simply no way that Rupert Murdoch, who has escaped more snares than Houdini, can cleanly escape the trap he has laid himself.”
While this may be wishful thinking on the part of those who think Murdoch has dragged American journalism into the gutter, there is a growing number of analysts who think News Corp’s UK troubles could spread like a contagion and ruin his empire.
Kevin Cullen writes for the Boston Globe