It Takes More Than Moguls

Even Murdoch needs a helping hand

This review was first published in the Nine papers.

A book can be a long time in the making. In the case of The Men Who Killed The News, the gestation was ten years. The tricky thing, especially when a book deals with elements of the contemporary culture, is that the world you are describing will not stand still.

As author, journalist and publisher Eric Beecher, admits in the Afterword to this authoritative and meticulous volume, “When I first began to think about writing this book, a decade ago, its central premise was uncomplicated”.

Perhaps less so now. The changes in the west’s information architecture have been radical; changes that have left the world so lucidly described in this book a little in their wake.

Beecher’s premise, and here we revert to the book’s introductory chapter, was to make an account of “the cumulative damage inflicted on liberal democracies by owners of journalism who place profits and power ahead of civic responsibility and decency”.

He goes on to make this case though an encyclopaedic accumulation of anecdote and evidence. What fills the bulk of these pages is an assiduously researched and brightly written account of news media owners and their exercise of ‘insidious editorial power’. It reaches back to Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst and fetches up with Rupert Murdoch, before noting the growing anti-democratic pall cast by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg’s unprecedentedly liberal dissemination of self-serving and often malignant falsehood.

It’s the rapidity of this last moment of change, one that also includes the burgeoning frontier of artificial intelligence and its unknown intersections with truth and public information, that catches this book on the hop.

Historically, it is on certain ground. Beecher’s grasp of his subject is impressive, if at times the book seems to favour the assembly of history over the crafting of argument. He has the journalist’s gift of placing us in the room, for example the 1930s office of Sir Keith Murdoch in the Herald and Weekly Times Building, a corner of its ‘mahogany row’ that Beecher himself would occupy as Rupert Murdoch’s editor of Melbourne’s Herald in the 1980s, but only for two years: ‘I resigned when my moral compass became dysfunctional ... after a year at News Corp I found myself being tested, regularly, by ethical issues that became too precipitous for me to jump.’

Murdoch senior’s office is the scene for one of the book’s best and most telling anecdotes, told by a former Herald copy boy who took in his boss’s tea during a meeting with then prime Minister, Joseph Lyons. ‘I put the tea down on the big desk and went out through the door. As I went through it I turned and there, with his hat in his hand, like a man seeking a job, stood the Prime Minister before Murdoch’s desk. As I shut the door, I heard the leader of the nation say: “Yes, sir”.’

As the pages turn, mogul after mogul repeats this relationship with political power, from Hearst to Robert Maxwell, from lords Rothermere to Northcliffe, from Conrad Black to Murdoch’s infamous editor of The Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, who once assured UK Prime Minister John Major that ‘I’ve got a large bucket of shit lying on my desk and tomorrow morning I’m going to pour it all over your head.’

The media mogul, Beecher argues, is a participant in the game of power, the beneficiary of the press’s elevated status as democracy’s fourth estate.

‘This is the paradox at the heart of the free press. The custodians of journalism are entrusted to protect it, yet incentivised to exploit it ... Using their privileged status, they have intimidated governments, invaded personal privacy, peddled mistruths, stirred up sensationalism, dispensed patronage, denigrated their enemies, twisted social values, and in the process accumulated obscene fortunes.’

Beecher’s big idea is this ‘loophole in democracy’, but he does not develop that quite significant insight as a synthesis that might have connected the many layers of this rich history with a clearer argumentive purpose.

More’s the pity, because in the next phase of this long tussle between greed, power and truth, the fight will not be simply to preserve some skerrick of morally robust, ‘truth to power’ journalism. In fact, the unintended subtext of this book is to argue against any notion of a journalistically sincere fourth estate. This is the story of journalism’s co-opting by greed and public amorality, and its failure as a craft. These proprietors do not fill the pages, they don’t personally write the lies and vile attacks. That is the work of journalists.

But journalism and its ongoing health is not the point. An informed polity capable of demanding responsible and serious democratic government very much is. Journalism may play that role, though this book reads a little as an obsequy for its most vigorous, albeit morally compromised, moment.

What comes next will be freed of the Murdoch era’s lip service to truth and journalistic responsibility; Beecher’s ‘loophole in democracy’. The potential in this new world for unseen psychological manipulation and the manufacture of a universe of bespoke and wilful mistruth is, momentarily, beyond imagining.

That’s a prospect that makes the century of misdeeds and manoeuvrings sketched in Beecher’s book seem almost nostalgic.

The Men Who Killed The News
Eric Beecher
Scribner, $36.99

This review was first published by The Age/Sydney Morning Herald.