What do bust-enhanced model Katie Price (aka Jordan) and martial-arts guy and sort-of actor Alex Reid -- Britain's, er, former sweethearts -- have to do with the culture clash between "serious" and "tabloid" journalism? Read on."Murdoch was warming [the six-year-old Profumo sex scandal] up again, because his instinct, as keen as ever, told him that the will to forgive is weaker, in the communal conscience, than the urge to drool. He was reported as saying, 'People can sneer all they like, but I'll take the hundred and fifty thousand extra copies we're going to sell.'"
"[I]f one had to isolate an instant, in the thirty years of his ownership [of London's Times and Sunday Times], that best portrayed the Murdoch touch it would be the dictum that he issued, over the phone, on the evening of Saturday, April 23, 1983. The Sunday Times, poised to publish Hitler's diaries, had hit a wrinkle; the historian Lord Dacre, who had verified their authenticity, was having second thoughts. Stop the presses, or forge ahead? Over to Murdoch, in New York: 'Fuck Dacre. Publish.'"
-- Anthony Lane, in "Hack Journalism" in the Aug. 1 New Yorker
by Ken
You know how sometimes even as you say or write something you're thinking, "On the other hand . . . ?" That happened to me last night while I was writing my post "Glenn Beck gives Rupert Murdoch something to smile about." A nagging voice in my head cautioned, "Are you sure of that?," in connection with the opening:
When shocked word began to spread about Glenn Beck's latest sociopathic blitherings, I'm guessing that Rupert Murdoch cracked his first smile in weeks. I imagine him saying to one of his underlings something like: "Thank God the little shit isn't our problem anymore."
On the whole I still think it's fairly likely that ol' Rupe is relieved at having cut Glenno loose in time to be spared the embarrassment of the little shit's likening of the Norwegian Labor Party's youth camp at Utoya to the Hitler Youth. But then I flashed to a piece I've been meaning to write about ever since I read it right after I posting my Tuesday piece about Fox Noise not being subject to challenges to its news ethics given that it's not in the news business.
The piece is Anthony Lane's "Hack Work: A tabloid culture runs amok," and it offers an interestingly different perspective on the master of News Corp, no doubt influenced by closer familiarity with the operation of Rupert's British newspapers. Lane approaches the phone-hacking scandal by looking back at some of the more, um, colorful landmarks of the Murdoch era in British journalism, then writes:
All of which suggests that the seeds of the current crisis were planted long ago. If your attitude toward the lives of others is that of a house burglar confronted by an open window; if you consider it part of your business to fabricate conversations where none exist; and if your boss treats his employees with a derision that they, following suit, extend to the subjects of their inquiries -- if those elements are already in place, then the decision to, say, hack into someone's cell phone is almost no decision at all. It is merely the next step. All that is required is the technology. What ensues may be against the law, but it goes no more against the grain of common decency than any other tool of your trade.
A point Lane makes is one that many Rupert-watchers seem to me to miss: that what he's basically about is making money. He recalls Rupert being taken to task by the Archbishop of Westminster in 1969,
for having bought and splashed, or resplashed, the memoirs of Christine Keeler in the News of the World. She was the woman who had enjoyed simultaneous affairs with the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and a Soviet attaché--a grave security risk and, by any standards, a superheated news story. But that had all happened six years earlier; Profumo had resigned and devoted himself to work among the poor, in the East End, and the saga had grown cold. Murdoch was warming it up again, because his instinct, as keen as ever, told him that the will to forgive is weaker, in the communal conscience, than the urge to drool. He was reported as saying, "People can sneer all they like, but I'll take the hundred and fifty thousand extra copies we're going to sell."
"As one scans the history of Murdoch's rise," Lane writes, "[a] mission to entertain assumes far more importance than his political agenda.
Unlike [onetime Daily Mail and Daily Mirror owner Lord] Rothermere and [onetime Daily Express owner Lord] Beaverbrook, he relishes not the orotundity of power ("It is the duty of newspapers to advocate a policy of optimism in the broadest sense," Beaverbrook said, in 1922) but the more subtle power of suggestion. (When Murdoch was angling to buy the Times, he entered a committee room "like someone visiting a friend in hospital" -- the recollection of Harry Evans, who was about to cross over as editor of the Sunday paper to editor of the daily paper.) Murdoch is not prone to intellectual nicety, and his support for any given government has been determined, more often than not, by its willingness to strike the fetters from the market; once the Conservatives chose not to refer his takeover of the Times and the Sunday Times to the Monopolies Commission, it was easy to guess where Murdoch's fealty would lie. But if one had to isolate an instant, in the thirty years of his ownership, that best portrayed the Murdoch touch it would be the dictum that he issued, over the phone, on the evening of Saturday, April 23, 1983. The Sunday Times, poised to publish Hitler's diaries, had hit a wrinkle; the historian Lord Dacre, who had verified their authenticity, was having second thoughts. Stop the presses, or forge ahead? Over to Murdoch, in New York: "Fuck Dacre. Publish."
I don't know how easy it would have been to sell more newspapers, or draw more televiewers, based on Glenno's drooling, but if anyone could have found a way, you can be sure it would have been our Rupert.
In the "how and why" department, I should let Lane continue from the point where I just interrupted him, recalling Rupert's dressing down by the Archbishop of Westminster.
Nonetheless, he apologized to the Cardinal, thus setting a pattern that persists to this day. Murdoch would preside over an exclusive, reap the reward, and, if necessary, express contrition, while his underlings readied themselves for the next scoop. On July 16th of this year, as the hacking scandal bloomed, News Corporation placed full-page advertisements in several newspapers--including, with some panache, the Guardian -- headlined "WE ARE SORRY," and adding, "Our business was founded on the idea that a free and open press should be a positive force in society. We need to live up to this." That is a direct descendant of a statement that Murdoch issued in 1995: "This company will not tolerate its papers bringing into disrepute the best practices of popular journalism."
We can laugh if we will, about this ringing commitment to "the best practices of popular journalism." We can also wonder what exactly it means. Clearly the inclusion of that word "popular" is important, producing a phrase that means something different from "the best practices of journalism.""Popular journalism" would presumably stand in noticeable contrast to the stuff they teach in the journalism schools. Or the kind of prissy, carefully sourced, fact-based reporting espoused by fancy-pants elite news operations, what we might call, oh, fair and balanced reporting, where nothing matters more than rooting out and reporting the story so the readers/viewers can decide.
Oh wait.
Whatever that 1995 statement meant when it said, "This company will not tolerate its papers bringing into disrepute the best practices of popular journalism," it presumably encompasses the kind of flagrant news manipulation that longtime New York Times reporter-editor-columnist Joyce Purnick was talking about recently (see my "Postscript on the problem with 'news' coverage Murdoch-style: Joyce Purnick recalls the New York Post takeover") based on her experience as the Post chief political reporter at the time, when Murdoch jumped right into using his new property to install Ed Koch as mayor of New York City.
It didn't matter what we [i.e., she and the paper's other surviving legit reporters] wrote, because we were surrounded by propaganda for Ed Koch. You know, there were all those photos, and all those poll stories and all those headlines. It didn't matter that somewhere in the back of the paper or the middle of the paper I had a short story that was perfectly legitimate. It didn't matter, that's the point. The paper had become a propaganda tool.
I took away three more themes sounded by Lane which don't seem to me part of the standard thinking about Rupert M:
* Whatever one may think of the kind of newspapers he puts out, he really does love newspapers, an attitude that is otherwise pretty much extinct among contemporary moguls. Oh, he understands that the big money is now to be made in other media. Nevertheless, his passion for print seems undimmed. (To which I would add that, characteristically, he has found ways of making them "pay," if not directly at the cash register -- as tools of influence, of course, and also in synergistic combination with those newer, flashier media, as for example he expects to be able to do with Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal.)
* While that passion for newspapers may be undimmed, Master Rupert's standing has changed. In, granted, the kind of "journalism" he believes in -- call it "tabloid," or "popular"? -- he once seemed to derive his greatest pleasures from sticking it to the powers-that-be, but over time he has become a power-that-is. Lane notes that the switch from "insider" to "outsider" position and mentality is far from uncommon, and I think most of us who've had much contact with "outsiders' to the establishment discover that for many (most?) of them, consciously or otherwise, the deepest desire is to make precisely this switch, to get their "share."
* In the matter of journalistic propriety, of suitable subject matter and treatment, Murdoch knows something that many media observers don't: that the "tabloid culture" has already prevailed. In British newspapering, notably, the trash that was once the province of the sensationalist Sunday tabloids increasingly became the bread-and-butter of the dailies.
[A]s Kevin Williams explains in his book Read All About It, the decline of the mass Sunday newspaper is attributed to the incorporation of its values into the mainstream daily papers. The reader did not have to wait for the sleaze, scandals, and sex that up until the 1960s had only been available on Sundays.” Lurking somewhere behind this is a sulfurous inversion of religious practice: it’s not enough to confess your faith on the Lord’s day; you must go out and live it every day of the week.
However, the loss of those old Sunday-tabloid readers has been to an extent offset by a growing readership for them among the up-market patrons of the tonier dailies.
Over the course of four decades, under Murdoch's approving gaze, the lowbrow has paid no more attention to the highbrow than it ever did, while the highbrow has paid both heed and obeisance to the low -- submission, in the weird wrangling of British class consciousness, being preferable to condescension. The most telling piece in the Guardian, in the wake of the hacking scandal, came from a former editor of the paper, Peter Preston, who analyzed the sales figures and showed that more ABC1 readers (that is, those with better education, employment, and pay, and thus close to advertisers' hearts) read the News of the World than the Sunday Times -- more, indeed, than the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Independent on Sunday put together. Murdoch must have closed the Screws with a pang.
And having worked his way back to the now-defunct News of the World, Lane signs off with this heartwarming bit of anecdotal data regarding "tabloid culture":
The front page of the March 27th edition bore an archetypal story, in that it was barely a story at all. The headline read "JORDAN DROVE ME TO SUICIDE." Now, this could not literally be true, unless the paper's foreign desk was even more foreign than we knew. Rather, the lucky survivor was Alex Reid, a professional cage-fighter, and formerly the paramour of Jordan -- the defining, improbable deity of the past ten years, acclaimed for her volcanic breast implants, for her crowning appearance on a jungle-based reality show, "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!," and for the five best-selling novels that she engendered but did not actually write. In short, like other personae in the Murdochian drama, she scarcely exists outside the appetites of the tabloid press -- and there, you might expect, she would remain, as safe a standby as Christine Keeler was. Should you wish, however, to delve into all that Jordan means, and the reasons for her reign in the jungle that is Great Britain, there were two lengthy, in-depth interviews published last year, one with her and the other with Alex Reid. Both were in the Guardian.
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