Rupert Murdoch may best be remembered for closing down News of the World after it came to light that the newspaper had hacked into telephones and bribed investigators to get scoops and stay ahead of rivals. Murdoch accepted that his journalists had exceeded the brief, apologised and then brought the shutters down on the newspaper. He had to eat humble pie, in spite of friends in high places.
Murdoch, 81, is feared, adored and disliked in equal measure. There are many wannabe media barons who dream of being even 5 per cent like him, rivals fear his wrath and politicians and governments want to stay in his good books. For his part, Murdoch has all his life denied charges of influence-peddling and any impropriety. “Show me an example,” he dared Vanity Fair in an interview in 1999. The interviewer did not press the matter too hard — Murdoch wouldn’t lie to me, he said in his defence.
Not everybody buys the argument. Bruce Page’s The Murdoch Archipelago (Simon & Schuster, 2003) lays bare the political clout Murdoch enjoys through his media assets (newspapers, television and radio) not only in the English-speaking world but also in China and India. With painstaking research and hundreds of interviews, Page has built a case that Murdoch will find hard to dismiss. Murdoch’s business model, says Page, is built on his ability to collaborate with the powers that be, even though he might appear to stand against it. This is not very different from the tools used to good effect by his father, Keith Murdoch, in his World War I propaganda campaigns. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
Britain is where Murdoch has faced the maximum controversy. He entered the market in 1968 with the acquisition of News of the World. Over the years, he added the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times to his portfolio. Page talks of how Murdoch offered “critical services” to Margaret Thatcher during her days at 10 Downing Street in the 1980s. Many credited John Major’s victory in 1992 to support from the Times. This is not to say that all went well for Murdoch in Britain. His attempt to buy Manchester United for £625 million in 1998 was blocked by the Competition Commission because it felt the acquisition would “hurt competition in the broadcast industry and the quality of British football”.
It is instructive also to learn how Murdoch made his peace with China in 1994. When a certain channel showed lengthy footage from Tiananmen Square and screened The Last Emperor, he agreed to remove it from his satellite. That cut the channel off not just from mainland China but also Hong Kong (then not a part of China) and Taiwan. He even made a donation of $5.4 million to the People’s Daily, which, according to Page, “is the central element in China’s totalitarian media apparatus, and so pure a pseudo-newspaper that Weber might rethink his dictum that ideal types never appear exactly in the real world”.
Murdoch, says Page in plain language, drills systemic loopholes to his advantage, often with the connivance of local authorities. Page calls it the “trouncing of the institutions of the constitutional West”. He writes: “Murdoch is not greatly troubled by law that tends to circumscribe his media operations. His method is to signal acceptance, and afterwards to find exceptions and loopholes — gun-jumping or foot-dragging — then, if he gets stuck, he seeks political aid.”