An Indian newspaper baron once said no one owns a newspaper to make money. This may be an extreme view but every media baron and journalist will understand the sentiment. But that was before Rupert Murdoch became a force on the global media scene and radically re-set the business on its current amoral course. Suddenly it was possible to view media as a money-making business just like soap or steel and openly schmooze with the political powers to gain favours. This week’s abrupt decision to close one of Britain’s oldest weekend tabloids, News of the World (NoTW), demonstrated one consequence of that business philosophy.
Outwardly, the decision looked like the decent thing to do; NoTW was at the centre of a hugely controversial phone-hacking scandal that was extreme even by the low standards of British tabloid journalism. But few people have been fooled. For one, the scandal has been brewing since 2005 when its journalists were caught hacking the mailboxes of the royal family, celebrities and even families of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Two NoTW journalists were jailed after a Scotland Yard investigation, the editor David Coulson resigned (only to become Prime Minister David Cameron’s chief press officer), the paper faced a raft of lawsuits and a strongly-worded admonition from a Parliamentary committee. But with the world economy in fine fettle Mr Murdoch forebore to close the paper then. Things came to a head this year when it became clear that NoTW journalists had been hacking the voice mailbox of a teenage girl who had disappeared in 2002 and was later found murdered. Most media analysts have pointed out that NoTW’s closure made a virtue out of expediency. With the British economy in stasis, NewsCorp’s British operations — which include The Times, the respected daily that he turned tabloid, and The Sun — account for just 4 per cent of global revenues and barely break even. The loss of NoTW’s negligible revenues was a price Mr Murdoch was happy to pay to buy out the more profitable BSkyB (he ran the risk of being declared not a “fit and proper person” by the regulator because of NoTW).
This is not the first time the profit-motivated Murdoch empire has been in the thick of ethics controversies. In the eighties, he elected to publish excerpts from Hitler’s “diaries” in the Sunday Times over objections from historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (who had initially endorsed them, then changed his mind) and the editor Frank Giles. When it became clear that the diaries were fake, he reacted by sidelining Giles as Editor Emeritus (the apochryphal story being that he told Giles, “It’s Latin, Frank. E means you’re out and meritus means you deserved it”). In China, after being critical of the regime, he quickly became its biggest propagandist when his Star TV network was threatened, strategically making a mainland Chinese woman his third wife and dropping BBC News from the network when the ruling party expressed displeasure at its critical coverage. In the US, his Fox Network is an open supporter of the Republican regime with most of its anchors members of the GOP, its embedded journalists focusing on good news when the Iraq campaign began imploding. Small wonder when he bought the respected Wall Street Journal in 2007 several senior journalists exited, citing a reluctance to work for him.
They were probably prescient. Mr Murdoch has attracted a growing number of clones in India and journalists often believe that ownership philosophies do not really matter as long as their work is not impacted. The NoTW imbroglio shows how wrong they can be.
