All the News That Profits : Married . . . With Power : MURDOCH, By William Shawcross (Simon & Schuster: $27.50; 469 pp.)
If one is to despise Rupert Murdoch, as many are wont to do, then it must be for his business rather than his personal life. For we learn from this painfully balanced appraisal that there is nothing very interesting to discover about the human side of Rupert Murdoch. Here the press lord as Satan is reduced to the press lord as market researcher.
Despite the sexually lurid headlines of the London Sun and the New York Post under his tutelage, Murdoch emerges as nothing more salacious than a faithfully married media mogul who wants to control markets and help select, or at least have dinner with, prime ministers and presidents. It is reported here that Murdoch was disappointed when Ronald Reagan fell asleep in mid-sentence during one such dinner, but that was early in his presidency and Murdoch’s admiration for Reagan--and Thatcher, and every other conservative--continued to the end.
The Murdoch of this version is predictable and pedestrian beyond belief, although not always quite in the neat way William Shawcross insists. While Murdoch moved from the socialism of his youth to the conservatism of his years of power, Shawcross feels that his consistent enemy was the old-boy network that ran the English empire--and that Murdoch experienced as a colonial resentfully attending the best schools in the mother country.
Shawcross’s theme is that Murdoch, the son of an Australian journalist/publisher who made his fame exposing the British-directed disaster of Gallipoli, is forever tweaking the old British establishment. The high point of this revenge, according to Shawcross, came with the Australian’s purchase and dumbing down of the once ultra-refined Times and Sunday Times newspapers.
Perhaps. But that would lead one to dismiss Murdoch as an aberration when indeed he is, for better or worse, unmistakably a harbinger. The real story that emerges--and this can seem a very long read, unless you already understand the serious threat implied here--is that Murdoch as a press lord does what his more respectable counterparts do, only more so.
The only dirty secret revealed in this richly detailed, authoritative, well written but unsurprising work is that Rupert Murdoch is neither a pirate or a Satan, but merely a businessman. Were he the manufacturer of widgets rather than newspapers and television programs, he would be in all ways unexceptional. But what Murdoch has managed with his overbearing and, more important, overt ways is to blow the cover on the media attempt to pass its business off as civic activity. Instead, the man reminds us with every one of his replates of some unreservedly hallowed journalistic institution that “news” is “entertainment,” and that this is, above all else, a profit-driven enterprise.
Murdoch is merely a gross version of the modern news executive driven by market research to further penetrate what he fears is an increasingly uninterestedpublic.
At first Murdoch could be dismissed as one who merely expanded his audience by downscaling it. The formula is simple: Push sexual exploitation and bizarre violence as far as public censors and the advertisers will permit. Despite some mishaps along the way, it worked all too well as a strategy and you’d better believe that his competitors marked his successes from the London Sun to Fox television.
True, the downscaling could initially be dismissed as valuable only to the English tabloid market. Bloomingdale’s and other retail advertisers who are the mainstay of big city newspapers in this country don’t want downscale shoppers. The tale is repeated here of a Bloomingdale’s executive sniffing to Murdoch, “Rupert, your readers are our shoplifters.” So the line was held for a while in pursuit of the upscale reader until the other news businessmen realized that Murdoch was onto something very big; most of the audience can be made dumb. You can be upscale and frivolous all in the same moment.
It is possible to appeal to that common denominator in all of us that is banal, superficial and therefore more easily exploited. After all, why should a television program be expected to have standards higher than that of a beer commercial? And what big city department store doesn’t use sexual titillation as a staple of its advertising?
Murdoch understood that the audience for crass and dumb crossed borders and class, and that this universal market was now laid bare for exploitation thanks to the revolution in telecommunications. Satellite transmission would bring a Beverly Hills teenager with ample breasts popping out of her too-tight outfit to the distant but delighted home audiences of Africa and New Zealand. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rupert Murdoch carried “Married . . . with Children” to a newly liberated world.
To make the point, Shawcross invokes the specter raised by Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” which “proposed that those who were alert to the dangers of tyranny were often asleep to the dangers of distraction. He warned that people would be controlled by pleasure, not pain; their cultures would be made essentially inconsequential.” This is exactly what has occurred. As Shawcross points out in what is the book’s major and considerable contribution, the danger to the world’s serious and independent cultures lies not in Orwellian repression but in trivialization:
“As Murdoch well understood, entertainment was more and more the staple of Western and particularly American culture. In the global village, television was taking the place of the village green--a tiny but enticing green in every house. Visual images were beginning to replace arguments. Information was being presented as entertainment, and there was no one more skilled at marrying and mixing the two businesses than Rupert Murdoch.”
Maybe that last bit was once so. Murdoch came early to the marketing of news as entertainment, but he has clearly been surpassed by a new breed of professionals armed with focus-group surveys and other market research paraphernalia who have reduced the art of journalism to the inexact but pretentious as well as portentous pseudoscience of media market research.
Increasingly, and in every venue, from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, from CBS to Fox, the fight to preserve market share is on in earnest, and what sells is what counts no matter the new ethos spin that’s put on it. Yes there have to be standards, as even Murdoch came to realize, lest a conscious and significant minority of your public get turned off, but the pressure to appeal to some consultant’s perception of the market is relentless.
No need to exaggerate; Murdoch is cruder then most of his peers. Few would simply brush off the publication of the fraudulent diaries of Adolf Hitler with the remark, “After all, we are in the entertainment business.” Few would countenance the outright distortions that often marked the headlines of Murdoch’s papers or the underestimation of the public taste with failures like the dreadful New York Post. But beyond matters of taste, and Murdoch’s tasteless style was never heartfelt, being only a marketing tool, the similarities between this press lord and his emerging competition are disquietingly similar.
Taste, as was demonstrated by many of the stuffy types who rolled over for Murdoch once in his employ, is a rather puny barrier to the degeneration of a news organization. The London Times went way down the slippery slope with very proper people at the wheel. And Murdoch himself has learned to work on his manners and not frighten people, particularly investors. After all, he never would have gotten this far were it not for the consistent support of top bankers like Citibank’s Walter Wriston, who kept Murdoch’s house of cards intact. Murdoch’s empire has long floated on a sea of debt that would make even the U.S. government seem irresponsible but he got away with it because a large number of very responsible business people were there to bail him out.
They did so because he was, for better or worse, the wave of the future.
This book is valuable precisely because it reminds us of just how much Murdoch’s instincts are typical of the exercise of power in the modern media world and that those instincts are by and large amply rewarded. This is a tale of considerable success that is far from over, and one which, unfortunately, is bound to be emulated even more.