Emeritus Grise.

Rupert Murdoch has 'retired'. Translation: He's going to interfere with editorial line of his newspapers, radio stations, and TV channels even more.

Previously: Footage of The Game.
The BBC and ITV memory-holing programmes featuring Russell Brand still leaves plenty of evidence to consider, but not for right-wing columnists...

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In 1995, there are a number of things coming to head in the Murdoch empire, he’s about to turn 65 — retirement age.

— The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, Episode 1: Kingmaker

Now, 28 years after he reached ‘retirement age’, Rupert Murdoch finally appears to have relinquished control of News Corp, the globe-straddling media company which he has used to bludgeon the culture of the UK, US, and Australia into a shape pleasing unto his rheumy eye. He passes it to his son Lachlan, a character as monstrous as his old man and likely with many more years to live.

There have been a lot of pre-obit pieces about Murdoch following the news; the kind of stuff that begins with a cowardly throat-clearing along the lines of “whatever you think of Rupert Murdoch, you have to admit his achievements are impressive…” But you don’t have to admit anything.

I don’t believe — as the British media orthodoxy has it — that Murdoch’s entering the market by purchasing The News of the World, re-fashioning The Sun into its tabloid form, purchasing The Times and Sunday Times, and defeating the print unions at Wapping were inevitable events that the industry needed. The idea that we should thank him for giving journalists jobs presupposes that in a ‘Sliding Doors’ reality where he never made it out of Australia, no other figure would have taken his place and that no possible alternative could have been better.

Rupert Murdoch reshaped what a British press baron — or “billionaire tyrant” as he introduced himself in a guest appearance on The Simpsons — could be and, in fact, was expected to be. While Lords Northcliffe, Rothermere, and Beaverbrook were big figures who smudged their inky fingers all over politics, they fostered a climate of stuffy pseudo-competition, ensuring the market was carved up among them. That was especially true in the case of the Harmsworth family, in which the most prominent brothers (Alfred aka Northcliffe and Harold ak Rothermere) were joined in their endeavours by three of their other 13 siblings (Cecil, Robert, and Hildebrand).

Murdoch's arrival in 1969 introduced a new kind of ruthlessness to the British media. It also exacerbated the madness of Robert Maxwell who strained every sinew and plundered every pension pot in his wrong-headed and ultimately futile quest to defeat Murdoch in the battle of the Red Tops. Just as sewage floods our rivers and poisons the ecosystem, Murdoch has been — for over five decades — the ultimate source of shit spewing into the information environment of the UK.

In his reflection on Murdoch for UnHerd — the unhinged plaything of the bad banjo player spawning hedge fund headbanger Paul Marshall — convicted fraudster and one-time newspaper proprietor Conrad Black recalls:

“I’m calling to celebrate the demise of Maxwell,” said Rupert Murdoch down the phone to me on the morning Robert Maxwell’s private effects were being auctioned in a bankruptcy sale. I acknowledged that Maxwell had been a frightful scoundrel, but that he was an unforgettable character and I didn’t like to think of him floating around dead in the Bay of Biscay. “I do,” was the reply. Murdoch, as I was often reminded over many years, was a fierce competitor.

Sir Harold Evans — the late, great editor whose period leading The Sunday Times and briefly The Times was brought to an untimely end by Murdoch — said of Maxwell’s attempt to defeat Murdoch:

[He] thought he had entered the ring with another boxer, but he hadn’t. In fact, he’d entered the ring with a ju-jitsu artist who happened to be carrying a stiletto. 

Andrew Neil, himself a former editor of The Sunday Times, writes in his Daily Mail encomium to Murdoch — I’m told by reliable sources that he’s been tweaking his much longer Murdoch obit for years — that:

[Murdoch] has given himself a fancy title: Chairman Emeritus. When Frank Giles, who served briefly in 1982-83 as editor of The Sunday Times between the legendary Harry Evans and myself, was shunted out to make way for me, Rupert gave him the honorary title Editor Emeritus. When asked what that meant Giles self-deprecatingly explained: 'E means out in Latin, meritus means deserves to be.' I don't think Rupert will quite see his title in that way.

Myths build and grow around a person like Murdoch and former Sun editor and continual public irritant Kelvin Mackenzie — in his preemptive Murdoch memorial for The Spectator — offers another angle on Giles’ defenestration:

I remember that when he hired me as editor of the Sun he had just announced that Frank Giles was moving from editor of the Sunday Times to the new role of editor emeritus of the Sunday Times. Being a tabloid guy I had never heard the word ‘emeritus’ so timidly asked what it meant. He replied, in his softly spoken Aussie accent, ‘It means he’s not the fucking editor of the Sunday Times.’ 

Mackenzie, after hinting heavily that Murdoch has often regretted the times he’d sacked people such as, for example, Kelvin Mackenzie (how convenient), simpers:

There will be many journalists out there, me included, who will always be grateful for the opportunities he gave us. The media will never see another Rupert.

Giving Kelvin Mackenzie “opportunities” is a bit like a capricious god giving mosquitos the ‘opportunity’ to spread malaria. The reflections from Neil — more critical but still not slobber free (“The greatest media mogul of modern times…) — and Black — self-serving and supine in equal measure (“my most formidable competitor… the foremost and boldest media proprietor in history.”) accept the premise that Murdoch is tough but necessary; in some way ‘moral’. Evans’ assessment, in his book My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times, was starker:

I’d encountered Murdoch often enough to appreciate the delusiveness of his charm. He was a chameleon, who could switch from good humour to menace. I’d heard every jolly swagman’s yarn which placed him somewhere between Ned Kelly and Citizen Kane. I’d been at seminars on newspaper ethics where he was a caged lion, glowering his contempt for do-gooders and sappy academics. 

Murdoch — after interfering with the editorial line of the paper — began the process of kicking Evans out on the day after the latter had returned from his father’s funeral:

[Murdoch] leaned forward in his chair, took off his glasses, and stared at me. ‘I want your resignation today.’ I was astonished at how calm I was: it was rather like the out-of-body sensation I had the time I was mugged in New York. 

Evans refused to resign there and then, taking his time to do it his way:

Murdoch had gone to New York, but his henchmen told the press I’d resigned when I had not. They proffered statements praising my record. I was not about to comply with this pretence, so I took my time and continued with my conferences. After a week, besieged outside my house by TV cameramen and reporters, and only when my lawyers were satisfied with the terms, I resigned on ITN’s News at Ten, citing ‘the differences between me and Mr Murdoch’. It was 15 March. Only later did I recognise the significance of the date. One of the Shakespeare passages my father knew well and liked to declaim was: ‘Beware the Ides of March.’ 

When Murdoch converted the old broadsheet Sun into the super-soaraway Sun, he and the first editor, Larry Lamb, wrote a leader promising:

Your Sun will be different on Monday. Very different. 

But the most important thing to remember is that the new Sun will be the paper that cares. The paper that CARES — passionately — about truth, and beauty and justice. The paper that cares about people. About the kind of world we live in. And about the kind of world we would like our children to live in.

The same self-serving delusion apparent in those words written in 1969 was present in Murdoch’s statement about his ‘retirement’:

Our companies are in robust health, as am I. Our opportunities far exceed our commercial challenges. We have every reason to be optimistic about the coming years — I certainly am, and plan to be here to participate in them. But the battle for the freedom of speech and, ultimately, the freedom of thought, has never been more intense. 

My father firmly believed in freedom, and Lachlan is absolutely committed to the cause. Self-serving bureaucracies are seeking to silence those who would question their provenance and purpose. Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class. Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth. 

You need to be a multi-billionaire like Murdoch to afford that much gall. He’s raged against ‘elites’ for his entire career, despite being an Oxford-educated rich boy who began his ascent to global media dominance by inheriting a newspaper from his famed father. His obsession with ‘elites’ comes in part from the fact that he inherited only the one newspaper after his father’s death, instead of the entire group that he had expected to control.

Over the years that followed, Murdoch did come to control those assets and put his successor, Lachlan, in charge of some of them, but his bitterness about that beginning — returning home to find his inheritance shrunk — has stuck with him. It’s why Murdoch wrote about his father in his statement.

In his will, Sir Keith Murdoch wrote:

I desire that my said son Keith Rupert Murdoch should have the great opportunity of spending a useful, altruistic, and full life in newspaper and broadcasting activities and of ultimately occupying a position of high responsibility in that field with the support of my trustees if they consider him worthy of that support. 

Seventy-one years at the helm of News Corp fulfil Sir Keith’s wish that his son should spend a “full life in newspaper and broadcasting activities”, but only the most supine of suck-ups could suggest that it has been an “altruistic” one. Whether it has been useful depends on who you are; it has been “useful” for shareholders, members of the Murdoch family, and a selection of headbanging, glass-chewing right-wing politicos in the US, UK, and Australia. For anyone who wants to live in a kinder, calmer, cleverer, and more compassionate society, Murdoch has been neither use nor ornament.

And he can’t leave. While the press release was framed as a kind of retirement, it contains the looming threat to any employee of News Corp that Murdoch may apparate in their office on a Friday afternoon or be at the end of the line when the phone rings, ready with some of his patented ‘advice’, a low Aussie growl saying you’ve fucked up. He writes:

In my new role, I can guarantee you that I will be involved every day in the contest of ideas. Our companies are communities, and I will be an active member of our community. I will be watching our broadcasts with a critical eye, reading our newspapers and websites and books with much interest, and reaching out to you with thoughts, ideas, and advice. When I visit your countries and companies, you can expect to see me in the office late on a Friday afternoon. 

Imagine Murdoch looming next to your monitor like the central character in some antipodean remake of The Ring. Great news for anyone at his companies who likes to leave on time on a Friday or is terrified about nonagenarian newspaper obsessives.

If this is a real-world Succession, this is not the finale. Murdoch’s mother lived to 103 and while he has had a number of falls in recent years, he has access to levels of medical care that could no doubt keep his disembodied head issuing instructions from a temperature-controlled jar for years and years to come.

When Murdoch is finally pronounced dead — perhaps for tax reasons — the real battle for control of News Corp will begin. With his casting vote gone, four of his children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence — will suddenly have equal say. All six of his children — including his two younger daughters with Wendi Deng — will inherit even larger fortunes. James wants to ‘reform’ the company (as he tries to reframe himself as the ‘ethical’ one, real Kendall Roy vibes); Lachlan models himself on his father but is likely to kill the print edition of The Sun and throttle Talk TV; Elisabeth, a successful TV exec in her own right, may feel she should have been the anointed successor; and Prudence, while a director of Times Newspapers, is semi-detached from business and could be the king or queenmaker for one of her siblings.

For now, though, Murdoch, the Emeritus Grise (the Eminent Grease?), will have his bony fingers in all aspects of the business still. Lachlan will have to do the ‘boring’ stuff — massaging the egos of shareholders, attending endless meetings — while his father can focus his Sauron eye on the editorial lines of his newspapers and the way Fox News positions itself in the Republican Primaries and US Presidential election to come. Murdoch will not be able to resist exerting his influence across his empire; when he was nominally on honeymoon after marrying Deng (“You won’t hear from me for two weeks,” he told his then far right-hand man Les Hinton), he lasted a handful of days before flying senior executives to Itay to discuss future strategy.

The pre-obits of Murdoch have been kind; the real thing will be even more gushing. But that is a “political narrative” — the sort Murdoch claims to despise — and the truth is that an Australian man who became American to buy up more of that country’s TV networks has exerted undue influence on the politics of the US, UK, and Australia for five decades. If you look around the crime scenes of culture, politics, and the media, dusting for prints would throw up many culprits, but chief among them would be Keith Rupert Murdoch and the media mafia he built.

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This edition draws on the following books:

Stick It Up Your Punter: The Uncut Story of The Sun newspaper by
Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie
My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times by Sir Harold Evans
The Murdoch Method by Irwin Stelzer
Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire by Walter Marsh
The Man Who Owns The News by Michael Wolff

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