Rupert Murdoch Death Party

The demise of News Corp's mafia boss will be a day to celebrate.

Please note: It’s not even remotely possible to cram all of the miseries, indignities, cruelties, and crimes of Rupert Murdoch into a single newsletter edition.

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‘George Square Thatcher Death Party’ from Mogwai’s 2011 album Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will became a manifest reality in 2013 when around 250 people gathered at that spot in Glasgow after the former Prime Minister died. Sadly, there’s no equivalent anticipating Rupert Murdoch’s death, beyond a jingle looping in my mind.

While I have every intention of speaking ill of the dead, I’m impatient so I’ll continue to speak ill of Rupert Murdoch while he’s still alive. One of the foundational principles of this newsletter and the way I see the British media, generally and in particular, is that Murdoch and his family are a malign influence. Though his death will not end that influence — his eldest son and co-chairman of News Corp, Lachlan, is a chip off the old cock¹ — it will still gladden my heart for a moment.

In his final televised interview, conducted by Melvyn Bragg for Channel 4 in March 1994 and broadcast the following month, the ailing Dennis Potter famously said:

I call my cancer, the main one, the pancreas one, I call it Rupert, so I can get close to it, because the man Murdoch is the one who, if I had the time… I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press, and the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life.

But Potter didn’t confine his attack on Murdoch to when he knew he was quickly heading for the exit door. In 1993, before his terminal diagnosis, he made an episode of Channel 4’s Opinions, with his anger about Murdoch at its heart. He began:

Switch off now. There’s no sex in this programme, unless you count the Sun newspaper’s dirty words, but there will be a great deal of violence. I’m going to get down there in the gutter where so many of our journalists crawl, and for maybe the fifth time in my life conduct an argument in the sort of personal terms that have become the norm across such large and fetid tracts of our cynical, venal, genuinely prostituted and foreign-owned press

… what I’m about to do is to make a provenly vindictive and extremely powerful enemy, a sort of serial killer (metaphorically speaking) who has more phials of poison at his command than there are chemists’ shops in this troubled land.

… the enemy in question is that drivel-merchant, global huckster and so-to-speak media psychopath, Rupert Murdoch…

The text of previous episodes — Alan Clark on Britain, Brian Cox on education, Linda Colley on British history, Sir James Goldsmith on Europe — were published in The Times. Curiously, Potter’s monologue was not and an abbreviated version (headlined ‘Murdoch's Desolate View of Human Life’) appeared instead in The Guardian². A live debate at Westminster Hall, linked to the series and sponsored by The Times, didn’t find space for Potter on its panel.

The Sunday Times — where Potter had been a celebrated and caustic TV critic before the Murdoch era — ran a review of the programme. In it, Craig Brown denied he was defending his boss and wrote:

No doubt Potter will imagine that these criticisms are the first volley in [Mudoch's] global counter-attack, but it is inspired less by loyalty than by disloyalty: I could have done it much better myself.

But, of course, the Eton-educated Brown would have done nothing of the kind; his career as a satirist has been pursued in the pages of Tatler, The Spectator, The Evening Standard, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Times Literary Supplement and of late The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday as well as Private Eye.

Brown’s anecdotes about Murdoch for The Spectator Diary in the late-80s all showed the man who the Eye insists on calling “the Dirty Digger” in a favourable light, while his sketch about the Murdoch family from the Leveson era was written under the protective umbrella of Lord Rothermere and behind the snarling figure of Paul Dacre.

The Murdoch-invoicing Brown of 1993 suggested that Potter’s anger was entirely down to bad reviews of his TV plays:

Any viewer coming fresh to the programme would have thought that Murdoch's most dreadful sin was to employ journalists who were occasionally a little rude about Dennis Potter… the only examples Potter gave of the perfidy of the Murdoch press lay in their unfair treatment of the plays of Dennis Potter. ”You stain your soul in opening Murdoch's Sun," he said. And why? Because it employs Garry Bushell, a television critic who has been shockingly critical of Dennis Potter… This disastrously deflected this ostensible attack on Murdoch from its true target.

But that’s not true; had Potter’s monologue purely been a whine about negative reviews, The Times might have still published it as it did the other transcripts. Instead, he spoke bluntly about Murdoch’s influence on government…

[He] is in many important ways a deal more powerful in Britain than our own schoolboy Parliament, its minority elected Government, and even its bumbling Mr Pooter of a Prime Minister. A Government — and God help us — that the Murdoch press did so much, so dishonestly, to put into power, mostly by means so aslant, so tilted, so bent and untrue that they by definition open up the trap-door under the word “democracy”…

… and the nature of his tabloids:

The one thing we most need is that freedom of information and that cleanliness of ownership that would allow us, at least, to know that the facts that we are being given, and the opinions we are being given, are part and parcel of our own mature decisions to be full citizens, in a full democracy.

There is an avid wet-mouthed down market slide that began its giddiest decent on the day marauding Rupert Murdoch first left his paw-marks on our shores in acquiring the Sun and dragged so many others toward the sewers where too many of his too craven employees have their natural habitat.

Brown’s review ignores these criticisms and frames Potter as a purveyor of “a violence and paranoia more often to be found in anonymous letters written in large capital letters and green ink, with plentiful underlining,” because he knew that his readers would not easily be able to access the programme after its initial broadcast.

Potter also quoted from former Guardian political editor Ian Aiken’s LRB review of ‘Murdoch’ by William Shawcross:

… in the course of nearly six hundred pages, [Shawcross] provides plenty of denunciation from others, together with enough facts about [Murdoch’s] conduct to hang him several times over.

But Murdoch has turned out to be the man they couldn’t hang. The dodderer who told a parliamentary committee in 2011 that appearing before it to answer questions on the phone hacking scandal was “the most humble day of [his] life”, was considered by CNN to be “bouncing back” less than a year later.

Since 2006, News Corp has paid over £500 million in legal fees and damages to make phone hacking claims go away. Most of those cases centred on the News of the World, which Murdoch shuttered abruptly in 2011 in an attempt to bury the toxicity. But in recent years, the company has — without admitting liability — reached financial settlements with individuals who say The Sun hacked their phones.

The latest wave of claims indicate the breadth of the Murdoch tabloids’ Sauron’s Eye gaze across British society. The new ‘Sun-only’ claims come the actor Hugh Grant, the London 7/7 bombings survivor John Tulloch, Charlotte Church’s mother, Maria, Paul Gascoigne’s friend Jimmy Gardner, Tricia Bernal (the mother of murder victim Clare Bernal), David Beckham’s father, Ted, and the jockey Kieren Fallon.

A further 150 claims against News Group Newspaper (NGN) include Baroness Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, who has also begun proceedings against Associated Newspapers, Tulisa — the victim of a sting by the ‘fake sheikh’ Mazher Mahmood which resulted in his conviction for attempting to pervert the course of justice, Chris Jefferies, who was falsely suspected of murdering Joanna Yeates, and seven former cabinet ministers.

School of hard Knox: For the British press no one is ever truly innocent whatever courts say...

It’s likely that the legal proceedings against NGN will have gone on for more than 20 years by the time the latest set of cases concludes. And yet being tied up in one of the longest litigations in British legal history has not stopped politicians from flocking to Murdoch’s summer parties, or done anything to reduce his easy access to ministers, shadow ministers, the Leader of the Opposition, and the Prime Minister.

James Murdoch, back then still a snivelling Muttley by his father’s side, bristled when the company was compared to the mafia during that 2011 parliamentary appearance. But there are countless examples of how News Corp — whether it’s through The Sun, Fox News or The Times, which pretends it’s above that sort of thing — has terrorised “an enemy”. Think back to 2004, when Clare Short said at a Westminster lunch that she would “like to take the pornography out of our press”.

The Sun’s headline response? ‘Fat, Jealous’ Clare Brands Page 3 Porn. Its direct action? Sending a busload of scantily-clad models to Short’s house to jeer her, and comping her head onto the body of a topless woman. The paper was a pioneer of revenge porn and cheapfakes, and the woman who is now News UK’s CEO, Rebekah Brooks, was its editor at the time. In 2015, The Sun stopped putting topless women on page 3, though the spot still features a woman in a bikini or lingerie every day tied to a spurious story. Its apology to Clare Short is still pending.

Back in 2011, Nick Davies summed up Murdoch’s ongoing defence whenever any of News Corp’s dark secrets seep out from between the cracks:

Essentially, he worked too high up the ladder to see the ground. He had 52,000 employees, and the News of the World accounted for less than 1% of News Corp, he explained. Twice.

It’s the modus operandi of organised criminals and spooks — plausible deniability. That along with a remarkably clumsy approach to record keeping, cosy relationships with the police, and a willingness to sacrifice as many underlings as required to protect the people at the top. Of course, everyone is an underling to Rupert Murdoch.

Dennis Potter died 28 years ago. He didn’t live to see the Leveson Inquiry lift the rock to reveal the squirming horrors underneath that he always knew were there, or to witness News UK paying out hundreds of millions to victims of Murdoch’s tabloids. When Rupert Murdoch finally goes, I’ll dance and raise a glass to Potter, listening at the window for a thousand other sounds of glee.

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Recommended watching: Arena: Potter on Television (2005)
Recommended reading: The Art of Invective: Selected Non-Fiction 1954 - 94

1. For example, he’s currently trying to destroy a small Australian website.

2. It was also published in unexpurgated form in the British Review of Journalism. Thanks to BGMM for sending the article.