The Henry Kissinger Death Carnival: Why it's not outrageous to wish Rupert Murdoch gone
A Donald Rumsfeld's dead! memorial edition.
Note: There isn’t enough space in one newsletter to discuss every awful thing Rupert Murdoch has done in his long career.
Donald Rumsfeld is dead. We have another known known to add to the list: One of the architects of the Iraq War atrocity is gone. He is not coming back and the world is better for his absence. There will be some people who baulk at appearing to celebrate a man’s death, but Rumsfeld will receive many lavish newspapers obituaries. The hundreds of thousands who died in Iraq rarely if ever have their names spoken.
It’s also worth making a philosophical distinction before we go much further in this edition. I did not wish Rumsfeld dead, any more than I wish Henry Kissinger or Rupert Murdoch dead. I’m just not sad or regretful that he’s gone. In fact, I genuinely believe the world is improved by his absence as I think it will be when Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch shuffle off their physical forms to become pure screams of malevolent animus.
The standard industry line on Rupert Murdoch is that he ‘saved’ the British press after he broke the backs of the print unions in the Battle of Wapping. While it’s true that the printers were awkward, censorious bastards whose jobs were being rapidly changed by modern technology, Murdoch was no hero. He was then what he is now: An opportunist. And one who screwed over journalists just as much as he screwed over the printers.
When the writer Dennis Potter was dying, he gave his final interview to Melvyn Bragg. A striking quote from it comes up often in discussions of Rupert Murdoch and the media. Potter told Bragg:
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 — in fact, I've got too much writing to do and I haven't got the energy — but 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.
Potter has spoken more expansively but no less viciously about Murdoch the year before in an authored piece to camera. Sitting in front of a newspaper stand, he said:
... the enemy in question is that drivel-merchant, global huckster and so-to-speak media psychopath, Rupert Murdoch. A Hannibal the Cannibal, who is 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 — 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 opened the trapdoor under the word democracy.
What Potter, who died on 7 June 1994, could not have known was that Labour — the party he had stood for in a no-hope battle in the safe Tory seat of Hertfordshire East in 30 years before — would do a deal with Murdoch to ease its way into government.
In Where The Power Lies: Prime Minister Vs The Media, the former Labour spin doctor Lance Price wrote:
Blair and [Alastair] Campbell took to heart the advice of the Australian prime minister, Paul Keating, on how to deal with Murdoch: "He's a big bad bastard, and the only way you can deal with him is to make sure he thinks you can be a big bad bastard too. You can do deals with him, without ever saying a deal is done. But the only thing he cares about is his business and the only language he respects is strength." Blair and his team believed they had achieved exactly that. A deal had been done, although with nothing in writing. If Murdoch were left to pursue his business interests in peace he would give Labour a fair wind.
In 1995, Blair was invited to News International’s annual conference on Hayman Island, just off Queensland, Australia. Keating’s advice ringing in his ears, his aim was to placate The Sun — the tabloid that Murdoch had practically hand-delivered from the ashes of dying broadsheet version in 1969 — which had battered Neil Kinnock through his tenure.
Blair, his press chief Campbell — a former tabloid hack with the Mirror Group — and Anji Hunter, his old school friend turned political assistant, were flown first class to the event where the future Prime Minister made a speech. In his diaries, Campbell called the appeared “enough for the News Corp lot, enough for the anti-Murdoch neuralgics”, but it was the words that Blair and Murdoch spoke off stage that really mattered.
On 18 March 1997, The Sun officially switched sides having been giving a kicking to John Major’s government for years before that. During the exchange rate mechanism crisis of 1992, The Sun’s then-editor Kevlin MacKenzie had told Major who had phoned to see how bad the headlines would be:
Well John, let me put it this way. I’ve got a large bucket of shit lying on my desk and tomorrow morning I’m going to pour it all over your head.
Now The Sun was committed not simply to throwing buckets of shit at the party which it had promoted and protected since Margaret Thatcher did her own deals with Murdoch1 but turning a firehose of liquid waste towards it. The Sun’s front page said simply THE SUN BACKS BLAIR while the copy told its readers that he was "the breath of fresh air that Britain needs” and castigated the “tired, divided and rudderless” Tories.
While The Sun’s Editor, Stuart Higgins, gave quotes about how he and his team had come to the decision to switch from blue corner to red…
This is not a decision we have taken lightly. We consider Mr Blair has all the qualities of leadership required to take this great country forward. The Tories are tired, divided and need a good rest to regroup.'
… the decision was down to one man — Rupert Murdoch — and the assurances that Blair had given him about how an administration which in the words of Peter Mandelson would be “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes” would give him an easy ride.
It was 5 years since The Sun’s exaggerated and extremely immodest headline (It Was The Sun Wot Won It) in the wake of Major’s unexpected win in the 1992 general election. MacKenzie had slapped the boast on the front page to Murdoch’s displeasure — he likes to swing elections but he never wants to explicitly say that’s what’s going on. In the years since both the Major win and the Blair endorsement, it’s been argued often that any sense of Murdoch being a puppetmaster is vastly overplayed. Just how ol’ Rupert likes it.
News Corp executives, including Murdoch, met ministers and the Prime Minister 41 times in the first 14 months of the Johnson administration. And the government is as close as ever with Murdoch. Boris Johnson’s first meeting with Murdoch after he became Prime Minister took place 72 hours after the General Election. And Home Secretary, Priti Patel, for example, not only has private lunches with Murdoch but was a guest at his wedding to Jeri Hall.
A Tribune article last year put the frequency of the meeting between the Murdoch mafia and the government into context:
Between 2018 and 2019, staff at Rupert Murdoch’s News UK met with government ministers and advisors a total of 206 times. Parliament sat for roughly 73 weeks across this period – which means News UK employees were getting an average of 2.8 meetings per week. The cabinet, by contrast, usually meets only once per week.
When The Sun returned its affections to the Conservatives in 2009 (LABOUR’S LOST IT), there was a direct echo of the events in 1996.
In 2008, David Cameron flew on a private jet organised by Matthew Freud — then Murdoch’s son-in-law — to dine on Murdoch’s private yacht, the Roseharty. In 2017, Ken Clarke, who was Justice Secretary in the Coalition government, told a Competition and Markets Authority inquiry that he believed Cameron has done a deal with Murdoch just as Blair had done before him:
Rebekah Brooks [News UK’s CEO and a former Sun editor] described herself as running the government — now in partnership with David Cameron. I found myself in an extraordinary meeting with Rebekah who was instructing me on criminal justice policy from now on, as I think she had instructed my predecessor, so far as I could see, judging from the numbers of people we had in prison and the growth of rather exotic sentences.
She wanted me to buy prison ships because she did accept that the capacity of the prisons was getting rather strained… She really was solemnly telling me that we had got to have prison ships because she had got some more campaigns coming, which is one of her specialities.
Brooks was Editor of the News of the World during the ‘name and shame’ era — while also managing to turn a blind eye to its own shameful phone hacking antics — and her deputy, former lover, and News of the World editor in his own right, Andy Coulson was then in Number 10 as Cameron’s communications director. In his evidence to the CMA, Clarke claimed that Coulson’s hiring was part of the deal — ‘Murdoch’s man’ parachuted right into the heart of government.
Take a look at Priti Patel’s favoured policies now — sending refugees to Rwanda and floating, pun-intended, prison ships — and you can’t help but wonder if she and Rupert have been chatting about the same things that Brooks tried to push Clarke into backing.
Coulson, of course, left the government in disgrace and ended up serving 18 months in prison after being convicted of phone hacking offences committed during his time as News of the World editor. He’s now a highly paid comms consultant again, advising companies including The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. Presumably, the first bullet point in all his presentations reads: “Don’t hack dead childrens’ phones.”
The Leveson Inquiry that followed the phone-hacking scandal was stuck in the mud once Cameron got his majority in 2015 and after the 2017 general election then Culture Secretary Matt Hancock — whatever happened to that guy? — killed it off permanently.
Hancock axed plans for Leveson 2 (aka Police Corruption Boogaloo) which had been intended to look into ‘close relations’ between public officials — especially police officers — and the British media. The Daniel Morgan Independent Panel report, another inquiry that explored tabloid complicity with corruption, was similarly stymied and delayed.
Murdoch is 90 years old but his influence is still all over the politics of not just Britain but the US and Australia; he remains the eminence mahogany behind several thrones, wielding his newspapers like weapons and his influence like a protection racket. We can be told over and over again that he is not nearly as powerful as we’re told but yet he has the ear of politicians when he calls and what he wants tends to happen.
The argument that Murdoch has been a ‘force for good’ — a claim that has been put forward by his daughter as well as many politicians who have benefitted from his good graces and fear his capricious rage — is laughable. He may have preserved the pool of British newspapers through the success of The Sun and the maintenance of The Times and Sunday Times but he has consistently polluted it. His role in journalism — both with the British newspapers and the US cable network Fox News — has been to fuel and exploit division at every turn.
When the Emperor Palpatine of print media falls, his heirs will have neither their father’s impression of power nor his literal power. They will fight like privileged weasels in the most expensive of sacks. And, in that way, the world will be better when Rupert Murdoch’s gone. Just as I look forward to the Henry Kissinger Death Carnival, I won’t spend one moment mourning Murdoch.
Donald Rumsfeld’s most famous quote — echoing out across the airwaves today — appeared to be gibberish at first but did, in fact, make complete sense:
As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know.
That Rupert Murdoch is a negative force in the world is a known known. The known unknown is when he finally be gone. The unknown unknown is how much damage he will have left behind and how easily it can be undone.
Including one over The Times and Sunday Times that News UK is trying to unwind.