Tabloids love telling tales about the powerful caught up in scandals. So it is wryly appropriate that Rupert Murdoch, the world’s leading purveyor of gossip disguised as journalism, is now caught up in precisely the type of sleazy story that his newspapers and television stations love to wallow in.
Here is a story that has some of the world’s best-selling papers (including the now-deceased News of the World and the still-existing Sun of the United Kingdom) allegedly hacking into the phones of the families of kidnapping victims, terrorism victims and dead soldiers. The same media empire is accused of protecting its corrupt activities by paying off the police and collecting covert information on politicians.
As the sordid facts started becoming public, the elder Murdoch has been forced to sacrifice key lieutenants such as Les Hinton, chief executive of Dow Jones, in order to save the dynastic legacy planned for a favored son, James Murdoch. The latest bombshell to hit is the arrest of Rebekah Brooks, former CEO of News International, who until recently was flattered and courted by leading British politicians, including successive occupants of 10 Downing Street.
Yet to treat the agony of Murdoch and his minions simply as mudslingers getting their comeuppance ignores the genuine political lessons of this story.
Although he dabbled with left-wing politics when young, the mature Murdoch has had a remarkably consistent political profile, one that informs his vast array of media holdings ranging from the Sunday Times of England to The Australian to the Wall Street Journal and Fox News in the United States. With the exception of Murdoch’s Chinese holdings, which tend to defer to the wishes of the Communist Party, all of Murdoch’s media outlets are organs of right-wing populism.
The comedian and actor Steve Coogan, himself an alleged target of the News of the World’s phone hacking antics, described it as “a misogynistic, xenophobic, single-parent-hating, asylum-seeker-hating newspaper.” Coogan’s characterization might be extended to the Murdoch press as a whole, which tends to go after any group that doesn’t adhere to the ideals of middle-class white society. The characteristic stance of a Murdoch newspaper is that of defending putatively “normal” tax-payers against various supposed parasites and weirdos, an eclectic and elastic category that includes union members, gays, almost all foreigners, uppity women, and racial minorities.
The strain of xenophobia that Coogan noticed actually runs like a crimson thread through Murdoch’s career. In 1960, the editors of The News of Adelaide criticized the government’s policy of keeping Asian immigrants out of Australia. Murdoch, whose family owned the paper, forced the editors to change this stance; and a new editorial argued, somewhat absurdly, that “to permit an admixture of Asian and European races to develop within Australia would probably result in tensions that would defeat all our efforts to retain the friendship of our northern neighbors.”
The Sun has a long-standing habit of referring to the French as “frogs,” a term that gets thrown around quite a bit as if it were a clever witticism worthy of Oscar Wilde. As the editors of the paper declared with forthrightness in 1986: “The Sun, as regular readers will know, has never liked the French.” A 1987 headline referred to Germans as “krauts.” Throughout the 1980s, the Sun repeatedly referred to Arabs as “pigs,” with headlines such as “Arab pig sneaks back in” and “Get out you Syrian swine.” The paper summed up its general view of the subject by stating: “The Arabs are very sensitive people, continually proclaiming their virtues before the rest of the world. In reality, they show themselves to be the modern Barbarians, with as much humanity and warmth as a piece of rock.” In 1994, Richard Lynn wrote an article for the Sunday Times arguing that the largely non-white “underclass” of England was in danger of reverting to the “age of the Apes.”
More recently, Murdoch reluctantly apologized for a New York Post editorial cartoon that likened President Obama to a crazed chimp deserving to be shot.
These comments can all be multiplied a thousand-fold without exhausting the nearly limitless bile of the Murdoch press.
What are we to make of this remarkable history of ethnic enmity? First of all, there is no evidence that Murdoch himself is personally bigoted. Murdoch’s third and current wife is of Chinese ancestry. Rather than being a garden-variety bigot, Murdoch is something fouler: an intelligent man who has found a way to make money trafficking in racial animosities he himself doesn’t necessarily share.
Murdoch’s right-wing populism belongs to a long tradition of press barons who traded in yellow journalism while stirring up hatred against various minority groups. In their day, William Randolph Hearst (the mastermind of a vast newspaper chain) and Joseph Medill Patterson (founder of the New York Daily News) craftily combined sensationalistic reports of celebrities, sex and crimes with very conservative social messages and jingoistic nationalism.
Why has there been such a persistent affinity between right-wing populism and tabloid journalism? A simple economic explanation might suffice: To own a newspaper such as The News of the World, you have to be very rich. To make the paper a going concern, you have to appeal to a wide swathe of readers. Left-wing populism might gather a crowd, but it creates the danger that your own wealth might be expropriated if the message is too successful. So it is safer for a newspaper baron to put out a paper targeting minority groups rather than the rich. Right-wing populism is a way for plutocrats to wear the mask of plebian outrage, pretending to be the voice of the very people they are economically exploiting.
Despite all his pretended faith in the free-market, Murdoch’s success has always owed much to his uncanny ability to align himself with governments that were able to dole out lucrative broadcasting and cable monopolies. Not just in China but in the West as well, Murdoch has been an expert practitioner of crony capitalism. Again, we see the large element of fraud inherent in right-wing populism.
Murdoch successfully rode the wave of right-wing populism that first peaked in the 1980s. In the wake of the ongoing economic crisis, that brand of populism now seems both obsolete and dangerous, which is why the eclipse of Murdoch should be welcomed. In a truly democratic society, no individual or corporation should enjoy the unchecked powers that Murdoch was able to amass during the height of his reign as a media baron.
National Post
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