Rupert Murdoch: Sympathy for the Devil

Inside Television 564


Publication Date: 8-5-11

By: Hubert O’Hearn


Sympathy for the Devil: Rupert Murdoch Edition





I like people who make me think. The ones I know who make me think, I treasure. The ones I don’t know who make me think, I want to know. One of the very few regrets I have in what can be broadly termed my writing career is that the interview I had scheduled with Christopher Hitchens had to be canceled because Hitchens is battling esophageal cancer with all his might. Drinks and discussion will have to wait for until his recuperation. Now there’s motivation for both of us to battle onwards, and yes in his case I say that tongue in cheek.



The Hitch, as his great friend Martin Amis calls him, is one of the very few living idols I have left in journalism. There are lots of dead ones: Lincoln Steffens, I.F. Stone, Hunter Thompson, David Halberstam are numbered among them. Their value is not as a model to copy, but rather as metamorphic Scoutmasters who show you how to hold a (moral) compass. Through all the different styles those named had, they all came from a certain point of view, an ethic, and wrote to achieve a purpose. It’s why I understand Hitchens’ defence of the various Middle Eastern wars of the past decade; his attitude towards the eradication of the terrorist factions who hide behind Islam is precisely the same as his long-standing defence of the Kurdish and Palestinian peoples. I may not agree, but I at least can admire someone who takes a stand for a moral reason rather than a mere financial one.



Which leads to Rupert Murdoch. It was inevitable that I would at some point write about the man that the delicious British muckraking magazine Private Eye refers to as the Dirty Digger. I’ve just been waiting for the right angle. As it turns out, two angles formed a perfect vector.



The first was from Hitchens. In his on-line column for Slate he referred to his own timidity in writing a book review about Murdoch’s Sun newspaper. Murdoch also owned The Times and Hitchens badly wanted to write for The Times. What would the proprietor think if he was slammed in the review. So, The Hitch refrained from mentioning Murdoch until the last sentence where he wrote, ‘What does Rupert Murdoch want?’ There’s the first angle.



The second stemmed from, not an argument, but a string difference of opinion I had with one of those friends who makes me think. I’ve mentioned our dear friend the actress and writer Lydia Cornell before. Her reaction to the great hysteria over the U.S. debt crisis and the sheer foulness and negativity of current news coverage was that people should just stop watching the news. Having the finely tuned sense of humour of a Soviet-era border guard, I missed that Lydia was joking. So naturally I loudly disagreed, but the result was I did have my Eureka moment, although I refrained from rising naked from the bath and dashing through the streets. I have the answer to Hitchens’ question.



Rupert Murdoch has no political agenda. What? You protest? You shouldn’t. Why did Murdoch drop support of Labour in order to support the Thatcher Conservatives? He needed the government of the day to back him when he broke the back of the pressmen’s union in moving The Sun from Fleet Street to the non-unionized Wapping Road. Why did he do that? To make more money. Why did he continue to fawn and bribe various politicians? To get television licenses. Why did he do that? To make more money. Why did he allow his papers and ‘news’ networks to break laws and treat journalistic ethics like so much soiled tissue? To make more money.



But how did the latter make more money for him? Because he, Rupert Murdoch, understands our ugly side better than we choose to recognize it ourselves. Murdoch is like that strange light creature in the original Star Trek series that becomes stronger the more the Klingons argue with Captain Kirk. Murdoch feeds the anger, inspires the anger, probably worships the anger because...anger sells. He has replaced prize-fighting as the televised outlet for testosterone with people in blazers spouting invective on split-screen. This is why his appearance before the British House of Commons Select Committee was so...well, banal. There is no there there, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland. There is just a tired old man who wants more coins in his purse. Were his methods not so foul, he could be pitied.



I am convinced of this conclusion. If people on the Left had the money and the naked love of consumer products as people on the Right; if advertisers wanted big Left audiences, Murdoch would turn Fox News into Pravda overnight.

Please allow me to introduce myself - I'm a man of wealth and taste

So why hate Rupert Murdoch? He only gave us what we asked for: a focus for our fear. Be seeing you.