Murdoch's World (16 page)

Bacon's study of the
Australian
(and other dailies) focused primarily on the news pages of the papers, not their opinion content. Murdoch's Australian arm, however, savaged the professor. Greg Baxter, then the director of corporate affairs for News Ltd, asserted she lacked credibility and further deplored that she was allowed to teach students. Baxter offered that the
Australian
“believes that humans are warming the planet—but
obviously there is doubt among those who claim otherwise”—and explained the paper favored a market-based solution. “The fact that Wendy Bacon produces a piece of research that is negative about this company is no surprise to anybody,” he told the
Conversation
news site. “She's been doing it for 25 years.”

Bacon is a recipient of the Walkley Award, the Australian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, for her work exposing police corruption.
Bacon's work made the cut when Murdoch's
Australian
published a list of the country's top 100 stories of the twentieth century. Bacon and her husband, Chris Nash, live in an eggshell-blue house in Newtown, a neighborhood made up of a jumble of working-class, bohemian, and academic streets on the west side of Sydney. She might well not fit in their profile of a desired demographic for the
Australian
. But as we sat on the interior brick courtyard of her home, lined by Australasian trees and blooms, Bacon said she was dumbstruck by News Ltd's reply. She had published little previously on the Murdoch press.

Robert
Manne wrote a lengthy critique of the
Australian
for the
Quarterly Essay
in which he, too, devoted a section to reviewing the newspaper's climate change coverage. His conclusions echoed those of Bacon. “On balance, the opinion pieces and the news coverage in the paper was on the side of those who were against the climate scientists,” Manne told me. “And that might be playing into the hands of the group I call the ‘denialists' because all they have to do is create
doubt in the public mind to make it much more difficult for politicians to take action.”

The top editors and executives at the
Australian
took umbrage at that specific characterization, with its echoes of Holocaust deniers. They responded, correctly, that their paper had been open to a free-flowing debate. But Bacon argued the paper embarked on an intentional and insurmountable effort to tilt debate against any carbon consumption tax, a position consistent with the paper's long-held views on economics.

She had found the most negative coverage in the country's top-selling Murdoch tabloids—the Melbourne
Herald Sun
and the Sydney
Daily Telegraph
. The
Herald Sun
's Andrew Bolt is by common assent the top-read columnist in Australia. He presents as an outright skeptic of climate change, at one point
calling competing newspapers that treat it as settled science “propagandists.” The clash over climate change is a frequent subject of Bolt's program on Lachlan Murdoch's Ten network.

“Everybody was rather taken aback and it seemed to change the editorial tone of climate change coverage for a very short period of time—but not very long. I think it lasted a year, perhaps less,” said Monica Attard, a former foreign correspondent, media critic, and host for the ABC, Australia's public broadcasting network. “And then we were all left scratching our heads as to what Rupert's missive that
News Ltd was to become a ‘green' company was actually all about. Nobody quite understood. Perhaps they turned the lights off at night. We weren't really sure.”

In 2012 tensions within various Murdoch factions in Australia surfaced once again. The Labor-led governing alliance sought modest remedies to contain carbon emissions. But public support had eroded. Murdoch's mother, the centenarian
Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, signed a letter sent to the
Age
, the up-market Fairfax Media paper in her hometown of Melbourne, calling for a price to be put on the use of carbon. Americans would call that a carbon tax.

Columnist
Piers Akerman of News Corp's Sydney
Daily Telegraph
, the nation's top-selling paper, expressed esteem toward the Murdoch matriarch but told fellow panelists on the TV program
ABC Insiders
that she had been used: “The very elderly, no matter how cogent they are, should not be out fronting a campaign.” The national editor of the rival Melbourne
Age
, Michael Gordon, wrote that “Dame Elisabeth's stand is consistent with the stated position on climate change of her son Rupert, but out of step with coverage in his newspapers.” That observation occasioned a sharp slap at Gordon in the
Australian
the next day.

In March 2012, Akerman's column in Murdoch's
Daily Telegraph
carried a provocative headline:
“Greens and their crazy cronies are holding a gun to our head.” Akerman called global warming “a bogeyman” foisted on the general public by environmental activists at the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In July 2012 Murdoch tweeted encouragement about the great promise shown in new technologies used to extract natural gas from shale. But he now warned against government moves to take drastic action on global warming.
“Climate change very slow but real,” he tweeted. “So far all cures worse than disease.”

A message to his hundreds of thousands of followers—and his hundreds of newspaper editors and television news executives, economically conveyed in less than 140 characters: No need to get people worked up about it. We'll handle this one at our own pace. No need for the government to get involved.

9

THE FLYING MUSLIMS

MURDOCH ALWAYS RESENTED GOVERNMENT REGULATION of for-profit news outlets and financial support for the public media sector. That opposition stemmed from both philosophical and competitive reasons, and it was often reflected in the commentaries of his journalists. In the fall of 2010, NPR's decision to sever ties with Juan Williams because of remarks he made on the Fox News Channel became more than just a professional cataclysm for the journalist and a public relations debacle for the public radio broadcaster. The episode served as a singularly telling moment about two distinctive journalistic cultures.

In the summer of 1995, I was a reporter on the metro desk for the
Baltimore Sun
covering campus life and higher education. One of the most contested issues in the state involved legal challenges to a scholarship program at the University of Maryland set aside for African Americans and other minority students. The university had
filed briefs defending the scholarships by invoking the state's racist past. At the outset of the Great Depression, it was widely believed that the university's law school, based in Baltimore, had denied admission to hometown native Thurgood Marshall, who eventually became the chief lawyer for the NAACP, the nation's solicitor general, and the first black jurist to sit on the Supreme Court.

The story had been told many times, including repeatedly in the pages of the
Sun
, but most notably by the late syndicated columnist and civil rights champion Carl T. Rowan. In his 1993 biography of Marshall, Rowan wrote the sting never eased: Marshall's treatment by Maryland fueled his quest for justice, including a landmark case in which he successfully represented a black Amherst College graduate seeking to overturn his rejection from the University of Maryland law school. Marshall also refused to attend the ceremony naming the school library in his honor.

An administrator tipped me off to a law review article suggesting
the facts did not match the legend. There was little evidence that Marshall had ever applied to the University of Maryland law school, because he knew his race would preclude his admission.

I reviewed documents at the Library of Congress and conferred with Marshall's former law clerks and his widow. I found the rejection letter with the language cited by Rowan—but it was in response to an application by a client of Marshall's, not Marshall himself.

Finally I called Williams, then a columnist at the
Washington Post
who was working on his own Marshall biography. While I was in college I had read and admired his book on the American civil rights movement,
Eyes on the Prize
, a companion volume to the PBS documentary television series of the same name.

Williams had also concluded Marshall had not applied. Rowan, though indignant at the suggestion, by all indications misunderstood this seminal episode about Marshall. “He and every other young black person in Baltimore in this time period, in 1930, knew that the
University of Maryland law school did not accept black students,” Williams told me. “At best, it would be defying the state and simply registering your refusal to accept this racist system.”

“In that sense, it doesn't make much difference,” Williams said. But he proved willing to report what he had learned, despite the power of the legend. Several years earlier, Williams had embroiled himself in controversy by defending the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas;
women at the
Washington Post
denounced him for failing to disclose that he—like Thomas—had been accused of verbal sexual harassment by female colleagues. A lengthy apology helped to dispel that flap.

Williams signed up to be a commentator on Fox News in 1997, and in 2000 he left the
Post
to become host of NPR's afternoon public affairs interview and call-in show
Talk of the Nation
. The combination was striking. When I became the
Baltimore Sun
's media columnist,
I profiled Williams: “During the week, Williams acts as the reasonable arbiter, led by common sense to tease out greater truths. Sundays, he's the sparring partner of anchor Brit Hume, perhaps the toniest embodiment of Fox News' often-acerbic style.”

Williams said NPR allowed him to avoid the cable catnip of controversy for its own sake. He was popular and affable, and became more visible than ever for his work on the air. In addition, Williams proved to be one of the network's most highly sought-after public speakers.

But controversy would shadow his time at the radio network.

Williams was eased out of the
Talk of the Nation
job after just a year. Senior producers and executives at NPR concluded—with almost no dissenting voices—that the role wasn't a great fit for him. He became a senior correspondent, tapped to do political coverage and some high-profile interviews.

But
some of those colleagues and some of his listeners did not always appreciate how he subsequently handled himself. One minor element involved a cultural matter, internal to the network. He showed
little interest in mastering how to record interviews on his own, and therefore frequently required a producer to accompany him on assignments. The practice is commonplace in network television, but less frequent at NPR.

Second, and more important, his performance on the air occasioned periodic heartburn. In large part because of his prominence on Fox News, Williams had a line to officials at the Bush White House that was hard for some of his NPR colleagues to match. That was at once envied and believed to be a good thing. He landed interviews with Vice President Cheney, Bush's chief political adviser Karl Rove, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and, in January 2007, President Bush himself.

It was the network's only interview with Bush during his eight-year presidency. By then the public had soured on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Republicans had been tossed from majorities in both chambers of Congress. As he did during most of his interviews, Williams sought to connect with the person sitting across from him. This time,
Williams seemed at his most empathetic, seeking a way to give Bush a chance to explain himself. “You know, people are praying for you,” Williams said. “The American people want to be with you, Mr. President, but you just spoke about the polls and they indicate the public—and you know about what's going up on Capitol Hill with the Congress, some in the military. Even many Iraqis, according to the polls, don't like the idea of sending more troops into Iraq. So I wonder if you could give us something to go on, give us something—say, you know, this is a reason to get behind the president right now.”
Many listeners, including some of Williams's colleagues, believed he had veered dangerously into apologia, even as he broached an uncomfortable truth for the president.

Additionally, Williams had antagonized bosses by continuing to write opinion pieces in major papers such as the
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
, and
USA Today
without getting NPR's approval. He was
not the only major NPR figure to write such pieces.
Weekend Edition Saturday
host
Scott Simon occasionally weighed in, backing President Bush's war on terror in late 2001 in a piece for the
Wall Street Journal
, for example. But Simon tended to run his columns by his editors first. Williams did not.