The Man Who Owns the News (10 page)

After three hours of Dame Elisabeth’s instruction on how she has managed to hold together a family that spans three continents, her views on her “elderly” son’s divorce (“I just bite the bullet and get on with it…I remember saying to Rupert, ‘Rupert you’re going to be very, very lonely, and the first desiring female comes along will snap you up,’ and he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mum, I’m far too old for that’”), what makes “that wretched boy of mine” tick (“He was very definite. I mean, he mightn’t be always right, but he was always very definite”), and his chosen profession (“I don’t care a hang about the newspapers. I don’t care if I don’t see a newspaper for days. Terrible, isn’t it? I’m ashamed to say.”), she is off to a consolation dinner for the recently defeated prime minister, John Howard.

“She’s got this almost Victorian attitude to do this,” Murdoch says with some frustration. “It’s her duty. I keep telling her, ‘Mum, you don’t have to do this, just relax. You’re tiring yourself out. Go out two, three days a week, not seven days.’”

It is surely true that the ties that bind are a lot tighter where there’s a lot of money—and through the early years that Murdoch built the business, Dame Elisabeth held the purse strings. (Murdoch’s financial stake in News Corp. was wound up in Cruden Investments, the company Keith Murdoch left to his wife and children in 1952.)

But it’s not just money—the Bancroft family will prove as much—but money combined with a daunting mythology that truly binds.

You are, in a Murdoch discussion—especially in a Murdoch discussion with Murdochs—instantly back, on a first-name basis, five generations. Not only are the names clear, but so are their characters and motivations. Their stories become an overarching historical composite, such that their descendants might easily believe they are history’s living embodiment—and imperative.

William Henry Greene, Dame Elisabeth’s grandfather, is an Irish railroad man. In the transition from Ireland to England to Australia he becomes the commissioner of Victoria’s railway system.

He marries Fanny Govett, the Australian-born daughter of a founding citizen of Melbourne. Their son, Elisabeth’s father, Rupert Greene, is born in 1870.

Rupert Greene is, in the telling, the source of the family charisma, the deadly charm that, genetically transferred to his grandson, Rupert, would seal so many deals in the latter twentieth century.

The adjectives for Rupert Greene—which we might assume are euphemistic in their ways—include
swashbuckling, popular, amusing, wild,
and
delightful.
He’s a gambling man, and he challenged, in some more or less flashy and memorable ways, the upper-middle-class norms of early-twentieth-century Melbourne—an especially unflashy Protestant place. Still, he married properly: His wife, Marie Grace de Lancey Forth, Elisabeth’s mother, was from a long line of British and Scottish establishment figures.

In 1927, with the Greenes firmly ensconced in Melbourne society, their eighteen-year-old daughter Elisabeth’s debutante picture catches the eye of Keith Murdoch, the forty-two-year-old bachelor publisher, when it is printed in the gossip pages of his own newspaper.

Such an age difference, while mildly scandalous, creates for the Murdoch family a living historical expanse from Keith Murdoch’s birth, in 1885, to the end of his wife’s life—at this point, at least 123 years later. It’s some perspective. (The lives of Murdoch’s two youngest children, Chloe and Grace, could well bookend their grandfather’s birth by more than two hundred years.)

In December 1986, Rupert Murdoch marches into the offices of the Herald and Weekly Times, the company that his father built—and which, in family lore, wronged him by frustrating his efforts to become an owner himself—and announces he’s going to buy it.

This is thirty-four years after his father’s death. For more than three decades, Rupert has nursed this revenge fantasy. He tried it once before, in 1979, and failed: The company’s trustees enlisted Australia’s oldest establishment media family, the Fairfaxes, to block him. Seven years later, he’s back, and wins.

This is not just a psychological involvement with your family but an operatic involvement. It’s your destiny. You literally see yourself as part of a grand plot and extraordinary story.

Indeed, Keith Murdoch isn’t just the most prominent businessman and newspaper publisher in Australia: He’s the hero of Gallipoli.

The battle for the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey is the most fundamental story of Australian identity. It’s the Australian version of Dunkirk or Pearl Harbor or Bunker Hill. Or greater still. It is at the center of Australia’s place in the world—its relationship to the British, its ideas of mateship, egalitarianism, and anti-establishmentarianism. And, not insignificantly, it’s a story later retailed by Keith’s son, who helped finance the 1981 film
Gallipoli,
directed by the Australian Peter Weir and starring Mel Gibson (making Mel Gibson a star).

Gallipoli, where in 1915 the British ordered eight thousand Australian and New Zealand infantry and light horsemen to their death in a failed assault on the Turks, is not just the family’s first media event; it is media as a transformative force.

Keith Murdoch is, in 1915, a young man of a good background and fine connections, whose professional potential is already abundantly clear. He’s the product of two generations of Scottish-Protestant clergy, in an age when the clergy is a highest-attainment profession. The Murdochs are Free Churchers. Keith’s grandfather James Murdoch, born in 1817 on the Moray Firth, of Scotland, joins upward of 470 other Presbyterian clergymen in the Disruption of 1843 to break with the Church of Scotland. The issue here—a Murdoch theme to this day—is the relationship with England. The Church of Scotland is too tight with the English establishment (an anti-English catechism became central to the Free Churchers). The schism here, however, isn’t one of rebels turning their back on the establishment, but rather—and this remains another Murdoch family theme—the troublemakers arguing that
they
are the rightful establishment.

Keith’s father, Patrick, is born in Scotland in 1850. Patrick, raised in anti-English Scottish Protestantism, becomes an assistant to a big-name London clergyman and then in 1878 is ordained himself and given a church in Cruden, a fishing village in Aberdeenshire.

Patrick marries Rupert’s grandmother Annie Brown in 1882, and in 1884 takes a Free Church posting in Melbourne. Patrick, in relatively short order, finds himself not just a clergyman-pillar of the Melbourne community—and the immigrant waves have made Melbourne the largest city in Australia—but a leader of the Presbyterian Church of Australia.

Keith is born in 1885. He is meant to carry on the Calvinist line, but instead becomes a journalist. This is perhaps because of his terrible stutter—a grievous impediment to preaching. Still, at the turn of the century, 1885 journalism is nobody’s idea of a profession. Or it is only a good idea if you own the press itself. To be a journalist from an upper-class family is to see yourself as something of a cultured industrialist. You would own the factory; the actual people who gathered up the news would be the factory workers.

Keith’s father arranges a job for him on a prominent Melbourne paper.

Then, in 1908, he goes to study—unhappily, as it turns out—at the London School of Economics. He returns to Melbourne in 1910 and becomes a political writer—a parliamentary correspondent. He’s a supporter of his father’s friend Andrew Fisher, the Labor Party leader who is elected for three terms as Australia’s prime minister. The Murdochs, in other words, are cronies and confidants of the most powerful people in the land.

Keith Murdoch, beginning his management rise, becomes the London editor of the news agency United Cable Service (the journalism business at the time is also the telegraph business). His father’s chum Fisher, serving his third term as prime minister, asks the twenty-nine-year-old Keith to stop in Egypt on his way to London to look into some problems with the mail service to Australian soldiers (journalism is also closely related to mail).

Enterprisingly, Keith gets in touch with General Ian Hamilton, the commander of the Australian force in the Dardanelles, hoping to secure a firsthand look at the battlefield scene at Gallipoli.

Stringent censorship regulations are in place, not least of all because everything about the Dardanelles campaign has gone so terribly wrong. Keith agrees, in writing, “not to attempt to correspond by any other route or by any other means than that officially sanctioned.”

In fact, Keith spends almost no time at all at the front. Instead, he settles into the press camp, on the island of Imbros away from the front, and falls under the spell of Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett of the
Daily Telegraph,
the dean—a drunken one—of the Dardanelles correspondents. Because of the censorship rules, most of Ashmead-Bartlett’s dispatches never see print. The rules, according to Phillip Knightley (who will work for both Keith Murdoch at the
Herald
and for Rupert at the
Times
of London) in his book
The First Casualty,
about journalists in wars, allow “no criticism of the conduct of the operation, no indication of set-backs or delays, and no mention of casualty figures.” Very few people in Britain or Australia, in other words, understand the enormousness of the debacle.

Ashmead-Bartlett convinces Murdoch that the deterioration of the Dardanelles campaign will only get worse. “Murdoch,” according to Knightley, “must have realised that almost by accident he was in possession of information that would certainly rank as one of the great stories of the war.”

Keith decides to break the censorship rules and smuggle out the British correspondent’s dispatch. Their plot is discovered and the dispatch confiscated.

Acting not so much as a journalist but as a confidant of the powerful, Keith writes Fisher, the Australian prime minister, recounting everything he can remember from the Ashmead-Bartlett dispatch. It’s a paean to the virtues and heroism of the Australians and an indictment of the duplicity and cowardice of the British. It is, in Knightley’s description, “an amazing document, a mixture of error, fact, exaggeration, prejudice, and the most sentimental patriotism, which made highly damaging charges against the British general staff and Hamilton, many of them untrue.”

Arriving in London, Keith Murdoch brags about the letter to Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the
Times.
The
Times
—which Keith’s son Rupert will own in a few generations—is then owned by Lord Northcliffe (aka Alfred Harmsworth). In the history of powerful press barons who’ve meddled in politics, Northcliffe ranks only behind William Randolph Hearst and Rupert himself. Northcliffe has fiercely opposed the Dardanelles campaign and, with the encouragement of future prime minister David Lloyd George—this is all at a very high level of intrigue—who also opposes the campaign, has Keith’s letter sent to the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, who promptly has it printed and distributed to the cabinet.

As a nearly direct consequence of Murdoch’s letter, whatever its inaccuracies, Hamilton, the British general, is removed, and the evacuation of Gallipoli begins.

Or…maybe it doesn’t happen like that at all.

This event, so central to Australian mythology and to the rise of the Murdoch family, will be subject to natural and baroque revisionist accounts. Keith is not only
not
heroic but mendacious—a sneak, a thief, a plagiarist, and, of course, a self-promoter. Or he is the dupe of powerful men, a bit player in a larger conspiracy. Or a kind of Zelig—in the frame of history, but without real consequence.

No matter: It is a personal and media coup—Keith Murdoch becomes part of Australia’s World War I mythology. On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Gallipoli, the
Times
, at that point owned by his son, will run an account of his legend under the headline “The Journalist Who Stopped a War.”

The coup, in addition to making Keith famous at home, also cements his relationship with Lord Northcliffe, who becomes his mentor—his media rabbi.

Northcliffe is one of the great figures of the tale. His is the first great populist media empire. He has the touch (he helps Joseph Pulitzer create the famous one-time tabloid issue of the
World,
which appears on January 1, 1901, and a few years later begins the tabloid London
Daily Mirror
) and he has the business model: mass.

“A newspaper is to be made to pay. Let it deal with what interests the mass of people. Let it give the public what it wants,” pronounces Northcliffe to the great condemnation of intellectuals far and wide.

Northcliffe’s company—which will continue into the twenty-first century as Associated Newspapers, publishing the
Daily Mail,
“the voice of middle England,” and arguably the most influential paper in Britain—also includes the
Daily Mirror,
the
Evening News,
and the
Observer.
(The
Mirror
and
Observer
eventually change hands; the
Evening News,
which will continue to be owned by Associated, will change its name to the
Evening Standard.
) His takeover of the money-losing
Times
in 1908 is an occasion for pretty much the same kind of censure by the upper crust and journalists that will occur when Rupert takes it over more than eighty years later.

Keith Murdoch, after Gallipoli, runs his news service out of the
Times
’ office until in 1920 he is offered the editorship of the Melbourne
Herald
—the most upmarket and establishment paper in the country—which, with Northcliffe’s assent, Keith accepts.