Media Matters
For some he’s the ultimate hate figure, but his successor will almost certainly be worse
For fifty years, Rupert Murdoch has been a hate figure for most on the Left and some on the Right. He is said to have vulgarised the working classes with his Page Three girls in the Sun. Many – including me, on occasion – have argued that he dumbed down the Times, which he acquired in 1981. Most unforgivably for his critics on the Left, he has championed Right-wing causes and promoted Euroscepticism.
Murdoch has just sold much of his media empire to Disney, though the deal is still subject to shareholder and regulatory approval. Once he has offloaded 21st Century Fox (which includes a 39 per cent controlling stake in Britain’s Sky Television), he will be left with the Right-wing Fox News in America, and a large clutch of newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, the Times and the Sun. The media tycoon denies he is retreating but, given that his newspapers are to varying degrees in decline, and that he is 86, one feels an era is drawing to a close.
His enemies on the Left are cock-ahoop. Indeed, Ed Miliband, Vince Cable and Lord Falconer have said that the sale of his broadcasting assets to Disney is ‘good for broadcasting, the quality of public debate and democracy’. The trouble with such sentiments is that they ignore what is likely to happen next. Isn’t it possible that whoever succeeds Murdoch will turn out to be, even for the Left, very much worse?
For one thing, it’s not clear Disney will keep the loss-making Sky News going. The company could inherit Murdoch’s 39 per cent stake or, if a Murdoch deal still in play to acquire 100 per cent of Sky goes ahead, it could emerge as the sole owner. Most of Sky’s commercial channels are highly profitable. But it’s hard to see why an entertainment business based on the West Coast of America should wish to support Sky News in the longer term. If Disney did divest itself of the unprofitable news outlet, there would probably be no bidders. Sky News would die.
Rupert Murdoch’s detractors hate him so much that they are unable to concede he has done any good. But shouldn’t he be congratulated for having backed Sky News as the controlling shareholder of Sky? Even his enemies don’t contend that the news outlet is Right-wing or unbalanced. Murdoch has not only continued to absorb his share of the losses of Sky News as the company’s majority shareholder; he has also made no attempt to influence its political stance. In short, he has fostered media pluralism.
The same could be said of his ownership of the Times. There is no official figure for the losses his company has sustained in supporting the title over the past 35 years, but they run into hundreds of millions of pounds. It’s true that for a time the newspaper did dumb down, and it’s also the case that it enthusiastically supported the Iraq war, a cause to which Murdoch was very committed. On the other hand, it has maintained an independent voice well to the Left of the media tycoon. Despite Murdoch’s Europhobia, the paper supported Remain during the referendum and is increasingly antiBrexit in tone. Some people won’t read the Times because it is owned by Murdoch. But can they think of anyone who would have been a more sympathetic – as well as a financially viable – proprietor?
Of course, he is far from perfect. I have a personal gripe against him because of the way he helped kill off the Independent. When that paper was selling roughly the same number of copies as the Times in 1993, he slashed the price of his title, and then after a few months cut it again. The effect was to more than double the sales of the Times while those of the Independent plummeted. He was in effect crosssubsidising the loss-making Times from his profitable businesses to kill of its upstart rival – which would have been illegal in some countries. But he’s a businessman, not a saint, and he was allowed by the authorities to do it.
There are other things to be said against him. Phone-hacking thrived at the News of the World during his ownership, though there is no evidence he knew anything about it. And then he closed the paper in an unnecessary panic in 2011 after its excesses had been made known. He also failed to support journalists on the Sun who were being investigated by the police for allegedly paying public officials, though in almost all cases they were innocent.
I’m sure there’s fight in him yet. He’ll go on running his newspapers for a while. He loves them more than anything. Alas, though, they’re not what they were, particularly the Sun. And neither of his sons, James or Lachlan, seems keen, willing or even able to run them after he has gone. What will his adversaries on the Left say if Sky News is closed, and the Times is bought by a Chinese billionaire?