Media Matters

Plenty of rich men buy papers as playthings but they can get bored

For a long time, men – hardly ever women – have launched or bought publications to exert political influence. Beaverbrook (the Express titles), Northcliffe (the Mail) and Camrose (the Daily Telegraph) are obvious examples from the last century.

But such people weren’t merely interested in having political sway. They wanted to make money, too, and usually did so on an epic scale. They were also proper newspapermen who knew about all aspects of the business, and in many cases saw themselves as journalists.

In recent years, a new breed of publishers has emerged. These are hugely rich men who know nothing about newspapers but nonetheless want to own one. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and supposedly the wealthiest man in history, acquired the Washington Post in 2013 for £195 million – equivalent, for him, to the cost of, say, a washing machine for a normal person. The Barclay brothers paid nearly four times that amount in 2004 for the Telegraph titles, having made a fortune in businesses that had no connection with newspapers.

The question is whether such people can make a success of publishing. I’d say the jury is out. Bezos has invested in the Washington Post, which is now making reasonable profits. But he doesn’t need the title to make him richer. The Barclay brothers, less stratospherically wealthy, have made a lot of money out of the Telegraph titles. However, recent figures disclosed that the papers are barely breaking even, and the brothers have put the titles up for sale. In view of declining sales and shrinking advertising revenue, the most seasoned publisher in the world would now struggle to extract substantial profits.

There is a second variant of new media owners. These are people who not only know little or nothing about publishing but also have no expectation of ever making money out of it. They tend to restrict themselves to magazines, where potential losses are less than for newspapers, but the kudos of ownership, and the possibility of exerting influence, are nonetheless significant.

One example is Clive Cowdery, who made a pile out of insurance. Despite his prowess as a capitalist, he is of the soft Left. His Resolution Foundation controls the monthly Prospect magazine. I think it was livelier and less hidebound when continually looking for funds. Now safely in the Cowdery stable, it seems worthy and rather dull.

Two other highbrow magazines are being launched this autumn. The Critic, backed by City multimillionaire Jeremy Hosking, is a breakaway from the centreright Standpoint. And hedge-fund king Chris Rokos is said to be behind another planned right-wing magazine, tentatively called Smith. Perhaps not the ideal title?

Whether there is a market for three intellectual magazines of the Right may be doubted. But it seems this is an era in which enormously rich men bankroll publications. They are defying the increasingly gloomy economics of publishing. That readers benefit can scarcely be disputed. But there is a snag with sugar daddies: they can grow bored or skittish, or turn out to be less rich than everyone thought.

In the end, a newspaper or magazine is secure only when able to stand commercially on its own feet.

My old friend and old colleague Peter Oborne – who has just given up his Mail column – has upset a lot of journalists with a rumbustious article on the opendemocracy platform. He accused much of the media of meekly printing unattributed fake news stories spoon-fed by Number 10. The Mail on Sunday’s Glen Owen, the Sunday Times’s Tim Shipman, ITV’S Robert Peston and the BBC’S Laura

Kuenssberg were all lashed. Oborne said they are guilty of ‘client journalism’ – an accusation widened to include Amol Rajan, the BBC’S media editor, during an interview with Oborne on Radio 2.

Is he right? It seems to me pretty preposterous to indict these excellent journalists for consciously channelling pro-boris Johnson propaganda and, in Oborne’s words, ‘turning their readers and viewers into dupes’. They are simply doing their job and, like all journalists, they are sometimes forced to rely on anonymous sources. It is especially loopy to accuse the BBC of being pro-boris, and by implication pro-brexit, when there are examples of bias in the opposite direction. For example, Andrew Marr recently picked on Home Secretary Priti Patel for laughing during an interview when she was doing no such thing – as the corporation subsequently conceded.

Oborne rightly won admiration for a forensic book he once wrote criticising Alastair Campbell, Blair’s egregious and powerful spin doctor. This time he missed his mark. Having been pro-brexit and pro-boris, Oborne is now as enthusiastically anti-brexit and antiBoris. Nothing wrong with that. But it is not true that Number 10 manipulates the media as expertly as Campbell once did. Journalists seem to me far less compliant now than they were in Blair’s halcyon days before the Iraq War.

Even Oborne may have wondered whether he was on the right track when he was praised by arch-remainer Campbell on Sky News for his opendemocracy tirade.

‘Like all journalists, they are sometimes forced to rely on anonymous sources’