The Rupert Murdoch protection bill
Following reports that Rupert Murdoch might be ‘plotting a return’ to New Zealand, Toby Manhire, editor-at-large of The Spinoff, looks at the global shadow he casts in media, business and politics across more than six decades – including a heated 1965 parliamentary debate between Holyoake and Kirk.
Even now, the front page of a tabloid packs a visceral punch. Giant headlines, bloated puns, garish images; there is nothing quite like it. All the more so if it’s a News Corp title. Then it becomes also a sign, a smoke signal, a message not quite from God, but close: the most dangerous man in the world, Rupert Murdoch.
That’s how it went last week, when the headline on the New York Post read: ‘‘TRUMPTY DUMPTY’’, pointing the finger of blame at a man perched eggily on a wall. ‘‘Don (who couldn’t build a wall),’’ chortled the coverline, ahead of Donald Trump’s anticipated announcement that he was running again for the US presidency, ‘‘had a great fall – can all the GOP’s men put the party back together again?’’
Murdoch the man is softly spoken. But his voice, his influence – sometimes real, sometimes exaggerated, sometimes imagined, always obsessed over – has echoed through the halls of politics for more than six decades. Little wonder, then, that a less violent local headline this month, ‘‘Murdoch plots New Zealand return’’, sent a shiver down spines.
The Australian mogul has been a fascination here, as almost everywhere, since the 1960s, when Keith Holyoake and Norman Kirk debated the meaning of Murdoch, with passion and at length, in the New Zealand parliament.
‘Do we want Murdoch to eliminate our newspapers?’
New Zealand was the first foreign media foray for a young and tenacious Rupert Murdoch. In January 1964, he sailed across the Tasman and toured New Zealand with friends in a Morris Minor.
The 32-year-old, then steadily building his Australian portfolio from a single newspaper in Adelaide (all that was left of his father Keith’s once strong media stable), happened on the news that Lord Thomson, a powerful UKbased Canadian press baron, was seeking a controlling stake in Wellington’s Dominion newspaper. Murdoch decided to take him on.
Murdoch outfoxed Thomson (from whom, years later, he would purchase the establishment title he so coveted, the Times of London), buying a number of shares on the open market and securing a dominant stake of almost 30% in the Wellington Publishing Company.
The two moguls’ tussle for the newspaper led to Keith Holyoake driving through New Zealand’s Parliament the News Media Ownership Bill of 1965, which would limit future overseas ownership of news operations to 20%. Its intention, Holyoake told Parliament, was to protect homegrown journalism against the fickle or malign self-interest of foreign press barons.
Labour leader Norman Kirk railed against an ‘‘obnoxious, iniquitous, repressive’’ bill. The Government’s real concern, he judged, was maintaining the sympathetic press coverage it enjoyed under the status quo. ‘‘This is not a News Media Ownership Bill but a National Government Protection Bill,’’ said Kirk. ‘‘It is a first step towards removing the independence of the press.’’
The president of the New Zealand Journalists’ Association was similarly opposed. ‘‘The effect of the legislation,’’ he said, ‘‘is specifically to protect the interests of one overseas investor, the News Limited group of Adelaide, headed by Mr Rupert Murdoch.’’
Holyoake accepted that he had held discussions with Murdoch, but his motives were the same: to limit foreign influence. Those calling the legislation the ‘‘Murdoch Protection Bill’’ were quite wrong, he said. On the contrary, ‘‘the issue at this stage is: Do we want Murdoch to take over and eliminate our newspapers?’’
‘Most humble day of my life’
Fast forward 46 years from Holyoake and Kirk to another, bigger parliament, and a scene that must sit at the centre of any Murdoch biopic. It was the summer of 2011 and Rupert Murdoch, along with his son James, the boss of the family’s UK operations, was appearing before Westminster’s culture, media and sport committee to face questions over the phone hacking at the News of the World.
The scandal, revealing illegal activity on a near-industrial scale, had engulfed the paper and the wider company, and dominated British headlines for many months. A week before the father-son pair faced the committee, Murdoch Sr had taken the jaw-dropping decision to fold the 168-year-old title, to put a bullet in the head of his beloved first British media property, acquired a full 43 years earlier. ‘‘This is the most humble day of my life,’’ the 80-year-old press baron told MPs that morning.
Frequently mumbling, sometimes appearing baffled, unflinchingly deferential, Murdoch rejected a host of accusations from MPs, from the charge of ‘‘wilful blindness’’ to one MP’s suggestion he resembled a ‘‘mafia boss’’.
The exchange – though not its climax, when Murdoch’s then wife, Wendi Deng, pursued a protester who clown-pied her husband – was paid fictional homage eight years later on HBO, when Logan Roy and his son Kendall appeared before a senate subcommittee probing abuses in Waystar Royco’s cruise division. It was ‘‘the worst day of my life’’, intoned Logan. The series, Succession, draws on many monsters and media dynasties, but the Murdochs are the mother lode, a gruesome pantheon of siblings and spouses, of sycophants, regents and schemers.
James Murdoch’s swagger seemed not to recover from the hacking scandal. Or maybe it was his conscience. He quit the News Corp board in 2020, citing ‘‘disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets’’. James’ main objection was thought to centre on climate change coverage.
By then, his older brother, Lachlan, was cemented as heir. After his own mysterious stint out of the fold, Lachlan returned to his father’s company and in 2004 was made co-chairman of News Corp.
‘Fair and balanced’
Rupert Murdoch was a disruptor long before that word became part of the Ted Talk lexicon.
He transformed media markets and broke union movements. Politicians and parties that shared Murdoch’s free-market worldview, that smoothed the regulatory way, were rewarded; opponents were lambasted or lampooned.
His titles stood ready to lift a sail and catch the popular wind. At times they tried to engineer the weather. On election day in 1992, with the UK Labour Party leading in the polls, The Sun infamously ran a front page featuring the party leader Neil Kinnock’s head in a lightbulb, with the words ‘‘Will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?’’
Labour lost, prompting what was not one of Murdoch’s most humble days. ‘‘IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT’’ went the headline.
Tony Blair and the New Labour project focused great energy on courting Murdoch. In 1995, Blair infuriated Kinnock by accepting an invitation to travel to Australia to address a News Corp conference. It paid off. Two years later The Sun switched teams and endorsed Blair. During his time at No 10, Blair was made godfather to one of Murdoch’s daughters.
In 2007, Murdoch’s acquisition of The Wall Street Journal gave him a long-sought authoritative newspaper in the US. But he could not buy the admiration of rivals. In the late 60s, Britain’s Private Eye dubbed him ‘‘the Dirty Digger’’, a label that stuck. The Columbia Journalism Review called him ‘‘a force for evil’’.
When the world was debating a possible war in Iraq in 2003, Murdoch’s newspapers, more than 150 around the globe, New Zealand included, endorsed a US-led invasion. Editors denied emphatically any suggestion they had been handed an edict from their proprietor. Critics said he hardly needed to.
In the US, Murdoch’s influence continued to grow. In 1976, he had purchased the New York Post, turning a liberal paper into a rightwing scandal sheet. Two decades later, Fox News was launched.
Alongside Roger Ailes, Murdoch built a Conservative powerhouse under the audaciously untrue strapline ‘‘fair and balanced’’, providing a platform for outspoken right-wing partisans including Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.
The network, which in 2017 swapped out its slogan for ‘‘Real news. Real honest opinion’’, was instrumental in the rise of Trump, whose reactionary, polarising showmanship in turn turbocharged Fox ratings.
Trump was by numerous accounts glued to the channel in the White House. In the year 2019 he personally posted 657 tweets responding to Fox News or Fox Business.
Not banned and not bothered
The BusinessDesk headline ‘‘Murdoch plots New Zealand return’’ overcooked the report that followed. The return being plotted looks modest: a ‘‘dedicated New Zealand section on the website of The Australian, the group’s paywalled, right-leaning broadsheet’’.
Such an initiative, and the hiring of a couple of local journalists, would at most put it on par with the existing footprint of The Guardian in Aotearoa. And, as with The Guardian, the basis is straightforward. The audience numbers for stories about and from New Zealand are encouraging; let’s try to extract more reader revenue out of the place.
Murdoch sold his New Zealand newspaper operations in 2003, at a time when his focus was largely on television growth. By then, thanks in large part to the management of Alan Burnet, they had grown to cover most of the country as Independent Newspapers Ltd.
He dipped his toe again, with Murdoch companies at times holding stakes in Sky Network Television and APN (a forerunner to NZME), but these days he has no obvious direct ownership in New Zealand media companies.
His reputation is such, however, that even in absence Murdoch radiates controversy.
International newswires’ factchecking services have repeatedly moved this year to quash false claims that his companies are banned in New Zealand.
Reuters theorised this might have stemmed from commentator David Cormack’s assessment that ‘‘a huge reason that our politics is not so extremely polarised and so far out there is because we no longer have Murdoch-owned press in New Zealand, and it’s never taken a foothold.’’
It is hard to argue with that. The tenor of Australian politics is palpably harsher and more hostile, its culture entwined in inflamed symbiosis with the Murdoch press.
But don’t recline your seat. Cormack’s comments were for an October 2020 Guardian feature looking at Aotearoa’s relatively low level of populism, conspiracy theory and Covid-19 scepticism. Plenty has transpired since.
It’s hard to imagine him being engaged with, if he’s even aware of, the Australian newspaper hiring a reporter or two in New Zealand. Like another mythic media monster, Don Draper, he probably doesn’t think about us at all.
BusinessDesk did, however, note speculation that he might fancy an acquisition – the NBR, perhaps.
There is little in law to stop him. In 1975, Labour fulfilled its pledge and repealed the News Media Ownership Bill. In the decades that followed, foreign ownership of nonstate New Zealand news outlets became the norm.
There is today a character test on overseas purchases of ‘‘media entities that have an impact on New Zealand’s media plurality’’, but that should be a breeze.
Maybe, as he approaches his 92nd birthday, Rupert remembers fondly that Morris Minor road trip, that land of humility, his conversation with Holyoake in some smoke-filled room.
There are worse places to slide into semi-retirement. Fox News is available. So is HBO.