Eric Beecher on being sued by a Murdoch – and other media matters

This story is part of the September 21 edition of Good Weekend.See all 15 stories.

From a start in journalism at The Age, Eric Beecher became the youngest editor of The Sydney Morning Herald in 1984, at age 33. He went on to become editor-in-chief of The Herald and Weekly Times Group, resigning two years later over ethical differences with proprietor Rupert Murdoch. More recently, he was sued by Lachlan Murdoch over an opinion piece in his Private Media-owned Crikey website. He talks Murdochs, media and moguls with David Leser.

Your new book is called The Men Who Killed The News. Who’s the biggest killer? There’s a short list of suspects ... and yes, the news is still alive, but it’s nowhere near as alive as it has been over the last 100 years. There are four or five outstanding media moguls who contributed to the decline and, to some extent, demise in news journalism.

Who are they and what was their main method of killing? So the first was William Randolph Hearst and he ­inherited his family newspaper at a young age. He learnt the art of manipulating journalism to make money, and that’s at the heart of what this is all about. Joseph Pulitzer did the same, but then restored his reputation and created the Pulitzer Prizes. People obviously know about Rupert Murdoch, but his father Keith Murdoch really launched the 100-year Murdoch dynasty. The Daily Mail in London – and now online globally, owned by the Rothermere family – are also on the list. Then there are the mid-sized, but quite notorious, media moguls, such as Conrad Black, who ended up in jail for deceiving his shareholders, and Robert Maxwell, who died under suspicious circumstances as his empire sank.

William Randolph Hearst (1930); Vere Harmsworth – the 3rd Viscount Rothermere (1975); Robert Maxwell (1987); Conrad Black (2011).

Even if these media moguls had behaved in exemplary fashion, surely the business model would have still collapsed because of new technology? That’s true in a technical sense, but if they’d ­behaved more ethically, they would have built ­different kinds of media empires. They might have only been worth a couple of billion now, rather than tens of billions, but they would have ended up more like The New York Times, a family-controlled media organisation built ­almost entirely on an ethical foundation stone.

Was your motivation for writing this book to expose the way in which media power has been abused? Yes. I’ve been in the media for many decades, ­starting as a reporter, then becoming a newspaper editor at a young age, then a small-time media ­proprietor. And the thing that struck me very early on was the power that lies in owning and controlling journalism in a democratic society, and how that power is – or isn’t – wielded in the interests of that society.

How covert is that power and how dangerous is it? It’s largely covert, until it overreaches, and then it ­becomes extremely overt. There are examples of that like the phone hacking in London at the News of the World and the role of Fox News in US politics, particularly in the Trump era. Then it becomes highly visible, but most of the time it’s covert, because nearly all the practitioners who work in news organisations never want to talk about their power, let alone analyse it.

You write that journalism is the manipulation business. You also quote Janet Malcolm from her 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer, saying: “Every journalist who’s not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what’s going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He’s a kind of confidence man preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” You and I have known each other, Eric, for nearly 40 years and I’ve never heard you refer to journalists en masse as engaging in that kind of practice. Is that what you think we do? I do. I think Janet Malcolm put it in a very raw way. We are in the ­business of manipulation, but I don’t think that that’s necessarily always negative. It can be very ­positive. We’re the conduits between the news that happens [and] the people who make the news ... and it’s up to us, particularly the owners of the media, to decide how we deploy that manipulation.

You quote Tom Watson, the former British Labour MP, now member of the House of Lords, as having said, “the barons of the media, with their red-topped assassins, are the biggest beasts in the modern jungle. They have no predators. They are untouchable. They laugh at the law, they sneer at parliament. They have the power to hurt us, and they do so with gusto and precision, with joy and criminality.” Was Tom Watson right? I don’t think there’s any doubt he was right. In the ­context of the phone-hacking [scandal in London], thousands of ordinary people, cabinet ministers, ­celebrities, public figures had their voicemails hacked by the News of the World and the Sun newspapers. Over a decade, it was institutionalised into the way those newspapers did their journalism. They found things out that were entirely private. Rupert Murdoch ­apologised but took no responsibility for the culture or the actions that led to phone hacking. None whatsoever. He blamed his underlings for it. But since then, in the last 14 years or so, News Corp has forked out around $2 billion in payouts and costs to several thousand ­victims of phone hacking in legal settlements to ensure they don’t talk about it publicly.

Rupert Murdoch in 1968. “He can be quite seductive,” says Beecher, who worked for him in the 1980s.Credit: Getty Images

Does the good journalism it does still stand as good journalism? The good journalism stands as good journalism in its own right, but if this was any other business – and it was a public company – that company’s board, CEO, senior executives, would all have been removed almost instantly. That single bad event would have led to the company’s reputation being completely destroyed.

You use the term moral fading in your book. Describe what you mean and where it applies? Moral fading is when you are practising journalism or owning media and you believe that what you’re doing is in the public interest, but you don’t take moral responsibility for the kinds of things we’ve just been talking about – like phone hacking or like Fox News interfering in the US political scene and defending ­election denial. So, it’s a kind of duplicity. And I raise this question in the book about people who work in news organisations where these kinds of either ­illegal or unethical or ­immoral things go on. How do they actually feel? How do they deal with their own consciences? I’m not criticising them individually, ­because people have mortgages and they have to pay the bills, I understand that, but there must be some kind of conflict for them.

There are so few places now to work in journalism in Australia … so are you actually saying that anyone who works for News Corp, for example, has had to engage in an act of moral fading? No, I’m not saying that. I’m just asking the question, and you’re absolutely right. In a country like Australia, and increasingly, in every democracy now, as the ­business model for news unravels, there are fewer and fewer jobs ... If the owners of journalism acted like the owners of Le Monde in Paris or The New York Times or the Graham family at the Washington Post, or indeed, the Fairfax family for more than a century here in Australia, then the issue of moral fading would never be on the radar screen.

Is the tension between the drive for profits and holding power to account the root cause of the abuse we’re talking about? Yes, it is. I describe it as a loophole in democracy. Public-interest news journalism is a pivotal part of the fabric of democratic countries ­because it holds power to account. It’s really the only external scrutineer – in an institutional sense – of what goes on in power, what goes on in politics, all the things that ­democracy stands for. Yet there’s almost no regulatory or legal requirements on the owners of that journalism – and the practitioners who work for them – at an ethical or professional level, unlike almost any other profession where there are enforceable codes of conduct. It’s entirely up to the conscience of the owner.

In 1984, you became the youngest-ever editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and you worked there for three years before accepting an offer from Rupert Murdoch to run the Herald and Weekly Times. Why did you take the job? I still reflect on that. I was young. I was ambitious. Rupert Murdoch wasn’t quite the same mogul he is now. It was before phone hacking. It was before Fox News. I felt I had probably a 50/50 chance of getting through that [and] I felt I would learn a lot on the way, which I did. It was an exhilarating challenge. Also, he can be quite seductive, and was.

Former Murdoch editor Andy Coulson, who was jailed for conspiracy to hack phones.Credit: Getty Images

You write that your moral compass became dysfunctional working for him, which is why you resigned. What does it look like inside Eric Beecher’s head when it becomes morally dysfunctional? Oh, there are wires going everywhere and they’re sticking out of my ears. Look, I had two years as an editor for Rupert Murdoch. I spent quite a bit of time with him. [The Herald and Weekly Times, which Murdoch bought in 1987] was the biggest ­acquisition he had made at the time, and it was an emotional one because it was his ­father’s old ­company. And his mother and sisters all lived in Melbourne, which is where it was based. For the first year it was ­really good and he was supportive. We focused on quality journalism, but in the second year ... I started to see hurdles [and] what was required of a Murdoch editor to jump those hurdles. I started to ­realise it was like a cult [with] a messianic leader. It had single views on most issues, and all the editors and senior executives ­intuited – still intuit – the wishes of their proprietor without him having to issue direct ­instructions. That became incredibly disconcerting, and eventually those wires in my head started going haywire.

He tried to entice you to stay? Yes, when I decided to resign he invited me into his ­office in Melbourne, which was his father’s old office ... and we sat down on a couch together and closed the door, and he was very emotional. He asked me to stay and said that he thought we’d be working together all our lives. I agreed to stay, but a month or six weeks later I realised that my inner voice was so loud and clear in my head that I couldn’t stay. So I resigned.

Eric Beecher in 1989, on the day he resigned as editor-in-chief of the Melbourne Herald.Credit: Peter Cox

What happened in those weeks? Nothing specific ... It happened in the year before that. He tried to get me to sack our Washington correspondent ­because he felt his coverage of the Reagan presidency wasn’t Republican enough. I was told at one stage [by the late Ken Cowley, head of News Corp in Australia], when my paper ran a prominent story on the front page about a 747 jet crashing in Asia, killing 200 people, “We don’t run plane crashes on the front page. We own half an airline.”

What would you say to those who claim you’ve had an idée fixe about Murdoch ever since? I would say that it’s not personally about him or his family. In fact, I’ve usually found him quite charming. He’s intelligent and a good conversationalist. It’s not a personal thing. It’s really at the heart of why I wrote this book. I think that people, particularly very large media owners, especially if they operate in three of the main English-speaking democracies in the world, if they use their media power in malign ways and meddle with democracy, I think that is one of the most dangerous things that can happen to a democracy. The Murdochs are the biggest at doing that.

One of the chapters in your book is “The Madness of Great Men”, and it’s a great summation of some of the media moguls you write about – men who “inhabit a world of favours, deals and IOUs. They accumulate platoons of enemies as well as sycophants. They are feared. Everyone knows who they are. No one wants to cross them.” Two years ago, you crossed the Murdochs, Lachlan in particular, and he sued. How did you cross them and why? One of the publications in which I’m the owner – Crikey – published an opinion piece looking at the state of US politics and Trump in ­particular. It focused on election denial and the attack on the Capitol [and] was one of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of stories on the same topic. In the last paragraph of [our] story, there was a reference to Fox News and its role in election denial, in almost ­condoning the attack on the Capitol. It ­referred to the Murdochs and their underlings as being co-conspirators with Trump in these events. It was just a normal piece of commentary, so normal that the ­editors didn’t refer it to our lawyers.

Lachlan Murdoch sued Crikey publisher Private Media, eventually dropping the action.Credit: Getty Images

We [then] got a long letter from Lachlan Murdoch’s lawyer demanding that we pull the story off the ­website, that we apologise to Lachlan Murdoch, and threatening us with litigation. Our lawyers replied equally forcefully. His lawyers came back with another letter, and we replied. It got to the stage where we had to make a decision because we had absolutely no doubt that this was a totally legitimate piece of commentary, the likes of which Murdoch publications – and almost all other news publications around the world – were doing all the time. There was nothing exceptional about it. It didn’t even mention Lachlan Murdoch’s name. It just referred to the Murdochs.

So we decided we were going to stand up for our values, and we did two things that were unusual in the combative world of news publishing. We published all of the legal correspondence that we received and that we replied to … because we wanted to show people how this intimidation was happening. And the second thing we did – which was even more unusual – was we took an ad in the print edition of The New York Times, a “Dear Lachlan” letter in the form of an ad, inviting him to sue us because we said we believe this is ­out­rageous and it should be tested in the courtroom. And the next day he sued.

Were you deliberately trying to provoke? We wanted to stand up for what we thought was the right thing to do.

Is there anything you would have done differently? No, nothing at all. As it turned out, the case dragged on for about nine months ... Eventually, he withdrew the action and … paid our costs.

The NYT Crikey ad.

Did you fear losing your business or your home? No … and I should say … I’d been ­researching this book for eight or nine years … but when I became personally involved in abuse of media power in this way, it was the motivation for me to write the book.

Were you effectively saved by the Dominion court case in the US? So, the Dominion court case was where a small manufacturer of electronic-voting machines – Dominion – was suing Fox News over allegations [aired on Fox News] that Dominion were complicit in rigging the 2020 election. Which, of course, they weren’t. Fox News ­settled with Dominion and paid them more than $1 billion in damages. As part of that case, thousands of pages of internal Fox News documents became ­public and what they showed was that the Murdochs, their senior executives, and some of the main talent on Fox News, privately acknowledged that the election wasn’t rigged and that the attack on the Capitol was an ­extremely bad thing. But publicly, they were actually taking the opposite view. They were basically saying, “we have to follow our audience. We can’t tell them things they don’t want to hear because we’ll lose ­audience ratings and profits”.

That raises the question of how democracies survive or, at best, flourish if the losers of an election refuse to admit defeat and billionaire media owners support those refusals. We are in trouble, and to me what it highlights is the urgency for reputable, responsible, ethical media organisations to both exist and flourish and to be ­institutionalised in some way. That means we need to find another funding source … because the advertising revenues that used to fund it have moved to social media and elsewhere on the internet.

So how should we fund quality journalism? Serious journalism is so important for democracy that it needs to be funded, and I think the only funding source – or coordinator of funding – is government. I just don’t see that anyone else can do it.

The New York Times managed to recast itself as a global case study in quality journalism in the digital age. How did it do it, and could it have been replicated here? The New York Times did it because the family that controls the company realised early on, unlike the Fairfax board at the time, that the threats to the ­operating model of journalism and media and advertising in a digital age were seminal. And so they changed their model so that people had to pay for the journalism. They also continued to invest in their journalism, to the point where they now have a newsroom of something like 1700 journalists, which is an extra­ordinary number compared to any other publication in the world.

Could it be done here? Not on that scale. In markets like ours, the populations of our capital cities just aren’t that big, so it’s hard to see how that kind of quality journalism could be sustained through people paying for it.

Are there any commercial journalism business models that are still viable? One business model that has actually defied the gloom in journalism and media is business publishing. The Australian Financial Review newspaper here, the Wall Street Journal [in the US] and the Financial Times in London are doing really well and that’s ­because they provide journalism that is mandatory for an audience of people who are involved in business and politics and surrounding disciplines. And this type of audience is prepared to pay quite a lot of money for that journalism because it actually affects financial outcomes.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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