Eye for conspiracy turns empirical study into sermon on wealth and power

DAVID McKnight knows what happens to people who write books about Rupert Murdoch and he is determined to avoid their fate.

DAVID McKnight knows what happens to people who write books about Rupert Murdoch and he is determined to avoid their fate. Others who have braved this path found themselves "mesmerised by his charm, his buccaneering and his dazzling business deals". McKnight promises to end "this absence of scrutiny".

There are clues that his investigation won't go well for News Corporation's chairman and chief executive: a loaded subtitle; a pair of monochromatic eyes cropped too close for comfort; a warning from academic Robert Manne that the book is "disturbing". Yet if McKnight is to make good on his promise, he must deliver more than the black-caped blaggard of Victorian melodrama and paint a richer, more revealing portrait of this enigmatic publisher. As fiction writer David Lubar once remarked, unrelenting evil is boring, which is why James Bond's villains have cats.

We begin with a breezy history of early family life and learn that the Murdochs were "wealthy", their farm "large" and that their city mansion was "lavish". Perversely, this privilege bred a hostility to elites in the young Rupert, explaining (to McKnight's satisfaction at least) why he now "routinely poses as the protector of the interests of the working men and women".

The author's thick brush obscures important detail. Murdoch's religious upbringing is guilelessly described as "evangelical", missing the opportunity to explore the cultural legacy of Murdoch's Calvinist heritage, its work ethic, its sense of obligation and an antipathy to the establishment that might tell us more about his entrepreneurial drive and civic involvement. McKnight squanders the chance to place Murdoch alongside other Australians from the Scottish Presbyterian tradition, such as Sir Robert Menzies, whom the young Murdoch disliked. Like Menzies, Murdoch's political philosophy is often difficult to characterise as either Left or Right. In my view, the origins can be found in the Classical Liberal tradition and the Scottish Enlightenment, as evidenced by the often-cited front-page editorial in The Australian's first edition.

If McKnight had been genuinely interested in exploring News Corporation's culture, he would have done well to explore this territory. That, however, is not his intent: to him Left and Right are not political descriptors but crude markers of virtue and dishonour.

McKnight makes no serious attempt to explain Reaganism, Thatcherism or neoconservatism, (although, thankfully, he stays clear of the worn-out "neo-liberalism"). Suffice to say Murdoch is a radical Reaganite, supports ultra-Thatcherism and that his newspapers run columns by waspish neoconservatives. McKnight expects the adjectives to carry the argument.

Readers who enjoy theological debate might be surprised that McKnight assumes Calvinism and evangelicalism are synonymous, but it allows him to join the dots between Murdoch and so-called religious Right a paragraph later.

McKnight races through the familiar story of Murdoch's early career, strewing innuendo in his wake. In William Shawcross's 1992 biography, Murdoch "startled staff of The News with his energy", but McKnight says he displayed "a ruthlessness that became central to his power in the years to come". Shawcross says The Mirror was "cheeky" and carried "crisp and intelligent editorials"; McKnight says it adopted "the sensational formula that became his trademark". To Shawcross, The Australian was Murdoch's "finest hour"; to McKnight, it was a ploy "to win the respect and influence that his tabloid newspapers could never deliver".

The book's intellectual limits are becoming clear; this is not, as it pretends, an empirical study of the relationship between private profit and public purpose, but a sermon on wealth and power. History is not a set of records to be interrogated, but a cherry orchard from which the author selects the juiciest fruit.

McKnight's Murdoch is an ideological warrior who underwent a Damascene conversion from the Left to Right in the early 1970s, evidenced by his "single-minded campaign to destroy Australia's Labor government".

It could have been that by 1975 the business community was having second thoughts about Gough Whitlam's grasp of economic policy and the voters were becoming restless about the price at the bowser, but that version would be too prosaic for an academic such as McKnight.

Never mind Khemlani and runaway inflation, Murdoch was experiencing "a deep political transformation in his values and beliefs whose causes are little understood but have been central to his political ideology".

This pivotal moment provides the author with a clumsy segue to News Corporation's newspapers in the US and Britain, where he seems troubled by Murdoch's support for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: "The rebel child of the Melbourne establishment was becoming the dragon slayer of the liberal elites worldwide."

Readers unfamiliar with McKnight's career path might wonder why advocating small government, low taxes and a free market is "militant conservatism", or why Reagan's abandonment of detente with the Soviet Union was problematic. The fall of the Berlin Wall, after all, would suggest to a less partisan observer that it was on the right side of history.

It is puzzling that McKnight accuses Murdoch of turning a blind eye to South American dictatorships, and then lays into him for backing military intervention in Grenada in 1983. Tyranny is intolerable, apparently, unless you have chums in Havana.

McKnight is affronted by political donations Murdoch and his companies are said to have made, but offers no documentary evidence, and his footnotes point largely to articles published by Murdoch's newspaper rivals. The Australian presented the list of allegations to Murdoch's office in New York last week, but the company could find no record of many of the alleged donations, and said the author appeared to have recycled previously reported claims.

Without evidence, McKnight falls back on intuition: "One wonders how many other political subsidies made by Murdoch have never seen the light of day."

While ad hominem criticism is generally best avoided, it is surely not impertinent to inquire about McKnight's own political heritage, since he asks us to take his judgments on trust. McKnight was a member of the Communist Party of Australia in the 1970s and 1980s when he edited its weekly newspaper, Tribune.

His sharp eye for conspiracy is evident in his latest work, where he bravely resurrects complaints about The Australian's coverage of the 1997 Stolen Generations report. He claims The Australian conducted "a public onslaught against the recognition of this historic injustice" by giving space to critics who rejected Sir Ronald Wilson's use of the word genocide.

Given his previous brushes with genocide, it might have been wiser not to go there. In 1976, McKnight accused The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald of fabricating reports that the Khmer Rouge had killed between 500,000 and 1.5 million Cambodians. Writing in Tribune, McKnight then claimed that "the bosses' papers" had played up every report fed to them by "reputable" news agencies or from US intelligence services. The press is guided more by its vivid imagination and its political bias than by any respect for the facts, McKnight wrote. Yet The Australian's figures were, if anything, conservative; the Yale Cambodian Genocide Program estimates that Pol Pot's regime killed 1.7 million of its own people.

Fortunately, there is some light relief in an otherwise earnest tome when McKnight turns his attention to Murdoch's British newspapers' support for Thatcher. The Times and The Sun bow obediently to McKnight's theory that Murdoch publications were infatuated by Thatcher, so much so that they continued to support her even when it became clear that her best days as prime minister were behind her. Inconveniently, however, Andrew Neil's The Sunday Times took a different tack in an editorial wishing the prime minister "A Reluctant Goodbye", prompting a delicious editorial scrap with Kelvin McKenzie's Sun, which hoed into "the opportunists of The Sunday Times (who at) first sight of the favourite finding the going tough, they switch horses".

McKnight is unfazed by this outbreak of pluralism within the Murdoch camp since what really counted was the newspaper's deeper commitment to the ideological beliefs that underpinned Thatcherism.

Unusually, McKnight sees Neil's attachment to free market populism in The Sunday Times' campaign against banks that failed to pass on interest rate cuts to customers and the sharp practices by supermarket monopolies.

He finds it too in an exposure of the dirty tricks employed by British Airways against its smaller rival Virgin Atlantic, a curious suggestion to say the least since The Sunday Times forensic reporting cost one of Thatcher's closest corporate allies, BA chairman Lord King, his job.

To be fair, business and economics are not McKnight's strong suits, which is why his polemic ultimately disappoints. He offers no fresh insights into Murdoch's character or how he has managed the tension between corporate and civic ambition for more than half a century.

He fails because he cannot conceive of a newspaper as anything other than an agitprop instrument such as Tribune. Yet the tension between News Corporation's commercial and editorial divisions is the key to understanding the company and its founder.

Editors have the gift of a blank canvas to report, and contribute to the civic life of the nation. Yet it comes with a heavy responsibility, as editors are reminded when they are presented with the newspapers' weekly balance sheet. Successful editors understand the precariousness of sitting on the cost side of the ledger; their expenditure must be recouped by their commercial colleagues before the company can make a profit. Consequentially, commercial journalism is a supremely democratic enterprise; the customers call the shots, not the producer. The consumers' right to veto or endorse your product sets the limits of editorial adventurism.

McKnight is right to surmise that Murdoch is driven by deep-vested interest, but fails to recognise what that interest is, or appreciate why his staff willingly comply. Commercial journalism has similar imperatives to busking; first draw a crowd and then relieve them of their small change. That simple dynamic is enough to explain the pro-market, pro-enterprise editorial stance of every Murdoch publication since employees and employer have a vested interest in the pleasure and prosperity of their customers.

In an ideal world, McKnight's contribution to the marketplace of ideas would survive or fail on its own merits, but like Ford or Holden, old Left thinking is apparently being propped up by the taxpayer. McKnight received an Australian Research Council grant of $196,647 to research this book; perhaps that's what they meant by cash for clunkers.

Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation of Political Power

By David McKnight

Allen and Unwin