How Rupert Murdoch won over a critic

CANCELLING my subscriptions to The Times and The Sun in 1986, in protest against the industrial chaos outside Rupert Murdoch's Wapping print plant, was not the most ridiculous thing I did in my 20s. Everyone in Britain was doing it, after all, at least everyone who, like me, had graduated with a degree in sociology and worked at the BBC.

But three years later, after moving to Australia and getting a lukewarm response from the ABC in my hunt for a job, it seemed best not to mention the episode when I found myself in editor Piers Akerman's office at The Advertiser in Adelaide. I thought I should I be upfront about the BBC bit, and Akerman was kind enough to overlook it after a phone call from a mutual friend, Tom Krause. To the untrained English ear, it sounded as if Tom were hedging his bets when he described me as "not a bad bloke", but the brevity of his endorsement was refreshing after the frustrating, multi-tiered bureaucracy of the recruitment department at Broadcasting House. I was impressed too with the energetic, collegiate, can-do spirit in The Advertiser newsroom. It seemed a bit like Australian football, which as best as I could tell at that time had only two rules - grab the ball and get it between the sticks, or, in the case of The Advertiser, grab the facts and get them on to the front page.

The "proper job" I was waiting for never turned up and as the weeks went by I stopped ringing the ABC, since I had more fun exploring the shenanigans of the Adelaide Town Hall than I had at the BBC, and I couldn't face going back to those endless discussions, weighing up the worthiness of stories drawing attention to the various social ills we subtly sheeted home to Margaret Thatcher.

We all love the BBC, of course, Fawlty Towers, Pride and Prejudice and all that, but as an institution it looks better viewed from outside than inside, unlike News Limited where, as I was quickly discovering, the opposite is true.

Sociology is a useful background for journalism, and certainly it gives me confidence to discuss workplace culture at News Limited, or Toxic Murdoch Culture as the ABC likes to call it, apparently the most serious plague to hit the land of my birth since the 14th century when the Black Death blew in from the Crimea.

Every institution has its culture, but if employees behave badly, as they have done in some British newspapers, you cannot blame the culture for loss of moral fibre. The concept of an "ethical workplace" leaves me somewhat mystified, to be honest; companies have corporate responsibility, but moral responsibility attaches to the employee, not the brass plate at the entrance. If the employee is ever asked to perform duties they find morally unacceptable, they must find the courage to refuse.

Murdoch culture is can-do culture and, by and large, it works exceedingly well, fostering creativity and productivity. The downside of can-do culture was described at length in the official report on the crash of the Columbia space shuttle. In the can-do culture of NASA, and under the pressure of launch deadlines, engineers were reluctant to make too much of a few cracked tiles, since they did not want to be considered negative by their colleagues. The lesson every News Limited manager must draw from the News of the World scandal, indeed the lesson for any manager, is that hearing bad news from your employees can be more important than affirmation.

Some 23 years later, and with a handy stack of unspent long-service leave up my sleeve, I find Australia and News Limited have lost none of their allure, while London looks a sad and sorry place. The harrumphing about the spread of Toxic Murdoch Culture is making Britain and its legislators look absurd. Brendan O'Neill describes it better than I could elsewhere on this page, but since the country is now officially in a double-dip recession, they should really be concentrating on other things.

The images of last year's English riots disturbed me far more deeply than the pictures from outside News Corporation's Wapping plant 26 years ago, but since those nihilistic half-wits have not produced anything worthwhile in their lives, there was nothing for me to boycott.

I look back on those events in a different light today: a dose of Thatcherism was plainly what Britain needed in my (revised) opinion, after the degenerate years of James Callaghan's Labour government, and I now know a fair bit more about the newspaper business. It was not Toxic Murdoch Culture that caused the Wapping dispute; it was the reluctance of organised labour to recognise that the gravy train had hit the buffers. There had been similar ugly scenes in 1814, when The Times installed the first steam-driven rotary presses, lifting productivity from 250 copies an hour to 1100.

Some Australians seem eager to adopt the longstanding British prejudice against Mr Murdoch, one of the most successful entrepreneurs this country has produced. What happened to the Bradman impulse, the instinct to gloat when the Poms are beaten at their own game? There were journalists at The Advertiser who would tell stories of working with Mr Murdoch on what was then his only newspaper, The News, that he turned into a multi-billion-dollar global media company in the space of 50 years.

At the BBC we never had to bother with balance sheets or even viewing figures, since Britain's mandatory licence fee meant TV viewers would be fined if they tried to cancel their subscriptions. I now see the irony of my ludicrous protest at the counter of the Ruislip newsagency: I was exercising a right denied to the people who paid my wages. It's interesting to imagine what would happen if an Australian government, presumably one better disposed to the fourth estate than this one, passed a law forbidding The Australian's readers from voting with their wallets. The energy would drain out of this office in a month, or probably less. We would become lazier and more complacent, and start publishing stories that matter to our colleagues rather than our readers. Politically, we would start drifting towards the territory currently occupied by The Age.

Far worse would be the loss of restraint, the obligation to consider the interests of the whole country, not just the inner-city enclaves where most journalists probably live. We would end up hostage to group-think, reinforcing our own prejudices and eventually coming to secretly despise the readers. I know, because I once worked in such a place.