Rupert Murdoch, Humanitarian?
It is a truth universally
acknowledged that Rupert Murdoch is scum. The media tycoon has built his global
empire on schlock and sleaze, used heavy-handed tactics and legal chicanery to
evade laws and taxes, toppled British and Australian governments to expand his
domain, all but bribed Newt Gingrich and Margaret Thatcher with sweetheart book
deals, made mockery of the grand traditions of Australian/British/American
journalism. He is perhaps the world's most sinister businessman, the Ernst
Blofeld of the Information Age. Even his company's name, News Corp., has an
ominous, Big Brother ring to it.
So it's
no wonder that the press--at least that fraction of the press he does not
own--is gloating about his recent troubles. May has been an unpleasant month
for Murdoch. He abandoned a huge U.S. satellite-TV venture, provoking a $5
billion lawsuit from his jilted business partner and inviting speculation that
he'll be shut out of the American satellite market. A judge threw out most of
Murdoch's own lawsuit against Time Warner. (Time Warner had refused to carry
Murdoch's Fox News Channel on its cable system in New York City, prompting a
spectacular squabble between Murdoch and Ted Turner.) He horrified the
publishing intelligentsia by shutting down Basic Books. Even his lone May
triumph, the planned purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers for $350 million, has
been dismissed as an expensive folly.
But Murdoch, as usual, is getting a raw deal. You may not
like Murdoch--it's nearly impossible to like Murdoch--but you should probably
admire him. He has done more to help the great mass of media consumers than
anyone in the world. Murdoch is the global capitalist par excellence, the very
model of free enterprise and entrepreneurship. Almost single-handedly, Murdoch
has modernized the world's media, forcing competition on stagnant businesses,
cracking open monopolies and oligopolies, vanquishing "traditions" that were
often an excuse for laziness, unleashing the creative destruction of capitalism
on an industry that thought itself exempt from it.
Everywhere
Murdoch has gone, competition, efficiency, and consumer choice (and profit)
have followed. In his launching pad, Australia, Murdoch bought weak papers,
outworked established rivals, and became the market leader. In Great Britain,
he dragged the newspaper industry into the 20 th century. In 1986 he
broke the press operators' union. He won the eternal enmity of British lefties,
but he was right: The unions were lazy and intransigent. By sloughing
off thousands of make-work employees and ditching absurd union rules (which had
banned computerization, for example), Murdoch made his newspapers cheaper for
readers and more profitable for him. (Murdoch's critics rarely acknowledge that
publishers all over the world--including liberal saint Katharine Graham--have
crushed press unions to stay afloat.) Murdoch's British satellite-TV operation,
BSkyB, shattered the BBC's near monopoly on programming. British terrestrial
broadcasters had limited viewers to only a handful of channels. Murdoch's
satellites give them nearly two dozen.
In the United States, too, Murdoch has greased
the wheels of capitalism. Critics savaged his tabloids--the New York
Post , the Boston Herald , the Chicago Sun-Times (he no longer
owns the latter two)--as grotesque conservative rags. Which they were. But they
also grabbed market share from big complacent dailies and awakened the sleepy
local news trade. Murdoch brought the same fierce energy to the self-satisfied
American TV industry. He broke up a four-decade oligopoly by starting a fourth
network, a feat that no one, least of all ABC, CBS, and NBC, thought possible.
(At the time he bought his first seven U.S. TV stations for $2 billion,
industry analysts said he'd paid too much for them. They don't say that
anymore.) While Fox has certainly splashed its share of garbage on the screen
(e.g., Studs ), it has also given viewers some of the decade's most
remarkable shows ( The Simpsons , The X-Files , America's Most
Wanted ). Even Murdoch's aborted American satellite deal would have
benefited consumers. If it had succeeded Murdoch would have offered the first
serious competition to the cable monopolies--the very choice that politicians
and consumer advocates have been pleading for.
The
hatred of Murdoch is, at its core, aesthetic. Murdoch's in-your-face
conservatism is alienating. His newspapers and TV shows exaggerate and
distort for the sake of sensationalism. They deny the very existence of good
taste and propriety.
Murdoch is immune to such criticism. He's a billionaire. He
was also born in Australia, which makes him, almost by definition,
disrespectful of elites. He derides the BBC and respectable newspapers as
"unpopular" media subsidized by a condescending, out-of-touch gentry.
("Popular" is the highest praise in the Murdoch lexicon.) Murdoch may be a
modernist in his pursuit of a global techno-empire, but he's also an
anachronism, a throwback to Hearst and Pulitzer. British and American
journalism used to be competitive, sensational, overtly political, and
populist. Murdoch believes that the snobs have crippled the profession with
respectability, making journalism irrelevant to the masses. Murdoch has done
all he could to restore that scrappiness. Murdoch is, in some sense, the best
democrat of all: He prints newspapers that people want to read and produces TV
shows that people want to watch. His British tabloid the Sun has the
largest circulation of any English-language newspaper in the world. Populism is
popular.
Sadly, Murdoch the robber
baron may not be with us much longer. The 66-year-old is not showing signs of
age, but he is showing signs of respectability. Murdoch has always had his
yearning-for-respect side. But as he gets older, it seems to be getting worse
(or, if you prefer, better). In 1981 he bought the money-losing London
Times . Characteristically, he both vulgarized it and turned it around
financially, thus chalking up another business triumph but losing much of the
cachet he sought. Last year, he championed the effort to give presidential
candidates free air time on network TV. Fox also produces far more children's
programming than the other networks. What a shocking notion: A Rupert Murdoch
who cares more about his legacy than his bottom line.
