“For the bullied” reads the dedication in the latest book about the Murdoch empire. It’s a reference to the many victims of Murdoch journalism, those who get “Murdoched,” as the title puts it — relentlessly pursued, that is, for failings alleged, presumed, taken out of context or exaggerated, and seldom deserving the treatment meted out. The consequences, in numerous cases here and overseas covered by the authors, journalism academics Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson, have ruined careers, broken marriages and prompted suicide attempts.
To take a local example: on Anzac Day in 2015, Scott McIntyre, a sports journalist with SBS married to a Japanese woman, sent out a number of tweets including the words “remembering the summary execution, widespread rape and theft committed by these ‘brave’ Anzacs in Egypt, Palestine and Japan.” Understandably, this offended many Australians, even though it was grounded in some uncomfortable facts.
Several News columnists took up the cudgels, and for good measure the Australian’s Chris Kenny sent messages to communications minister Malcolm Turnbull urging him to force McIntyre off the public payroll. Turnbull rang the managing director of SBS, Michael Ebeid, who subsequently made clear that the tweets were “not at all the views of @SBS.” McIntyre was sacked the following day.
That was that. The caravan moved on. Except for McIntyre and his family. They received death threats; his wife and children moved to Japan; his marriage broke up. In short, McIntyre was cancelled and the right to free speech swept aside — practices the Murdoch media condemn whenever their journalists come under attack.
A year after the controversy, McIntyre received what he described as “quite a substantial financial settlement” from SBS after he sued for unfair dismissal. The SBS guidelines were ambiguous: employees had “a right to make public comment and to enter into public debate in their personal capacity” but also required that SBS was “not brought into disrepute.” It is not as though his sports journalism was likely to do that.
Another Australian example: that of Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who migrated from Sudan with her family in 1992. In a stellar rise, she co-founded a youth charity at the age of sixteen, gained a first-class honours degree in mechanical engineering, was chosen as Queensland Young Australian of the Year and appointed by the federal government to the board of the Council for Australian–Arab Relations.
She also made frequent media appearances and sometimes attracted controversy, such as when she said in early 2017 that Islam was “to me, the most feminist religion” (attempting to draw a distinction between the religion itself and how Islam is practised). The Australian ran more than thirty articles denouncing her, report Dodd and Ricketson, and Andrew Bolt wrote seven columns about her for the News tabloids.
On Anzac Day in 2017, Abdel-Magied sent out a post saying “LEST.WE.FORGET (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine…),” which she meant as a reference to asylum seekers and Palestinians who had died. Warned by a friend about how it might be received, she took down the post and apologised. But it was too late to stop her being condemned by politicians and the media, led by News, who pursued her for months. That encouraged a public pile-on, with online abuse, including videos of beheadings and rape. Abdel-Magied sought help from a psychologist and left Australia permanently to live in Britain.
Free speech? Not when News disagrees with you. While many people were offended by her remarks, even though they were misunderstood, did it really warrant her being hounded for months until she fled Australia?
Social media has accelerated the coarsening of public debate, but before that Murdoch led the way, with his publications often playing the person rather than the ball. Shouting and outrage attracts attention; it also encourages appalling behaviour and, on occasions, violence. Challenging public figures is one thing; vilification only feeds the toxic debate.
Rupert Murdoch’s business achievements are impressive: he has built the biggest media empire in history. His journalism? Not so much. He said in 1996: “For better or for worse, our company is a reflection of my thinking, my character, my values.” For worse is the authors’ assessment and few will disagree.
The negatives are many and major. Murdoch’s newspaper the Sun campaigned for Brexit, now widely acknowledged to have been the economic disaster experts predicted. It was not the only newspaper to do so but it had one of the biggest circulations.
Murdoch has always followed the money and the power, meaning that Fox News and Donald Trump were an irresistible combination. Murdoch didn’t believe Trump was fit to become president in 2016 and nor did he think he deserved to be re-elected in 2024. Yet Fox News gave him the exposure and backing that helped enable his rise and promoted the democratic outrages he has perpetrated.
That includes the claims of the stolen 2020 election, even though, as revealed by the Dominion court case (which cost Murdoch US$787.5 million), Fox commentators knew them not to be true. But it all helped Fox to become the single most profitable news business in the world.
The Murdoch outlets have taken every opportunity to cast doubt on the urgency of tackling climate change while giving credence to all manner of crackpot and fringe arguments.
And then there is the illegal hacking of the phones of celebrities, royalty and others who were potential sources for stories, practised on an industrial scale by the Fleet Street newspapers in Britain, mainly but not solely those owned by News. It epitomises one aspect of Murdoch’s “whatever it takes” journalism and was described by Australian media academic Rodney Tiffen as “the biggest media-related scandal in the history of English-speaking democracies.”
It ended up costing News £1.2 billion in legal fees and settlements. The even greater cost was to its reputation, particularly over the one case that outraged the British public and was the trigger for the Leveson inquiry into the media: the hacking of the phone of Milly Dowler, the thirteen-year-old who went missing in 2002 and was subsequently found murdered.
That particular offence wasn’t uncovered by the Guardian until 2011. In a public display of contrition, Rupert Murdoch asked to see her parents to apologise and, putting his head in his hands, told them “this is the worst day of my life,” leading Milly’s older sister Gemma to later remark that, if it was the worst day of Murdoch’s life, “then you’re bloody lucky.”
That same year Murdoch appeared before a parliamentary inquiry to declare it was the “humblest” day in his life. The contrition didn’t last: in 2013, he met with journalists at the Sun to reassure them he was on their side. Thanks to employees who recorded his address and leaked it to other media, we know that Murdoch thought the police investigations into hacking were “laughable” and “outrageous.” There was an admission of sorts: “We got caught with dirty hands, I guess.”
Not everything about the Murdoch media is black and white. It employs many fine journalists in Australia and overseas, many of them working in areas unaffected by culture wars and political agendas. Even as a senior journalist writing about politics and national affairs for the Australian for a decade and a half from the 1990s, my columns and feature articles were published with only occasional and minor editing, whether or not they contradicted the newspaper’s editorial line.
But I felt more and more uncomfortable as the newspaper’s right-wing agenda spread to its news coverage and diversity shrank on the opinion pages. With few exceptions, the “contest of ideas” the Australian proclaims on its website has become an echo chamber. But the Murdoch media doesn’t do shame: Fox News carries the deeply ironic slogan, “fair and balanced.”
For less senior staff than I was, life is more complicated. Often reporters are assigned a story with an angle that reflects a pet News Corp issue or prejudice. That can put them under pressure to stretch the facts to meet the request, perhaps by seizing on a relatively minor aspect. Regularly reporting back to editors that there is no story or finding a better one that doesn’t fit its agenda are not career-enhancing moves.
The agendas in the News publications are increasingly blatant. One tabloid interpretation likened this year’s federal budget to communism. News outlets support Israel whatever it does. They rail against antisemitism, completely justifiably, but ignore Islamaphobia.
Journalists are taught, or used to be, that nothing matters more than seeking out the truth. After all, that’s what distinguishes professional journalism from the gut beliefs and random thoughts presented as facts on social media.
But the owner of the largest share of English-speaking media has a different view. Rupert Murdoch was warned in 1983 that the diaries of Adolf Hitler were fakes but his British paper, the Sunday Times, published them anyway. The proprietor’s defence was that they increased circulation and that “after all, we are in the entertainment business.”
Murdoch established his priorities early in his career, when, as owner of the Sunday Times in Perth, he lobbied WA industrial development minister Charles Court to allow him a stake in the developing mining boom. As reported by author Robert Duffield in 1979, he told Court: “Look, you can have a headline a day or a bucket of shit every day. What’s it to be?” •
Getting Murdoched: How Murdoch’s Media Wields Power and Punishment
By Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson | Hardie Grant | $39.99 | 424 pages
