ERIC BEECHER The Men Who Killed the News. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress

Eric Beecher’s vital new book provides a history of world journalism, good and bad, with a pessimistic view of the future.

Beecher knows his territory. In his youth he was an investigative journalist at the Melbourne Age during the glory days of Graham Perkin’s editorship, before moving to London to work on the Sunday Times and the Observer, and to America on the Washington Post. In the mid-1980s he edited the Sydney Morning Herald for three years and then spent a short period editing the Melbourne Herald in its dying days. In 1990 Beecher moved away from print journalism as co-founder of Text Media, entered digital publishing with his purchase of online news outlet Crikey in 2005, and has continued to publish a range of influential online magazines over the last 20 years.

The lengthy subtitle, ‘The inside story of how media moguls abused their power, manipulated the truth and distorted democracy’ indicates the author’s approach. At the beginning he provides a dramatis personae of the moguls, dividing them (in historical order) into A and B lists. The A list comprises Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, brothers Alfred and Harold Harmsworth (Viscounts Northcliffe and Rothermere), Max Aitken (Lord Beaverbrook), Henry Luce, Rupert Murdoch, Roy (Lord) Thomson, Robert Maxwell, Conrad (Baron) Black, Silvio Berlusconi, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Among those on the B list are the Walter dynasty who built The Times newspaper, Adolph Ochs (New York Times), Keith Murdoch, Kerry Packer and others. All are enormously powerful men, and the villains outnumber the good.

The book is divided into four main parts – Moguldom, Power, Malfeasance and The Future – and chapters with alluring titles: ‘Encounter with Lachlan Murdoch’, ‘Gutenberg to Zuckerberg’ (with no mention of Gutenberg), ‘Editorial Dictators’, ‘Sycophants and Sackings’, ‘The Madness of Great Men’, ‘Give ’Em What They Want’, ‘We Go Out and Destroy Other People’s Lives’ and ‘The Media is Broken’, along with the more sober ‘Building the Empires’, ‘Succession’ and ‘Reimagining Journalism’.

The story opens in the recent past as Beecher recounts the experience of Crikey being sued by Lachlan Murdoch for defamation before tracing a history of journalism from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries when news began to attract entrepreneurs. Pulitzer’s New York World established a model of sensationalist reporting of crime, corruption, comics and soap opera tales of local characters that was picked up by other press populists such as Hearst, beginning with the San Francisco Examiner in California, and Alfred Harmsworth (Northcliffe) with the Daily Mail in Britain. Northcliffe was the most powerful and feared influence in British politics in the early twentieth century as his empire expanded to include The Times, the Observer, the Daily Mirror and the Evening News. Others to meddle in politics were Canadian-born Aitken (Beaverbrook) and Keith Murdoch.

Of the Murdoch dynasty’s founder, Beecher writes:

He moved to London to launch a spectacular career that combined journalism with influence-peddling, culminating in a brazen exposé of the ill-fated World War One Gallipoli campaign, that forced the withdrawal of Allied troops, and in its wake, raised many questions about Murdoch’s motives and ethical behaviour.

In 1921, aged 36, Keith Murdoch returned home to edit the Melbourne Herald and swiftly rose to become managing director and ‘the Big Boss of daily newspapers across most capital cities, a formidable presence and political kingmaker in Australia’s small clubby business community’. As an example of his kingmaking, Beecher tells of Murdoch throwing his newspapers’ support for the election of a new conservative party headed by former Labor Treasurer Joe Lyons in 1931, and the price that exacted:

A scene in Murdoch’s office in the 1930s was witnessed and later described by a Herald copy boy who served his boss tea: ‘Murdoch was still shouting and JA Lyons was standing before the desk. I put the tea down on the big desk and went out through the door. As I went through it I turned and there with his hat in his hand, like a man seeking a job, stood the Prime Minister before Murdoch’s desk. As I shut the door, I heard the leader of the nation say: “Yes, sir.”’

Keith Murdoch would pass on his propensity for political meddling to his son Rupert, who for the last 60 years has exerted a malign influence through his newspapers making (and breaking) prime ministers in Australia and Britain, and to an increasing extent (through Fox News) having a powerful effect in the United States on the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016. As Beecher argues, quoting former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, access to presidential power is for Murdoch ‘like sex, it’s an urge … so Murdoch went in boots and all to put Trump in the White House, and in return for that the deference Trump showed him was extraordinary’.

The moguls do not build their empires by themselves but through the actions of ‘loyal henchmen’:

Gofers with fancy titles and big pay packets serve multifunctional roles in a media autocracy. They do the boss’s dirty work, navigate the corridors of politics, keep watch for embarrassing landmines, prop up morale during difficult times, plant leaks to discredit internal and external enemies, spy on disloyal colleagues, and, always, praise the leader publicly and privately.

No wonder, having worked as a Murdoch editor for two years and viewing such behaviour with ‘a mixture of bemusement and distaste’, Beecher came to regard the empire as a cult.

The Murdochs are, of course, not the only villains. Most of the moguls embrace right-wing politics but not all go as far as Hearst, who, in the 1920s and 1930s, had Adolf Hitler, Herman Göring and Benito Mussolini providing columns for his papers, or the Harmsworths, who supported Nazism, corresponded with Hitler, and endorsed Oswald Mosley and his fascist British Blackshirts. One mogul spent time in prison: Black was gaoled for fraud; Maxwell would have been (had he not fallen off his yacht) for defrauding his company’s pension funds; and Berlusconi was slippery, forming his own political party (Forza Italia) and serving as prime minister for in four governments over 17 years while his TV network and newspaper Il Giornale pumped out propaganda on his behalf. As Beecher comments: ‘It was a blurring of lines between money, media, law and politics on a scale never seen in the global history of democratic governance.’ Berlusconi beat many trials before being convicted of tax fraud and bribery but escaped incarceration.

The heroes are few: Adolph Ochs with his commitment to impartiality and journalistic integrity at the New York Times; Henry Luce, who used journalism at Time magazine to make a better world; Roy Thomson, who presided over the best days of The Times and the Sunday Times; the Washington Post, particularly when Katharine Graham supported the Watergate investigation; the Fairfax family with a ‘statement of principles’ issued in Australia in the 1980s; Le Monde with its charter of ethics and professional conduct; and the Guardian, which stands for editorial independence.

If the picture is bleak in the democracies, it’s worse in the countries Beecher terms faux democracies (Turkey, Egypt, Hungary, Mexico, India) and the autocracies (Russia, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia) where news is heavily biased or censored by the state.

In the chapter ‘The Media is Broken’, Beecher describes how ‘the business models of traditional media have been unravelling at high speed ever since the internet transfigured communications more than two decades ago’. Print journalism (good and bad) relied on advertising which was ‘little more than a game of chance’, whereas ‘digital advertising is a science, not a gamble’. Continuing, he writes:

We are now watching the world’s third great transfer of media power, following the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the evolution of commercial media in the nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth centuries. And the biggest winner in this power shift has been Google.

He adds that at least Google has a ‘complementary relationship with news’ unlike the dominant social media platforms for whom ‘news and journalism are all but irrelevant’.

In keeping with the present times it is appropriate that Beecher should turn attention to his final two moguls, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Zuckerberg’s societal power he terms ‘almost certainly greater than that of Hearst, Beaverbrook and Murdoch combined’; in some countries Facebook is ‘the place where elections are fought, national issues are debated and influence resides’. Musk, the man who trashed Twitter, he describes as being ‘just the most recent example of plutocrats using their media properties as playthings for their views’.

In an Afterword, Beecher writes of first thinking about this book ten years ago when its central premise was uncomplicated:

… The owners and practitioners of news journalism either exercised their social licence responsibly or they abused it, but they used it.

Ten years on, as media power has shifted rapidly into the hands of the owners of social media algorithms and partisan propaganda platforms, technology is replacing humans …

The ability to create off-the-shelf, algorithmic, AI-fuelled, partisan news-making sausage machines has partly reshaped the thesis behind this book. No longer is it just men who have killed the news. Now it’s also machines that are killing the news.

It’s a chilling scenario. ‘Read all about it,’ newsboys once cried from our street corners. This book demands to be read.

Eric Beecher The Men Who Killed The News Scribner 2024 PB 400pp $36.99

Bernard Whimpress is a historian who usually writes on sport. His most recent book is SA Footy Stars of the Past, available from www.lulu.com/spotlight/bernardwhimpress

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Tags: Eric | Beecher, international media, Keith Murdoch, Kerry Packer, media moguls, media ownership, newspapers, press barons, Rupert Murdoch