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Force void of judgment falls by its own weight – Horace

In January 2009 I had planned to write about the corporate culture of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation under the tongue-in-cheek working title: In Bed with Rupert Murdoch. Although I was never intimately involved with the world’s most powerful media mogul I closely observed his modus operandi and witnessed his growing influence through working inside the organisation on three different continents for lengthy spells over a period spanning 45 years, the major part of it in Fleet Street. I was on first name terms with many of his top executives, although I declined to join the team of Murdoch’s UK newspaper operation, News International, preferring to remain a freelance journalist. Nevertheless I was afforded a unique opportunity at NI where I had carte blanche to pursue investigations and feature stories of my own choice or to accept commissions on behalf of the company. I was able to take advantage of NI’s seemingly limitless resources to engage in widely differing projects. There were no borders. I could travel wherever I pleased in pursuit of a good tale. And there were many of those.

In September 2010, it became apparent that activities at the News of the World over hacking and other serious forms of malfeasance were far wider than had originally been believed. The mighty vehicle created by Murdoch was in deep trouble, particularly as it had moved its headquarters from Australia to America where stringent laws applied to companies and overseas subsidiaries for which they were accountable under US legislation. The fallout from News International’s UK holdings dramatically unfolded, each revelation building on the last. A mountain of killer revelations was finally exposed to the world which now threatened a global organisation, built, controlled and powered by its central figure – Rupert Murdoch.

Was this the beginning of the end of the world’s most powerful newspaper mogul and his empire? Unlike other press barons whose fiefdom was restricted to national borders, Murdoch’s kingdom circled the globe and my working title now needed rethinking to embrace the cataclysmic changes. News International appeared to have succumbed to the myth of its seemingly impregnable position and had stepped on landmines of its own planting. One by one they were now exploding before a global audience.

I write this book from the view point of a working journalist and newspaper lawyer advising editors and journalists on the limitations dictated by law, convention, codes and ethics. As a journalist I had a clear window into the culture and workings of journalists and senior executives at Murdoch newspapers. A number of them have been arrested but not charged and I make no comment on the outcome of police inquiries into their behaviour. The purpose of this book is to share with the reader my view from the window and also my own experiences undertaking commissions from News International and other relevant newspapers. Any view I express about employees or former employees of News Group Newspapers is a personal view only and does not relate to anything else.

Within News Group, as in most other large organisations, there were in my opinion a number of loose cannons who were given authority beyond their capability or judgment. As a general rule from my own observation, NI journalists who abused that authority or judgment were unlikely to be punished where it led to a positive result. In fact, abuse of authority leading to publication of a ‘good story’ could have quite the opposite effect and be rewarded by the journalist’s line manager or editor who might for whatever reason not wish to know the full background of how that journalist obtained the story or if the story was correct.

Village Fleet Street was a fascinating mix of personalities and talent. It promoted talent and enterprise and despised failure. It allowed unimaginable excesses among its denizens and overlooked their personal failings providing they produced results. It was a place where prejudices could be aired and criticised in the same newspaper and where reputations could be ruined overnight by vindictive writers with personal prejudices. Supreme power of newspapers lay with the proprietor and the daddy of them all was Rupert Murdoch: Australian-born, anti-establishment to a degree, educated in England, citizen of America by choice and media billionaire through being the smartest operator of them all and hardnosed beyond imagination.

I joined Murdoch’s Daily Mirror in Sydney in 1966. One of his key executives, Frank Shaw, employed me on the basis that I had studied law and under the false impression that I had been junior chess champion of South Australia (I did not disillusion him). When the Mirror’s Chief of Staff discovered I had been a university student and knew nothing about reporting I was given the dubious title of interstate editor and provided with a desk in the telex room which fortunately gave me valuable access to editors in regional offices and correspondents overseas. I would also see messages exchanged between Rupert Murdoch and interested parties outside his organisation.

The paper’s news editor was known as Macca and opened my eyes to an exciting media world where travel and adventure came to men and women who were markedly different from the norm. People like Macca himself who had been hired, fired and re-hired by Murdoch on several occasions and eventually made editor of the Sunday Mirror. He considered it de rigueur to benefit from overcharging expenses and told the story of how he had made a killing when sent to New Guinea to find an Asmat village where Michael Rockefeller, missing heir to his family’s billions, was last seen alive. By chance, Macca found what he was looking for on the first day of searching but kept the details to himself. Tragically, young Rockefeller had either been eaten by cannibal tribes or killed by a crocodile. After two weeks Macca decided it was an appropriate time to break the news. He got his scoop and two weeks of expenses. At one morning’s conference during a dustmen’s strike Macca’s news list contained the acronym SARE. Rupert Murdoch happened to drop by and queried what the letters stood for. ‘Shit and rubbish everywhere,’ came the response. Macca was unashamedly fearless.

Before long I was writing a TV column for the Sydney Mirror and a weekly political column in The Australian, neither of which impressed Murdoch. I shared an office with the Mirror’s showbiz writer Matt White who was to become my mentor and close friend. Matt had returned to Sydney from London and been offered the editorship which he declined, preferring instead to write about movies. Sean Connery would stay with him when visiting Sydney and, according to Matt, rarely bothered to get dressed because of the queue of eager women begging to meet him. Matt had been a fighter pilot in the Second World War and later became a journalist and film producer. When he was in London, he had rented a flat in Hampstead with his friend the Earl of Coventry, a lover of cricket, gambling and high living. As a result, Matt was one of the few journalists to share the services of a butler while working for Associated Newspapers.

In Sydney, competition between the two evening newspapers was fierce. The Sun, part of the Fairfax group, was gradually overtaken by Murdoch’s Mirror, which he purchased soon after inheriting the Adelaide News. In order to overtake the Sun, he took the Mirror downmarket, publishing sensational stories under huge headlines and offering rich prizes to attract readers. Journalists on the two opposing newspapers would think nothing of engaging in dirty tricks to beat their rival. It was real Front Page stuff. Not pretty, but effective.

Reporters would impersonate doctors or policemen in pursuit of an exclusive. There was an outcry after a photographer donned a doctor’s coat and snatched a photograph of Mick Jagger’s former girlfriend Marianne Faithfull. She had taken a drug overdose and been rushed to the intensive care unit of St Vincent’s hospital in Sydney. Despite the unlawful means used, the Sunday Mirror splashed on the story with the headline: SCOOP! MARIANNE IN A COMA. It showed the singer lying in bed with tubes stuck in her mouth and a caption which read, ‘First exclusive picture of Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, as she lies in hospital fighting for life after an overdose of drugs.’ Although the Australian Journalists Association condemned the tactics used, newspapers in Australia and in Britain were happy to publish the dramatic photograph. Sydney provided an excellent training ground for Fleet Street.

Ron Boland, Murdoch’s right-hand man in Adelaide, offered me a job with the Adelaide News and its sister paper the Sunday Mail in 1968. I spent some weeks putting together a campaigning story about the large number of fatalities discovered among workers inhaling asbestos dust. Extensive research on the subject had been made available to me by Adelaide University, which had investigated different kinds of cancers arising from exposure to asbestos dust. Despite pleas from the features editor, Ron Boland refused to print the story to avoid offending major advertisers. Suppression of that kind would not happen to me again. Once I had arrived in Fleet Street, I found that refusal to publish by one newspaper group normally opened opportunities with another.

I joined the Melbourne Sun, part of the Herald and Weekly Times group once led by Rupert’s father Sir Keith Murdoch and whose ethos was markedly different to the brash culture of his son’s News Limited. Journalists were treated with civility and pay and conditions were a considerable improvement although one missed the go-getting excitement that existed at News Limited. But that was soon to return when I arrived penniless in London in January 1970, having just spent five glorious months on a mountain between Malaga and Ronda in Spain where I wrote my still-unfinished play and drank wine delivered in large casks strapped to the back of a donkey. But reality soon set in and the Press Association in Fleet Street beckoned. Impressed by my knowledge of law (from the results of a written test given to employees) editor-in-chief Sir David Chipp personally welcomed me to the organisation. But David held far greater expectations of me than I did for the pace of life at the PA with the result that I left some six months later and joined a notorious press agency run by a Fagin character who looked as if he had just emerged from a Charles Dickens novel. Tommy Bryant was outrageous and compelling with an unlimited supply of chutzpah.

Tommy’s Fleet Street News Agency was suitably based in subterranean premises in Red Lion Court off Fleet Street. Tommy (whose catchphrase was, ‘Jesus Christ, why aren’t you earning me money?’) hired young freelance journalists keen to break into Fleet Street. Several of his protégés were to become London editors and first class executives. He supplied stories to every newspaper and kept his wife pregnant most of the time to inhibit her passion for shopping.

Tommy was a master at ‘buying’ crime stories and had acquired a series of tipsters, most of them police officers, who he would regularly suborn with the promise of £5 for each publishable tip received. He was not the only one doing so. A former Labour MP and cabinet minister Shirley Williams recently made light of the fact on television that when as a young reporter she worked for the Daily Mirror police were regularly given a fiver for their assistance. But that was small beer compared to police on the make in the 1970s. They were paid thousands, stashed in brown envelopes and left on the bar of an Old Compton Street pub in Soho where pornographers and police exchanged pleasantries on a Friday evening.

Although it was against press council policy, Tommy would not hesitate to break rules or ethics when it came to getting a story. The press council had ruled that newspapers should not pay convicted criminals for their stories unless in exceptional circumstances. Tommy had no inhibitions. He promised criminals the world for their stories and promptly reneged on the deal once it was published. His police contacts in the City of London gave him adequate protection against disillusioned and unhappy criminals.

Across the way from Tommy’s den in Red Lion Court were the offices of News Limited of Australia, home of Murdoch’s London correspondents. One of his long-serving London editors, Peter Gladwin, had been given a seat on the board of directors of the newly acquired News of the World. Peter said he’d alerted Murdoch to rumours that Robert Maxwell had put in a bid for the newspaper but was modest about his role. ‘I was made a director simply to agree with whatever Rupert wanted.’

Apart from the Press Association and Fagin, the doors to the major newspapers were difficult to batter down for a young reporter from Australia. Fleet Street was a mecca for talented and clever journalists who could drink to excess and yet turn in superb prose. Battering rams were not the answer. The big money and recognition would come from acquiring exclusives and that is how I came to be offered considerable incentive from the News of the World to give it first refusal on my stories. I began chasing big stories, which at that time sold for small fortunes. It was at the height of relentless competition between the Sunday and daily newspapers in London, much of it generated by Murdoch’s acquisition of the News of the World and the Sun. On two different occasions, I had front-page splashes in all three of the Sunday populars on the same day. Editors began taking notice of this and within two years of arriving broke in London, I had acquired an Aston Martin DB5, two substantial properties, and the use of an office on the second floor of Bouverie Street, London EC4.

The combined circulation of the three Sunday newspapers – News of the World, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People – exceeded 10 million and the total readership was in the region of 30 million. It was an exciting change from the smaller newspapers on which I had worked in Australia, although the culture within the Murdoch camp was much the same in both countries. While the NoW provided ready cash, enabling Murdoch to quickly expand his empire, it was the Sun in which he showed most interest. He had bought a failing, left-wing newspaper and turned it into a huge money-spinner, eventually beating its main competitor the Daily Mirror. Murdoch had recognised the Mirror’s mistake in trying to be too upmarket while catering mainly to a blue-collar audience and made sure the Sun would have no such pretensions. His paper was working class but pandered to entrenched, right-wing opinions. It was bigoted, brash, angry about immigration, critical of homosexuals and interested in sex, sensation, and money. The Mirror would never again catch up with the Sun’s simple but effective formula. Much of its early success was due to the genius of advertising whizz kid Graham King who had proved his worth with Channel 9 TV in Adelaide and the Daily Mirror in Sydney. King’s golden touch would later increase sales of the Sunday Times and Murdoch’s Star magazine in America.

Murdoch paid his executives well. For the journalist or editor who could produce the results Murdoch demanded, there would be ample riches. For those who failed, early dismissal was on the cards. This approach ensured an editor would adapt the same hardnosed approach as the proprietor to avoid the risk of being moved sideways or sacked. Murdoch allowed no slack. His treatment of staff was rarely based on sentiment or emotion. Generally, the fate of an employee would be determined only by business considerations, although there have been some significant exceptions.

Rupert Murdoch’s approach to politics and politicians has been along similar lines. A politician who might be sympathetic to his organisation would be given a good press while otherwise he or she would be regarded as an enemy. And a prime minister’s term in office was finite while Rupert Murdoch was there for life. So it was they who usually sought favour with the press mogul and not the other way around. In fact, Murdoch bluntly told politicians questioning him about his friendship with politicians and access to prime ministers, ‘I wish they’d leave me alone.’ But neither side could leave the other alone for too long. When it helped his business, Murdoch could be at ease with either political party or, if necessary, support a dictatorship. His minions would also show deft footwork in nurturing friendships with people in power.

Politicians, police and public servants should be free to speak to the press providing they understand their boundaries. To limit that freedom in any way is tantamount to state censorship and that is unacceptable in a genuine democracy. The range of voices that are able to speak in the UK has been entrenched in the national psyche and must be preserved at all costs. The extent to which those boundaries have been compromised – and there is little doubt that they have been – is now the subject of a major investigation that will impact heavily on future relationships with the press. Journalism can be entertaining and enjoyable and hugely satisfying. Competition is healthy and there are already laws in place to prevent criminality. All that is needed is enforcement. The press should not be gagged.

Proprietors would do well to remind themselves of Kingsley Amis’s comment in the New Statesman in 1932. He wrote: ‘Every newspaper lives by appealing to a particular public. It can only go ahead of its times if it carries its public with it. Success in journalism depends on understanding the public. But success is of two kinds. [Daily Mail founder Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount] Northcliffe had a genius for understanding his public and he used it for making money, not for winning permanent influence. He became a millionaire because he was his own most appreciative reader; he instinctively appealed in the most profitable way to the millions of men and women whose tastes and prejudices were the same as his own. He lived by flattering. He did not educate or change his public in any essential; he merely induced it to buy newspapers.’