A House that Murdoch Bought

October 20, 2010 Topics: HistoryMedia Regions: United States

A House that Murdoch Bought

Mini Teaser: The business of newspapers isn't as interesting as journalists think. Not only that, few can write properly, few report thoroughly, and many are frustrated at being chroniclers rather than the persons being covered.

by Author(s): Conrad Black

 

THIS IS the problem with so much of this writing; it aggrandizes the downright-uninteresting power brokers of a dying genre that—most damningly—is slowly collapsing under the weight of its own substandards. Talese opens with an astonishing double-narcissism-mirror trick: The Times gives large play to a story that President John F. Kennedy regretted that the paper did not give more attention to an intelligence piece they had published which accurately predicted the sort of Cuban-exile amphibious action that was about to take place at the Bay of Pigs. Its own managing editor, Clifton Daniel, said JFK believed that if the New York Times had played the story more strongly, the administration might have abandoned the operation. As retold by the Times, the president lamented that the patriotic faction of the paper, which wanted to play down its advance scoop for national-security reasons, prevailed over those who wanted to magnify a great reporting coup. The Times was to protect the administration from itself, and cause the president to change military and strategic policy. This has to be the supreme coruscation of the collective institutional megalomania of an overmighty press. Talese and Daniel have performed a great service in revealing this orgy of self-importance, though not the service they probably expected. It is not unlimitedly flattering to JFK either.

In a jerky to-and-fro, pitching forward and back, Talese takes almost a hundred pages of flashbacks to get us through a twenty-minute prelude to one of Daniel’s daily editorial conferences. There are ten pages on the selection of a new Washington bureau chief. No one today could imagine that any of this really matters very much. The Times has recommended the losing candidate in seven of the eleven presidential elections since the book was originally published in 1966. Former–Times political columnist Tom Wicker reported on the weekend before Richard Nixon’s inauguration in 1969 that he might well blow up the world. (He tried to expiate his pathological hostility with a rather-favorable biography of Nixon twenty-two years later.) Then-columnist Reston pronounced Reagan a failure as president in 1984 and predicted he would give up and go back to California like Gene Autry singing “Back in the Saddle Again” (rather than be reelected by forty-nine states as he was).

Nothing in this book prepares the reader for the Times to write off the $1 billion it invested in the Boston Globe, or for the paper to go on life support with a usurious bond issue to Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telco king who is the apogee of the red-in-fang-and-claw corporate buccaneer about whom the Times is usually keenly censorious. These are more malleable principles than Talese conditions us to expect. Walter Duranty, the groveling Stalin apologist, and his like-minded successor Harold Denny in the Moscow bureau during the 1930s are glossed over in two neutral sentences, and the fact that the interminable Arthur Krock, Washington bureau chief for twenty-one years, was in the pay of Joseph Kennedy for much of that time is omitted altogether.

Ms. Ellison describes a frequent occurrence in the newspaper industry, as a longtime enterprise-controlling family splits over the publication’s future, supporting this or that manager. In the case of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, the case is one of a keenly interested elder generation of relatives who feel proprietary about the newspaper and the resentful cousins and in-laws who criticize the company’s performance and grumble about low dividends. A wealthy outsider arrives (Murdoch), exploiting the split and buying the property. And then there’s the fact that Murdoch soon wrote off his $5 billion investment. The grumbling relatives put the conquering lion of tabloid newspapers, television and film over the barrel even more expensively than had Walter Annenberg when he sold Murdoch TV Guide for at least $2 billion more than it was worth. This was the real news, in addition to the fact that for the first time in his long career, Murdoch actually has bought a quality title and raised the quality of it. He added a sports section, an inserted magazine, and made the stories less ashen and more accessible, with no diminution of quality. Perhaps one of the rare examples of news as NEWS.

The same moral-journalist-as-overhyped-pseudocelebrity-with-little-real-talent is seen over and over again—including at the Washington Post. With commendable candor, Mr. Kindred declares himself in his first sentence “a hopeless romantic about newspapers.” He is certainly entitled to that, but from my more than forty years in the business, in six countries as an owner and scores of others as publisher-traveler (doing my miniature New York Times role of calling on local heads of government and foreign ministers), I am long cured of any such romance. I think that most journalists, like most people, are pleasant enough to meet, but few can write properly, few report thoroughly, many are frustrated at being chroniclers rather than the persons whose deeds and words are reported. As a group, they often claim to be a craft, if not a learned profession, but generally act like an industrial trade union. Mr. Kindred thinks they have great loyalty to the proprietors. Perhaps where there is no competition, this is the case. In Washington, DC, there is concern for position, pay and prerogatives that masquerade as loyalty to the status quo. But where there is rivalry, like in London, as the late Lord Rothermere, erstwhile chairman of Associated Newspapers (the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday and the Evening Standard), said to me over dinner, after poaching one of my editors, “They are actors, and we own the theaters. They perform on our stages but don’t give a damn about us, and will go elsewhere tomorrow for an extra farthing a week.”

Kindred subscribes to the triumphalist school of Bob Woodward evangelism, and thinks that he and Carl Bernstein were the precursors of the great, crusading, truth-seeking reporting that, with Watergate, brought on a golden era of investigative journalism. He does not mention Woodward’s book Veil, where the author simply invented a hospital-deathbed interview with former–CIA Director William Casey, nor the wild exaggerations of the Watergate literature that claimed Woodward and Bernstein feared for their physical safety while reporting the crisis. There is some mention of Deep Throat (Mark Felt) but none of the fact that although Nixon suspected Felt was the informant, he insisted on being called as a witness when Felt was charged by the Carter administration with criminally violating the privacy of the Weather Underground urban terrorist organization, as Nixon considered Felt’s actions justified by legitimate national-security concerns. Nixon was jostled on his way into the court, heckled inside it and gave extensive exculpatory testimony. His offer of personal financial aid to the defendants was declined, but his strong recommendation to Reagan to pardon Felt and his co-accused, which was followed, went unacknowledged by the beneficiaries—as did Nixon’s gift to them of champagne when they were absolved. Kindred mentions none of this.

He concludes by celebrating that the Washington Post “will survive” because of Washingtonpost.com. As a former subscriber to the Post, I can attest that their related website is a relatively vigorous effort to keep abreast of other media, but it remains essentially an attempt to attract people into the printed newspaper and to keep the vast overhead of printing and physical distribution viable. The Post should survive, but that is not assured by anything we have seen up to now. Kindred buys into the theory that newspapers are necessary to expose abuses by police and prosecutors. The fact is that the local and national media have been severely complicit in the shredding of most protections of individual rights, civil liberties and due process in the Bill of Rights. While the media slept or applauded, the grand jury has become a rubber stamp for prosecutors, and the Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendment guaranties against uncompensated property seizure, and of due process, access to counsel, an impartial jury, prompt justice and reasonable bail, have been eviscerated. The media have said practically nothing while the United States has pursued an insane and hypocritical war on drugs, emptied the mental asylums into the prisons, and incarcerated between five and twelve times as many people per capita as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, comparable prosperous and sophisticated democracies. In these areas, the media, national and local, have pandered to public fear of violent crime, and have incited the mindless paranoia of the nation and the reactionary authoritarianism of people—like HLN host Nancy Grace demanding the preemptive imprisonment of a great swath of suspects. Mr. Kindred is clearly a sincere idealist, but he seems to have the utmost difficulty recognizing how inadequate the press has been in warning of visibly approaching economic and societal dangers. He is so steeped in the rites of his occupation that he thinks eating in a public place with a Pulitzer Prize winner is, as he reveals, almost a process of canonization for the laureate’s prandial companion.

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