Murdoch. - book reviews

National Review, June 7, 1993 by Richard Brookhiser

RUPERT MURDOCH and I came to New York at the same time, and there to greet us was the Son of Sam. One of my sharpest memories of the fag-end of the summer of 1977 is of waiting for the Lexington Avenue local in the steaming evening rush hour. Abe Beame was still mayor, the subway platforms were mosaics of black gumwads, the subway cars were swirls of psychotic graffiti. A fellow New Yorker held a copy of the newly Murdochized New York Post, reporting that David Berkowitz, the woman-stalking serial killer, had just been apprehended. The headline was about a foot tall, the letters were blood red: CAUGHT.

Rupert Murdoch's holdings cover the globe and reach (via satellite) into space, and he owns a Hollywood studio and a TV network. But I will always think of him as a newspaperman. William Shawcross's Murdoch never quite explains its subject's significance, chiefly because - pace both Shawcross and Murdoch - his significance is ambiguous, but it does a fine job of laying out the story up to this point.

Murdoch's grandfathers, a Scottish minister and an Irish gambler, prefigured his character. His father, who wrote a lurid and exaggerated dispatch on the Gallipoli debacle, supplied his profession. Murdoch developed his lifelong hatred of elitist attitudes at Oxford where, as a student, he expressed his disdain by driving his own sports car and by keeping a bust of Lenin on his mantel. From his first newspaper, in sleepy Adelaide, he moved to the fleshpots of Sydney. At the end of the Sixties, he arrived on Fleet Street by buying the News of the World (a/k/a "News of the Screws") and the Sun. As the years passed, he acquired properties with a boyish heedlessness: American newspapers and television stations, the Times of London, 20th Century Fox, TV Guide. "Maybe I was a bad buyer," Murdoch acknowledged after one megadeal. "I should have beaten him down a few hundred million." The spree stopped in 1990 when it turned out that the News Corporation, Murdoch's monster holding company, had run up a debt the size of Ecuador's. But the banks - and Murdoch's own lifelong record of straight dealing with his bankers - saved him for further sallies.

Along the way, he employed a cast of characters out of The Front Page, via the Rake's Progress: Steve Chao, a Harvard-trained classicist who created Studs and kept a pile of fake excrement on his desk; Steve Dunleavy, who told a limousine coming to take preacher's bimbo Jessica Hahn to the Geraldo show that Miss Hahn had gone to the hospital, and who then summoned an ambulance in which he interviewed her himself, Maxwell Newton, Clare fellow, densely learned economist, pornographer, and brothel - keeper, at whose funeral his third wife slipped his platinum American Express card into his pocket, "just in case." For two decades there hovered at the margins of Murdoch's career the figure of envious rival Robert Maxwell, liar, thief, and author of Todor Zhivkov: Statesman and Builder of Modern Bulgaria.

What has it all meant? Shawcross describes Murdoch as an "agent of influence" in the spread of American culture, and Murdoch himself agrees. "As the world is modernizing, so it is Americanizing," he has declared, and as a player in the information revolution, he sees himself as furthering this process. Murdoch's view is true, however, only if America means modernity, and that is not all that it means, or has meant. So long as even the ghosts of the rights of man and the fear of God continue to linger here, the essence of America cannot be entirely exported by Home Alone and The Simpsons.

In the English-speaking world, his effect has been more definite. Abandoning his youthful leftism, he became a convert to the Reagan-Thatcher revolutions, for which key papers here and in Britain beat the drums. But how does one reconcile this, and Murdoch's own strong sense of propriety, with the vulgarity of these same papers? What do the bare-breasted cuties on Page Three of the Sun have to do with what Mrs. Thatcher called the "Victorian virtues"?

George Orwell pondered a similar question fifty years ago when he wrote about the comic postcards of Donald Megill, of which the "outstanding, all important feature" was "their obscenity. It is by this that everyone remembers them, and it is also central to their purpose." Yet when Orwell examined McGill's postcards more closely, he concluded that their humor had meaning only "in relation to a fairly strict moral code. Whereas in papers like Esquire ... the imaginary background of the jokes is always promiscuity, the utter breakdown of all standards, the background of the McGill postcard is marriage." The Page Three girls aren't Madonna; they also aren't K. D. Lang. Now that the cultural coverage of the New York Times has essentially made it The Advocate with foreign news and stock prices, one appreciates the difference.

Rupert Murdoch has returned to the New York Post, after being forced to sell it in 1988. Here's hoping he breaks some china.