Unbalanced like a Fox: Rupert Murdoch's critics should follow his lead

Reason, Oct, 2004 by Matt Welch

IN 1932 THOMAS Storke, editor and publisher of the Santa Barbara Daily News, faced a dilemma that seems positively alien in 2004. Storke's competition, the 58-year-old Santa Barbara Morning Press, was on the brink of bankruptcy, and it begged him to take over as owner.

Today we'd expect the dominant daily to quickly euthanize the straggler, maybe absorb some of the fired staff, and enjoy the 20-percent-plus annual profit margins of monopoly publishing. It's what the Los Angeles Times did to the Herald-Examiner in 1989, it's what the Hearst Corporation tried to do to its San Francisco Examiner while buying the market-leading Chronicle in 2000, and it's something the Chicago Tribune may soon do to the flailing Sun-Times.

But Storke belonged to a long-vanished era that is only now making a bitterly contentious comeback: a time when monopoly was a dirty word and daily newspapers identified openly with political parties. The editor was more of a Democrat than Rupert Murdoch has ever been a Republican: He served as a U.S. senator for two years, played a crucial kingmaking role at three presidential conventions, and used his sway with President Roosevelt to funnel several major public works projects to California's Central Coast. But it was Storke's sense of partisanship that stayed his hand from shutting down the local organ of his rival party.

"If the town's only Republican paper should merge with the independent, but pro-Democratic paper which I published, would not the ugly cry of 'monopoly!' be sounded against me?" Storke recounted in his charming 1958 memoir California Editor. "And monopoly was something I and my father before me had been fighting all our lives.... In Santa Barbara city and county more Republicans were registered than Democrats. I realized full well that the community should not be deprived of such an outlet of expression."

Storke's bundling of anti-monopoly sentiment and party politics, and his partisan conception of the audience, was the American newspaper norm before World War II, when media colossi like William Randolph Hearst tried to publish their way into the White House. Yet the exact inverse--nonpartisan monopolies --became the industry paradigm less than a generation later.

With start-up costs (and, in the case of broadcasting, limited spectrum allocation) proving an almost insurmountable barrier to entry, advertisers soon discovered that their products didn't sell well to people turned off by a news organization's politics. So during the newspaper consolidation era of 1960 to 2000, elite news became deliberately apolitical. Reporters, who had long chafed under the political machinations of their publishers, quickly learned that the ideal of objectivity, though unreachable, could nevertheless inspire a more thorough and convincing presentation of their work.

It was a win-win situation, except for more-partisan news consumers, whose dissatisfaction helped fuel the post-1960 explosion of left-of-center alternative weeklies, right-of-center talk radio, and niche opinion magazines like the one you're reading. Still, the lions of journalism --major dailies, network news broadcasts, Time and Newsweek--were able to keep their turf almost totally free from the perceived poison of identifiable politics. That is, until competition cracked open the door and Rupert Murdoch rammed a bulldozer through.

Kicking a 40-year habit is a traumatic business, especially if triggered by outside intervention in the form of a brazen foreigner whose politics you despise. Murdoch, by consciously pursuing the neglected audience of conservatives with both the New York Post and Fox News, broke the self-congratulatory spell with which journalists had long told themselves that their own editorial choices are driven by pristine motives. He then added a facetious insult to injury by declaring the result "fail" and balanced."

This is why Murdoch's News Corp., despite being a smaller company than Disney (which owns ABC), Time Warner (which owns CNN), Viacom (which owns CBS), and General Electric (which owns NBC), has been the singular object of establishment journalists' increasingly unhinged wrath. In May Los Angeles Times Editor-in-Chief John Carroll devoted a lecture at the University of Oregon to the topic of "the wolf in reporter's clothing: the rise of pseudo-journalism in America."

"Today, the credibility painstakingly earned by past journalists lends an unearned legitimacy to the new generation of talk show hosts," Carroll told the audience. "What we're seeing is a difference between journalism and pseudo-journalism, between journalism and propaganda. The former seeks earnestly to serve the public. The latter seeks to manipulate it."

It's important to note that Murdoch's critics are not at all wrong about one of their major gripes. Fox News does have a political agenda that dictates its journalistic choices. This is documented, in hilarious detail, in the MoveOn-financed documentary OutFoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, which began making the house party rounds this summer. One of the more amusing examples was given by former West Coast anchor Jon Du Pre, who said he was punished for failing to make the sparse attendance at a Ronald Reagan Library birthday celebration seem sufficiently "enthusiastic."