When is a jumbo jet crashing in the Indian Ocean and killing 100 passengers not a front page story?
When you’re editing a Rupert Murdoch newspaper and News Corp owns half an airline.
This was just one of the lessons Eric Beecher says he learned after he became editor in chief of the Herald and Weekly Times, including the now defunct Melbourne Herald, in 1987. He joined after a stint as editor of the Sydney Morning Herald.
Then aged 36, Beecher says he was berated by News’ managing director Ken Cowley for making an independent editorial decision.
“Don’t you know we own half an airline? Cowley said. “We don’t run stories about plane crashes on the front page!”
In his new book, The Men Who Killed the News, Beecher says during his time in the organisation his “moral compass became dysfunctional”.
“I had two years, you know, at a pretty senior level at News Corp, I saw a lot of Rupert Murdoch, travelled the world, and was part of the organisation from the inside,” Beecher says. “And it shocked me.”
Beecher says the organisation is a “medieval fiefdom” where editors learn through “a kind of osmosis” rather than through direct instruction.
“It’s a kind of osmosis. It absolutely exists, because otherwise, editors and writers and columnists in Murdoch publications would frequently write things that are opposed to their proprietor’s views. And they almost never do.”
Beecher adds that through the Dominion court case, however, we learned that Murdoch also sometimes takes a direct role in editorial decision-making.
“Murdoch’s predilections – commercial, editorial, ideological, personal, political, economic, philosophical, racial, sociological – were insinuated into every important decision and direction we took,” Beecher writes.
At a meeting attended by Murdoch, editors suggested the Melbourne Herald run a campaign on solutions to the problem of teenagers defacing trains with graffiti. Beecher claims Murdoch liked the idea and suggested the paper could promote “capital punishment”.
“The room fell silent,” Beecher writes. “I said we would look into it.” Capital punishment has been outlawed in all jurisdictions since 1985.
Beecher says he wrote the book – which examines the abuse of power by media moguls from William Randolph Hearst to Elon Musk – because of what he describes as a loophole in democracy.
“For the last few decades, after I stopped being a newspaper editor, and particularly after having spent two years as a Murdoch newspaper editor, it always struck me that there is this loophole in democracy,” he says.
“Freedom of the press is seen as an important component of democracy but on the other hand there are media owners who have almost no obligations or almost no regulation almost at all, apart from defamation laws.
“I’m certainly not an advocate for government regulation, but I am an advocate for much stronger forms of self-regulation.”
Beecher says there are strong examples of publications which have what he describes as “ethically resilient journalism” that is self-regulated: the New York Times, the Economist, the Guardian and Le Monde.
But newspapers run by media moguls are open to an abuse of power.
“What I’ve tried to do in this book is to explain how it works when you’re inside it,” Beecher says.
While he had been working slowly on the book for many years, the impetus to finish it came when he was personally sued by Lachlan Murdoch in 2022.
Lachlan claimed in a lawsuit that an article by Crikey’s political editor Bernard Keane conveyed a meaning that he illegally conspired with Donald Trump to “incite a mob with murderous intent to march on the Capitol” in Washington DC on 6 January 2021.
Beecher says the writ was a shock because the article was so innocuous it wasn’t even referred to the lawyers before publication.
The article did not name Lachlan Murdoch but was headlined: “Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator.”
“And there was almost a throwaway line about the Murdochs, as the controlling shareholders in Fox News, were co-conspirators with Trump in the riot,” Beecher says. “News Corp and many other news publishers publish much more incendiary pieces of commentary every day.”
Beecher – the co-founder and chair of Private Media, which publishes Crikey – decided to defend the case even though the stakes were high.
“I felt that this was an abuse of media power, because it was a billionaire suing a relatively small, independent news publisher,” he says.
After hundreds of hours spent in preliminary court battles and thousands of pages of discovery, Lachlan dropped the defamation proceedings in April last year.
The decision came after Fox reached a $US787.5m settlement with the voting equipment company Dominion in a separate defamation lawsuit.
Private Media’s CEO Will Hayward said it was a substantial victory for legitimate public interest journalism; and Lachlan handed over $1.3m in costs to Crikey.
The experience, while harrowing, spurred Beecher on to finish the book.
“I’ve been thinking about this book and sort of collecting information and research for probably seven or eight years on the side,” he says. “Once we were sued by Lachlan Murdoch, that really activated me.”
A News Corp spokesperson says, “Eric Beecher last worked at News in the previous century and has not worked for us for more than 30 years.”
• The Men Who Killed the News by Eric Beecher is available in Australia now
