It’s too soon to write the obituary. Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that he is transitioning – an unlikely combination of words, I grant you – to the role of “chairman emeritus” of Fox and News Corp, handing control to his eldest son, should not be the cue to speak of him in the past tense. As former employee and onetime Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie put it: “He’s going to be sitting in the back seat of the car while Lachlan drives the damn thing, and I should think it’ll be a pain in the backside.”
Indeed, in his letter to staff, Murdoch Sr sought to dry the tears of any premature mourners with a reassuring promise: “When I visit your countries and companies, you can expect to see me in the office late on a Friday afternoon” – a pledge that carried no hint of menace at all.
Still, the instant coverage of the Murdoch decision gave off more than a whiff of the retrospective. One clip featured prominently: the media colossus’s 2011 appearance before a committee of MPs at the height of the phone-hacking scandal, in which he avowed, “This is the most humble day of my life.” Watching it now, it seems almost quaint. You find yourself wondering: why didn’t Murdoch try a different tack? Why didn’t he deploy the rhetorical weapon that has proliferated around the world, shaping the fate of nations, including our own, and whose modern model he all but invented? In short, why didn’t he blame the elite?
We know his hatred for that mysterious, loosely defined caste has burned since his youth and has not dimmed. “Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class,” he raged in his not-quite-parting missive. “Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.”
Of course, there is a rich seam of comedy in the notion of a multibillionaire corporate tycoon who for decades held the ear (and other parts of the anatomy) of presidents and kings – a regular visitor to Downing Street, albeit via the back door – insisting that it’s others who belong to a “rarefied class”. You might have thought the yachts and private jets would exclude you from posing as an everyman cruelly shut out by those at the top – but no.
Murdoch is reported to wish Donald Trump dead, but that is in part the fury of the master for his apprentice. It’s been Trump’s shtick for a while, but Murdoch got there first: he was the original blue-collar billionaire. Both men inherited well, only to self-identify as self-made men forever battling against the snobbery of those who, in their minds, held the real power.
It’s an absurd position, as ridiculous as Murdoch’s supposed faith in free market capitalism, given that his path to riches was smoothed by sweetheart deals with politicians who craved his backing: his monopoly hold on satellite TV in the UK, gifted by Margaret Thatcher, was just one of the more egregious examples.
Still, anti-elitism is the guiding philosophy, and it has made Murdoch a vast fortune. Riddled with contradictions it might be, but it’s not fake. Its roots lie in his early life in Australia, where there flourished what the scholar David McKnight calls an unofficial culture that was “egalitarian, despised pretence and disliked elites – defined so as to include intellectuals”. Murdoch took that ethos to the Britain of the 1960s, where initially it looked like a refreshing challenge to a stuffy, snooty establishment.
But, especially in the US and on Fox News, it evolved long ago into something else – the rightwing populist creed that suggests ordinary people are under the thumb of a liberal elite that controls the civil service, media, science, the universities and the law. In this view, the right might win the odd election, but it’s the left and its “politically correct” or “woke” orthodoxies that grip the wider culture – and have to be broken.
Murdoch and his outlets have pushed that doctrine for decades, and the consequences are hardly a secret. The twin populist right victories of 2016 – Brexit and Trump – both carried a Murdoch stamp of approval, but the impact has been even wider. As McKnight noted, for years Murdoch-owned media framed the climate crisis as just another liberal orthodoxy: “In this scenario, scientists are an ‘elite’. On the other hand, climate deniers … are elevated to the status of brave dissidents against an oppressive set of beliefs.”
The damage caused is global and enduring, enough to ensure the final words of Murdoch’s exit letter – in which he urged his employees to “make the most of this great opportunity to improve the world we live in” – carry the bitterest ring. But there has been another consequence, one that was on display this very week.
It came in response to the investigation – by the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times and Times, along with Channel 4’s Dispatches – into the behaviour of Russell Brand. Accused of rape, sexual assault and abuse, Brand denied the charges in a video message and said it “makes me question, is there another agenda at play?” His followers had been warning him – “watch out Russell, they’re coming for you, you’re getting too close to the truth” – and he said he detected “a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces, and these kind of voices, and I mean my voice along with your voice”.
It’s becoming very familiar, this line of argument. Trump is the master of it, dismissing 91 criminal charges against him as the work of a liberal deep state bent on his destruction and, in the process, the silencing of his millions of supporters. In this telling, the voluminous evidence – showing Trump conspiring to overturn a democratic election, or harbouring top-secret government records, or paying hush money to a porn star – can be waved aside as nothing more than a plot by the elite, its sheer abundance proof of the enemy’s determination.
You’ll hear similar talk from Benjamin Netanyahu, on trial for corruption in Israel. He swears that he too did nothing wrong: it’s just a “witch-hunt” by a leftwing establishment out to get him – this in a country ruled by the right for most of the past three decades. You’ll hear it too from Robert Fico, the Trump wannabe who threatens to return as prime minister of Slovakia despite resigning from office in 2018 under a cloud of sleaze, and who now claims to be the victim of a “police-led coup”.
It’s become the go-to defence of the supposed anti-elitist. No matter the heinous acts they are alleged to have done, no matter how strong the evidence, and no matter how much power they themselves wield, they insist they are the poor, benighted victims of those who truly pull the strings.
Which is why it’s a wonder the godfather of rightwing populism, Rupert Murdoch, did not play that card when he was hauled to Westminster to account for the hacking of a dead child’s phone. He should have blamed the elites for that, too. After all, he and those loyal to his teachings during his epic, 70-year-long career blame them for absolutely everything else.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
Jonathan Freedland will host a Guardian Live event with Gordon Brown on Tuesday 26 September at 7pm BST. The event will be live in London and livestreamed – book tickets here
