This is the fifth instalment in a new series, The Murdoch Century, examining the legacy of News Corp and Rupert Murdoch.
Stories are the lifeblood of journalism. But just as important as the narratives published in the Murdoch family newspapers, websites and news channels are those the family’s leaders have told themselves for more than a century.
In the 1890s, when Keith Murdoch was the shy, stammering target of school bullies, he told himself that being powerful would fix everything, and from a young age, he was fixated on attaining power and security. As an adult, Keith also told himself that he was a self-made man, and there was certainly truth in this. He did work his way up from a bottom-rung “penny-a-line” reporter in the early 1900s, becoming head of Australia’s largest media empire and a political kingmaker by the 1930s.
A journalist who knew Keith well said his power lust was “insatiable”. And Keith’s success was a product of his skill in cultivating close friendships with powerful men — a strategy that his strict and social climbing father, the Reverend Patrick Murdoch, had instilled.
These friends and mentors included the British press baron Lord Northcliffe and the mining magnate William Lawrence Baillieu, head of Collins House, the largest industrial complex ever seen in Australia. Indeed, Baillieu, his brother and son helped Keith in many ways, including selling him newspaper shares at cheap rates and providing him with finance so that he could become a newspaper owner himself in the mid-1920s. The Baillieu family underwrote the mini-media empire that Keith would later leave to Rupert.
But one of the most enduring stories that Keith told himself and others was that he was a patriot, wielding power in service of Australia and its people. This was how Keith justified his attempts to govern by newspapers, as well as his many campaigns to influence politics and policy — from his Gallipoli letter, to his pro-conscription zealotry during both world wars, to his anti-Labor crusades and his attempts to install useful politicians on the conservative side of politics (such as Joe Lyons in 1931).
In reality, Keith had a tendency to conflate self-interest with the national interest. Cecil Edwards, a former editor of the Melbourne Herald who worked with Keith for years, said the “guiding star” of Keith Murdoch’s life was always “service to Murdoch”.
At the end of his life, even when Keith was physically unwell and quite isolated, he still considered himself the best newspaper manager in the country. Although his judgment was awry and his methods outdated, he refused to step back. He subjected his successor at the Herald and Weekly Times (HWT), his former protégé John Williams, to years of overbearing and unnecessary supervision.
Although Keith had expanded the HWT group into a giant in the 1920s and 1930s, all of his major business moves since the 1940s had been for himself, not the HWT. Keith was focused on creating an independent newspaper chain, separate from the HWT, for his son Rupert and the rest of his family. He had given standing orders to buy on his behalf shares in News Limited (publisher of the Adelaide News) and Queensland Newspapers (publisher of the Courier-Mail) whenever they were offered — and at a premium price.
Rupert later said his father borrowed so heavily that he “cleaned himself out completely to buy the News“. This was the key media asset that Rupert inherited in 1952. Rupert was only 21 years old. He adored, perhaps even revered, his father, and Keith’s death was an immense personal tragedy for him. But in a business sense, Rupert would have had a very different career if his father had lived.
Keith would have been a domineering presence within the family company he had worked so hard to build. He would have been constantly looking over Rupert’s shoulder; a restraining force on his son. Not just because Keith’s judgment had declined and his tactics were from a bygone era, but because he cared about appearances, conventions and social approval where Rupert did not. It was Rupert’s unleashed business style — unimpeded even by the bonds of friendship — and his willingness to be openly ruthless that were at the heart of his business success as he expanded News Limited into a global media empire.
Along the way, Rupert always told himself that he was an outsider, not an elite — despite his inheritance and his Geelong Grammar then Oxford University education. And like his father, he conflated whatever was best for him as being in the best interests of the country too.
That story in particular was always dangerous, but especially so in recent years as the Murdoch family’s leaders told themselves — or at least their audiences — that the world would be a better place with Donald Trump in charge. That Brexit would be “wonderful” for the UK. That Australia would be better off without the ABC. And that global warming “is good for us”.
On display in Australia for a century, these Murdoch family traditions — of power-lust and self-interest disguised as patriotism, using media assets to play politics — have had a global impact.
