Murdoch watchers have had their gaze wrenched towards the home of the controlling family trust in Reno, Nevada this past week. But Australians would get a better sense of just how the family’s media companies are accommodating a rising authoritarianism by looking closer to home.
In Hong Kong, The Wall Street Journal, a publication that has marketed itself as the least Murdoch-like of the family’s properties, marked the 28th anniversary of the handover to China this month by sacking reporter Selina Cheng. She had been elected chair of the territory’s leading journalists’ rights organisation, the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA).
It’s a blunt reminder that (at News Corp, at least) the global purging of newsrooms is as much about creating a politically correct workforce of reliable journalistic cadres as it is about simply saving costs.
For the past decade, Hong Kong has been at the coalface of the global struggle for press freedom. Right now, Jimmy Lai, publisher of the pro-democracy Apple Daily, is in jail facing national security charges. The HKJA has been the key voice for journalists in that struggle. Last year, Cheng’s predecessor as HKJA chair, Ronson Chan, was jailed for five days.
It’s that context that has made the sacking of Cheng so shocking, marking the moment when, if we had any doubts, News Corp declared just which side it’s on. As Cheng said: “Reporters in Hong Kong know their editors or employers don’t always have their backs. That’s why the [HKJA] is so important. We want other journalists to know we’re here for them.”
The media is so brutalised by repeat rounds of job losses that it’s easy to miss that the cuts are changing the shape of the industry.
Here in Australia, the number of journalists across News Corp has drop from a boasted 2,500 across all its titles in 2012 to whispers of fewer than 1,000 now. The so-called “good journalists” have been winnowed far more quickly. They were essential to provide journalistic cover for an otherwise radicalising News Corp — for example, the straight Sky News by day needed to balance the just plain weird Sky after dark.
It’s the Lachlan transition: adapting the family business models by accepting, and eventually embracing, that odd mix of authoritarian populism and anarcho-capitalism championed by Donald Trump — then pairing it with radical job cuts. It’s a journalism of hard reporting with the bluster of punditry and the lure of conspiracy theorising, all packaged up with the frenetic urgency of a tabloid news framing.
Traditional media is mimicking the new Murdoch model — like at Politico in the US or the Daily Mail and Telegraph in the UK — and doing it just as well, in raw readership terms anyway. The Washington Post has brought in former Murdoch managers to oversee its own transition.
Until last year, The Wall Street Journal was meandering more slowly down the path of change. Outside Lachlan’s direct control, it stuck more rigidly to the traditional siloing of its deeply reported news and its often quite bonkers op-eds.
After the Murdochs took over in 2008, Rupert’s managers built on its strengths but also made it a sharper, more serious news broadsheet, with a broader market appeal than the old-fashioned business paper they’d inherited. It now boasts one of the world’s most successful digital subscription programs.
Since change agent Emma Tucker was brought in from the family’s Sunday Times to be editor in chief last year, the paper has been in turmoil, with job cuts and staff protests (the WSJ remains a strongly unionised newsroom) over her reboot to make the masthead more like, well, all the other “serious” Murdoch mastheads like, say, The Australian.
The Lachlan-era shock has encouraged a hope that maybe things would be different if prodigal James was restored in a post-Rupert palace revolt by the family trust. Maybe. Or maybe people are drawing too strong a conclusion from stray comments that the Tesla board member has made about climate change.
In the chronicles of the Murdoch dynasty, Hong Kong plays much the same role as it does in British imperial history: once the strategic spearpoint to open up China to drive expansion for a new century; now, a largely greyed-out embarrassing moment of overreach.
For the Murdochs, that spear was Star Television, distributed across east and south Asia (although not China itself) bought for about US$1 billion in 1996. The spear carrier was youngest princeling James, who marked his own 28th birthday in 2000 as Hong Kong-based head of the satellite broadcaster.
His main job was to persuade Beijing that they could trust the family to go along to get along (a task made harder by Rupert’s incautious 1993 assertion that satellite television was an “unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere”.)
In a 2001 speech, by contrast, James shrugged off the threat of authoritarianism, saying Hong Kong democracy activists should “accept the reality of life under a strong-willed ‘absolutist’ government”.
That’s the lesson from Hong Kong: you can change the father for the son, or the brother for the other, but you can’t change the fundamentals of the business of right-wing media.
Should News Corp and the Murdochs be doing more to stand up for press freedom? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
