For more han half a century, Rupert Murdoch has been a sort of Deus ex Machina in Western politics, not so much saving as sinking the forces of reason. He never really got over the fact that his father, an Australian media magnate, died before bequesting him his stable of titles. Instead, Rupert received just one, in Brisbane, but then built up his own Australian media empire, not least with the nationwide The Australian, before moving on to Britain, the United States and then the world. In the UK, like a spider drawing newspaper and TV outlets into his web, Murdoch corrupted the British political establishment, first the Conservatives, then Blairite Labour, then Conservatives again, before swinging behind Nigel Farage and Brexit. The Sun newspaper, not so much the zenith but the nadir of Murdoch’s influence, trumpetted that it won the 1997 election for Labour. I am not sure that is necessarily true, but I do think that it was crucial in winning the slight majority for Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum.
In the meantime, the Murdoch stable, most infamously represented by the News of the World, had engaged in phone-hacking and all sorts of underhand, indeed illegal, activities. That Sunday newspaper was liquidated as a result, but anyone who thinks that Murdoch and his henchmen thereby repented needs their head seeing to. All this figures in the BBC’s new three-part documentary, The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, currently available on iPlayer. There are lots of good interviews with people who worked inside the Murdoch machine, as well as insights into Rupert’s three children, and how they waltzed into and out of favour. There is particularly interesting footage about Murdoch’s involvement with Fox News — the ultimate pits — and his embrace of Donald Trump. Much of this is pretty ghastly stuff, and it would have benefitted from a more lengthy opportunity for people who had been screwed over by the Murdoch Mafia to set out their views. I would also like to have known more about Murdoch’s various wives, before and after; what on earth did Jerry Hall see in him (other than zillion dollar signs), for example? I have always felt uncomfortable with Kate Fleetwood’s style in such documentary commentary, but don’t let that put you off. There is much to savour and retch over in these three programmes. In recent years, Murdoch offloaded much of his media estate to Disney. But I long for the series’ inevitable sequel, The Downfall of the Murdoch Dynasty.
The Sun newspaper is trumpeting its “success” in getting Britain’s “iconic” blue passport back, after a long and at times hysterically nationalistic campaign. But the whole thing is a con-trick. The new, pale blue passport that will in principle come into use from October 2019 is nothing like the old one. It’s the wrong colour, the wrong size, the wrong texture and doesn’t have the little windows that the old British passports had. Although I haven’t seen the inside pages of the proposed new passport, I bet they will be different too. So, in a nutshell, the new passport has nothing whatsoever in common with the “iconic” old one, other than it is not the burgundy EU-UK passports that we have now. But in a post-Truth world, why would a pernicious rag like the Sun care about facts? Like the Daily Mail and the Daily Express — and the Daily Telegraph on a bad day — the Sun is just concerned with anti-EU propaganda, sometimes in the ugly forms of migrant-bashing and outright xenophobia. No other EU member state has such an irresponsible gutter Press like the UK’s, which is a major reason why the Brexiteers won — narrowly — in last year’s EU Referendum. That’s why it is so important to expose their lies, as well as to campaign to keep our burgundy passports, with all the European citizenship rights that they represent.
British newspapers are notoriously partisan, which is a polite way of saying politically biased. But do they actually influence the way people think and vote, or rather do readers gravitate to titles that reflect their own opinions? It has often been argued that the latter is the case, which might suggest that the bias does not really matter, yet when so much of the UK Press argued for Brexit, I couldn’t help wondering if that contributed significantly to the narrow vote to leave the EU. So I was pleased to be able to attend a seminar last night at Europe House, headquarters of the European Commission and European Parliament London representation, to listen to a panel discussing the findings of a report on UK Press coverage of the EU Referendum, published by the Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism in association with PRIME Research. The study, which looked at the Tuesday and Saturday editions of nine leading newspapers, found that 41% of the articles that focused on the referendum were pro-Leave whereas only 27% were pro-Remain. When the readership reach of the different newspapers was factored in, the imbalance was even more marked, as 48% were then identified as pro-Leave and only 22% pro-Remain. The study noted that Europe was not a particularly important issue for voters until 2010 and only became so after it was linked to immigration. The referendum campaign itself coincided with a decline in David Cameron’s popularity and the Remain campaign appeared unable or unwilling to articulate a positive vision for Britain’s EU membership instead focusing on the risks of Brexit. The Leave side then cleverly exploited what it dubbed Project Fear. The Remainers concentrated almost entirely on economic arguments whereas the Leavers gave more weight to matters such as sovereignty and migration. Neither side could claim to have told the unblemished truth, though the most egregious lie was the £350 million a week claim the Leave campaign could be saved by no longer paying in to the EU budget, instead spending the money on the embattled NHS. The Daily Express maintained a barrage of anti-EU migrant stories, though the reach and therefore impact of the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph was more significant. The pro-Remain newspapers were essentially the Daily Mirror, the Guardian and the Financial Times, though interestingly polling results later showed that a significant number of Daily Mirror readers voted to Leave, underlining the social/economic class dimension to the vote.
Jonathan Fryer 