The Making of Murdoch: Power, Politics and What Shaped the Man Who Owns the Media

Tom Roberts

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788317849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Biographies d'entreprises

Rupert Murdoch's extraordinary career has no parallel. His control of Fox news, which so successfully supports the Trump presidency, is a key force in American politics. In the UK, his control of The Sun and The Times leaves politicians scrambling to get him onside. But what do we know about the man himself? This book looks closely at the Murdochs, focusing on Rupert's father Keith, who built the family's media power and cultivated the anti-establishment instincts that his son Rupert is known for. Roberts traces the life of the Murdochs, how Rupert Murdoch's view of the world was formed, and assesses it's impact on the media that influences our politics today.

1ROSEHEARTY

The north-east coast of Scotland, 25 June 2016. A golf buggy lurches along fresh tarmac through the coastal dunes. On its rear-facing bench seat sits an 83 year-old billionaire in a sports jacket. Up front, a blonde former supermodel sits next to the driver whose own improbable golden locks are secured under a white baseball cap. Donald J. Trump, fellow billionaire with dynastic ambitions and newly minted Republican Party presidential nominee, is driving Rupert Murdoch and the media titan’s wife number four, Jerry Hall. Trump’s own model wife number three, Melania, is absent. It is three months since Murdoch and Hall married, and Rupert foreswore using Twitter with a final message: ‘No more tweets for ten days or ever! I feel the luckiest AND happiest man in the world!’ His penultimate tweet that day focused on the likelihood of Trump winning the Republican nomination. Rupert had already nailed his colours to the mast, claiming the Republican Party ‘would be mad not to unify’ if Trump won out. Trump eagerly retweeted this endorsement.

Now it was time to seal the deal of support with a publicity-friendly jaunt in Scotland, a location close to both their hearts and key in the origins of their families. Trump’s mother Mary Ann MacLeod had emigrated to America from the Isle of Lewis, while the Murdochs had reluctantly left Scotland’s shores for Australia.

The white golf cap Trump wore as he drove the buggy bore the populist slogan that would help sweep him to power that November: ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN’. Five years earlier, in the summer sun of London to the south, as the hacking scandal unfolded, Rupert Murdoch had sported a cap of his own. A week before he delivered his stumbling testimony to the committee of MPs and told them of his father’s legacy, he was photographed power-walking the paths of Hyde Park in a blue crew cap. It bore the name ‘ROSEHEARTY’.

Rosehearty was the simple fishing village on the barren Aberdeenshire coast where in 1844 Keith’s grandfather James had founded a Free Church of Scotland ministry. Brought up in the manse there, James’s son Patrick went on to become Free Church minister of Cruden Bay, just a 20-minute drive up the coast from Trump’s Scottish golf course.

In 1884 God, it seems, intervened, delivering a mission call to Patrick to emigrate to Australia. More prosaically, it offered a chance for the family to escape the convulsions in the Free Church and the scourge of tuberculosis that was picking off its numbers.

The Murdochs were a family of solid Presbyterian stock with a Calvinistic dedication, propriety and diligence. But Rupert’s blue crew cap came from another Rosehearty – his multimillion-dollar superyacht. World leaders had been guests on that yacht and had seen the dining room – with its wall-wide map of the world showing America at the centre – the scene of secret unrecorded meetings. It was the stateless zone of the super-rich where deals could be struck and the media and political world carved up beyond the range of telephoto lenses.

In 2008 it was to this Rosehearty that British Prime Minister David Cameron, when still Leader of the Opposition, had been flown by Murdoch family Gulfstream jet and granted an audience in his successful effort to gain the support of the Murdoch press in the forthcoming general election that would bring him and his Conservative Party to power.

A century earlier, in 1908, Keith Arthur Murdoch had been in London, far away from his Australian home. A handsome and physically imposing young man with intense brown eyes under a heavy brow, a casual glance would not have revealed him as the homesick, painfully shy man he then was. He also suffered from a cruelly debilitating condition: under stress his breaths became shorter and his throat muscles constricted, strangling his voice and shutting down his ability to communicate.

At just twenty-two, Keith had left Australia and the security of his father’s manse in suburban Melbourne for the first time. He had arrived in London hoping to find immediate success in Fleet Street as well as the best expert on speech available. But he found himself in a strange and hostile city, torn between a passion to pursue a career in journalism and the pressure to continue in the line of family preachers. His plan to gain the valuable experience he craved in this centre of the world’s press had so far come to nothing.

During one lonely, doubt-racked midsummer evening, Keith stopped to rest on a bench in Hyde Park. He was suddenly gripped by what he described in a letter to his father as a ‘religious experience’. But even so he simply could not reconcile himself to devoting his whole life and career to the Church, as his stern clergyman father had always hoped. Journalism was a calling as much as the ministry, and Keith imbued his choice with a missionary zeal: ‘Tonight I fancy that my path lies clearly along journalism, where undoubtedly great work can be accomplished.’ He assured his father that however his future developed, he would pray ‘for strength throughout the years to work for Christ’.

The break was made, the decision set. After all, as he pointed out, with his speech impediment he would not be a suitable preacher. Henceforth, Keith Murdoch and his descendants would find other platforms and a bigger congregation.

He was determined to make his name in the city and wouldn’t leave whatever the cost, until he was a good journalist. With Fleet Street as his training ground he was sure he would learn an enormous amount, and, all going well, he ‘should become a power in Australia’. As he told his father:

I know that you have never been keen on my profession and would have preferred a more stable walk of life nor do you trust press work for any good end. I assure you I would be happy and relieved to give it up but I see the opportunities and necessities and I shall go ahead to become a power for good. If I consulted my own inclination I would be in a much easier path than journalism but I see enormous possibilities ahead for journalism…’

There was a caveat: ‘[T]hat is of course if I overcome my stammer.’ But Keith saw a higher plan even in this. It was surely ‘a dispensation of Providence, for to him that overcometh shall be given not a crown – I don’t want that – but enlarged opportunities for useful service’.

Keith’s letters reveal the bubbling cauldron of his mind – ambition clashing with a sense of inadequacy mixed with a Calvinistic streak of denial and Darwinian principles of self-improvement. He foresaw ‘a pretty bad time’ over the next eighteen months but faced it ‘confidently because I want a struggle’. ‘The “survival of the fittest” principle is good because the fittest become very fit indeed. I’ve sacrificed a nice easy position, comforts, friends and hundreds of pounds by coming here but I hope to get very fit.’ His life, he felt, had ‘been altogether too easy’ so far.

But Keith’s childhood in Melbourne had not been easy in some ways. Determined and vocal, Reverend Patrick Murdoch held a series of prominent positions in the Presbyterian Church of Australia, including a time at its head as moderator-general. A ‘cleric who valued social connexions’, his standing in society was high, but his clergyman’s stipend remained low. And so, though Keith grew up playing with the sons of the wealthy and influential, he did so, as he would painfully recall, in patched pants. The importance of capital – or at least access to and friendship with those who had it – was a lesson Keith absorbed early in life. He also felt the weight of family expectation, for he had been named Keith Rupert Murdoch after his father’s youngest brother, who had left Scotland to make his career in London and died of tuberculosis, aged twenty, two years before young Keith’s birth. Keith was also the eldest son, as his older brother George had died tragically soon after Keith’s own birth on 12 August 1885.

School had been an ordeal for a boy who could not read aloud in class, yet Keith had applied himself diligently. He attended various local schools, including the small coaching college set up by his uncle Walter Murdoch, who became a prominent journalist and essayist. There he was drilled in the belief that clear written English is the bedrock to success, and Walter’s stint as a parliamentary reporter for the Argus helped inspire Keith’s interest in journalism as a career. Keith had decided against going to university, fearing the cost and the effect it would have on the upbringing and potential opportunities for his younger brothers (Ivon, Frank, Alan and Alec) and sister Helen, just a year his senior. It was a sacrifice he would come to regret in London, where he felt wholly out of his depth: ‘a baby in thought and knowledge’.

In other ways Keith’s path had been smoothed for his career as a journalist; before he left he had been given a job at the Melbourne Age. The Scots-born proprietor David Syme no doubt accepted him as a favour to the Murdoch family, as he and the Reverend Patrick Murdoch were friends and their wives were on visiting terms.

The going was tough, however. As a lowly suburban reporter Keith had to battle to work up stories and establish contacts. This was made even more difficult because of his stammer, so bad that he often had to resort to drafting notes in order to communicate, even to buy a train ticket. Keith’s livelihood depended entirely on the sub-editor’s willingness to publish the stories he submitted. He cannily cultivated the ‘bearded old terror’, marking the start of a pattern he would repeat with increasing utility throughout the first half of his career. After five years of this hard graft, by 1908 he had managed to earn and save more towards his London trip than if he had been a regular staff reporter.

When he set out from Melbourne, Keith had safely stowed in his trunk a light but precious cargo: a sheaf of letters of introduction, including one from his employer praising his ‘zeal and industry’. Other letters had been requested from leading figures connected to the Presbyterian Church. But potentially most useful and certainly most impressive, with its embossed Commonwealth of Australia letterhead, was the letter from his father’s friend, the Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, introducing ‘a well known and much respected young journalist’.

The letters of introduction might have been impressive but the list of contacts Keith had to pursue after his arrival in Britain was hardly at the dynamic edge of Fleet Street. Trusting that God’s support was already in the bag, his more mundane hopes of gaining the entrée to experience rested on the church journalist and publisher William Robertson Nicoll. However, Nicoll delivered a rebuff and the ‘cold stern slaughter of some hopes’, saying he was only prepared to help Keith indirectly. Nevertheless, writing up pieces from the Pan-Anglican Congress for the Church Family newspaper gave Keith three days’ work. A few freelance pieces in the British Weekly and Daily News on church politics followed. But Keith was soon worn out with worry that his writing was going nowhere. Still, his resolve and ambition reasserted themselves and he told his father, ‘I’m going to become a moving force yet.’

On the other side of the world, Reverend Murdoch could only worry at his son’s state of mind. Keith admitted to having had a breakdown, which in London had manifested itself as ‘repeated headaches, a constant feeling of weakness, clouded depression over the brain, condition of speechlessness with strangers, fear now and then of doing mad things – in fact, pure nervous depression through over work’. He had tried to do too much too quickly. It was time to put the piecemeal, desperate attempts at press work to one side and instead confront the underlying block to his prospects of success.

In the British autumn of 1908 Keith ‘decided to run for health and speech’ back to Scotland and the safe, comforting haunts of Rosehearty and Cruden. Travelling between relatives and enjoying golf in Dumfries, he regained his spirit and concentrated on eliminating his stammer. While still in London, he had sought out the best elocutionist and voice expert he could. Madame Behnke claimed that having practised her method for forty years, she had identified the main cause of the problem for those afflicted: blockages in the nasal and respiratory passages. Contributory factors included ‘public-school life’ and less convincingly ‘worms’. After assessing Keith, Madame delivered her expert opinion: he was suffering from ‘rheumatism of the throat’, a condition not helped by the damp, foggy conditions of the approaching London winter. Strict adherence to the Behnke Method’s programme of rigorous muscle exercise was deemed necessary not just for the sufferer, but ‘for the sake of his … possible descendants’. While he laboriously repeated ‘rhythmic speaking’ Keith planned to purchase the latest travelling typewrite...