Abstract
Funny old world – that has to be the reaction to the news that, despite the great gnashing and wailing occasioned by the phone-hacking scandal and the subsequent Leveson inquiry, the Dirty Digger is still up to his old tricks. Or is he?
If these two excellent books are to be believed, it should have been inconceivable that Rupert Murdoch, flying in the face of the legal undertakings he gave when taking over The Times and The Sunday Times, has now embarked on what looks the merging of the two papers. He has moved John Witherow, the long-standing editor of The Sunday Times, into the editor's chair at The Times, and his deputy, Martin Ivens, has taken over at The Sunday Times.
But hold on, what's this? The until now ultra-tame “independent directors” of Times Newspapers have said: “Whoa, not so fast old Rupe.” They smell a rat and have used the undertaking that Murdoch signed in 1981 – “The editors, to be appointed by the board, may be appointed or removed only by the agreement of a majority of the independent national directors,” – to block, or at least slow down, the merger process. This has forced Rupert into the humiliating position of announcing that Witherow and Ivens are merely “temporary acting editors”.
There are two almost contradictory readings of these events. First, that Murdoch, despite the title of the Jukes book – The Fall of the House of Murdoch – is far from down and out. Because, despite the gory unravelling of life at Fortress Wapping that emerged during the Leveson inquiry, Murdoch is still there making, and breaking, undertakings at will. But there's an alternative reading, encapsulated by the Watson/Hickman slightly dramatic (but nonetheless pertinent) sub-title, News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain. That reading suggests the scale of indefensible behaviour revealed during the Leveson inquiry might have succeeded in stiffening the sinews of those who were supposed to be holding Murdoch and his newspapers in check.
Whichever reading turns out to be more prescient where this particular pattern of events ends is probably less important than the fact that Murdoch's power is now being challenged both externally and internally.
Although neither of these two books predicted this particular turn of events, they both give the reader, particularly anyone who has not been following events in forensic detail, a depth of background, and a sense of flavour, that makes understanding the current developments that much easier. Both books have a slightly breathless tone about them, particularly Watson/Hickman, although there is, arguably, good reason for this. First, it was produced at great speed – many months before Peter Jukes's book appeared – even though both books end more or less at the same point in the narrative. And second, because MP Tom Watson, a central figure in the uncovering of the phone-hacking scandal, somewhat disconcertingly writes about himself in the third person. “As he lay in bed in the Ship Inn in Perranporth on 15 April,” he writes, “Watson's mind was abuzz and he constantly replayed events.” And it's not just Watson who gets the Mickey Spillane treatment. The Guardian's Nick Davies, for example, is described as “a 56-year-old investigative reporter with a swirl of receding white hair”.
The Peter Jukes book is more of a tome – at 150,000 words it is twice the length of Watson/Hickman – and although it covers much the same ground there's a difference in register. The book is, on occasion, a touch gauche, particularly when Jukes, like Watson, puts himself into the narrative either through references to his work as a TV drama producer or his Murdoch-related hackery on the Daily Kos, the Daily Beast and the Huffington Post websites. More interestingly, as someone from outside the Fleet Street bubble, he is able to draw upon his drama background and also his impressively wider reading in media and journalism studies to illuminate the narrative, although perhaps with an over-reliance on Michael Woolf's slightly idiosyncratic book The Man who Owns the News.
But quibbles apart, both books provide a lively narrative and useful insight into the series of events that students of journalism history will no doubt be studying for years to come. Indeed, as someone who dabbles in journalism academia, I have been trying to puzzle out what essay question I might be setting on the phone-hacking/Leveson saga in 10 years' time (should I still be labouring at the chalk face). Perhaps “2012 – a turning point in journalism history when history failed to turn, discuss”? Marking this question in 2022 (with Murdoch still a sprightly 92-year-old) I would probably be looking for answers that observed that Leveson's failed attempt to reform the press was the seventh such attempt in 70 years, and that it, like all the previous attempts, failed as a result of newspapers' proprietorial solidarity and the craven fear of politicians that, if they took on the press, the press might well reciprocate. Of course, the essay would also observe that this whole debate became largely irrelevant as hard-copy newspapers had, by then, all but disappeared and all attempts at regulating the internet and social media foundered on the twin rocks of selfish national interests and the power of the media conglomerates.
Yet despite this failure, these two books, as accounts of an important moment in journalism history, would almost certainly be on my 2022 reading list. And I would be telling my students that, although no substantial changes in press regulation resulted from the phone-hacking scandal and subsequent Leveson inquiry, at the very least these events did cast light on the shadowy workings of the Murdoch empire, and justified the claims of those who said that this was a global media conglomerate that had grown out of control and was wielding an unhealthy influence on British public life that made it a real threat to democracy. British democracy survived, but then again, so did Murdoch.