Abstract
The launch party for Les Hinton's memoir was held 100 yards or so from the former offices of the pre-Murdoch Sun, where we first met 52 years ago. He was then a gangling, unassertive, slightly weedy youth of 22 with wonky eyesight, the most junior of reporters. I was six years older, with the imposing rank of diplomatic reporter. Neither I nor any of his colleagues could have guessed that Leslie (as he then was) would rise to become one of the most powerful figures in journalism on both sides of the Atlantic. So how did it happen?
In this amiable autobiography he offers some answers, but takes his time getting around to them. We are exactly half-way through when, on page 223, he reluctantly accepts his first executive job. Before that he was a carefree reporter on the road, treating us to stirring anecdotes of the type that habitually crop up in old journos’ memoirs, teetering on the cusp of credibility and often involving alcohol. Within the next two dozen pages he has moved up from drinking in the seedy haunts of hacks to the country houses of the international élite, including one where a Picasso hangs in the bathroom.
Although born in Bootle, when he joined The Sun in 1966 he was not long back from Adelaide, where his family had settled and where he had been working for a small-time newspaper proprietor named Rupert Murdoch. In 1969 Murdoch, rapidly becoming bigger-time, bought The Sun – whereupon Hinton quit; not because of any aversion to the new owner but because he had just got married and wanted to present his wife to the family in Adelaide.
Within a year he was back and had rejoined the revamped Sun. He proved an enterprising reporter and won the coveted posting to New York – which is where the Rise and Rise of Les Hinton began. The trigger was Murdoch's conviction that American journalists are too pompous, and take themselves too seriously, to understand tabloids. So every time he acquired or launched an American tabloid he would bring in British and/or Australian specialists to shape it as only they know how. Seeking a news editor for the Star — a weekly rag sold mainly in supermarkets and specialising in UFOs, the occult and celebrity sex – his gaze fell on Hinton, who was handily on the spot and knew the game well. Not long afterwards he bought the Boston Herald and made Hinton deputy editor. This was where he absorbed the Murdochian technique of eliminating those reluctant to co-operate with the new regime, swiftly but relatively humanely.
After a second stint at the Star, this time as editor-in-chief, he moved to the executive suite as the head of Murdoch's American magazines, where he had to learn how to butter up advertisers and read a balance sheet: skills that he appeared to take in his stride. Things went less well in Los Angeles, where for a while he ran the Fox television network (and lived next door to OJ Simpson) but never warmed to the Hollywood style of doing business. Murdoch did not hold this against him, and soon appointed him chief executive of News International, the publisher of his British newspapers – a post he filled for 12 years.
In 2007 Murdoch persuaded him to return to New York to run his latest and most prestigious acquisition, Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal. He signed a five-year contract but was unable to see it through to the end, because in 2011 came the revelations of widespread phone-hacking on the News of the World, dating from the time that Hinton was chief executive. He quickly resigned from Dow Jones, while maintaining that he had been unaware of the practice. He delivers a bitter diatribe against the police and members of parliament for their persistence in hounding him until he was officially exonerated in 2016.
He had worked for Murdoch for 52 years, almost certainly a record. The secret of keeping on the boss's good side, he reveals, is never to disagree with him in front of other people. If you think he has made a bad decision, break it to him gradually and in private. This works sometimes, but failed when it came to the hasty closure of the News of the World, which many of his executives opposed and Murdoch apparently now regrets.
Hinton is an unashamed admirer of his old boss and has no time for those who see him as a “scabrous, plundering capitalist debasing cultures across the world”. He believes that “the Rupert Murdoch they hated was a hallucination, a virtual devil, a crowd-sourced apparition created to be the object of all their rage and grief”. While conceding that he was not the easiest man to work for, he makes the point that he “imbued his companies with a fantastic sense of possibility and got big results”. And he treats us to one or two of the pithy sayings of Chairman Rupert, such as: “There's no such thing as a quiet day. Some are more challenging than others, that's all.”
The book has no index. This is a pity, since such is the allure of influential newspaper executives that an index would have been a great read, overflowing with the names of the rich and famous, from Yoko Ono, Johnny Rotten and Graham Greene (“I smiled at him, he smiled back”) to Bill Clinton, Princess Diana and Gordon Brown. At the launch party, Les said the omission had been suggested by Piers Morgan, who knows how tight-fisted journos behave in bookshops: they go straight to the index to see if they're in it, and if not they don't buy the book. So we all have to read through it: no hardship, since it is pacey and engrossing and a lot better written than most of the hacks’ memoirs I have struggled through over the years.
