Journalists have spent months agonising over how not to normalise Trump. I have a variation on this theme: Please do not normalise Rupert Murdoch.
Yesterday—after 15 years of wriggling, delaying, lying, twisting and smearing—the British wing of Murdoch’s news empire shelled out more than £10m to prevent a court from hearing numerous allegations of persistent illegality. This is not normal.
The company has already paid out more than £1bn in costs and damages to thousands of others who found their most private communications had been spied on by journalists and private investigators doing the editorial dirty work on their behalf. This is not normal.
It’s not normal for a news organisation to target the private lives of MPs who have the temerity to raise questions about the way the company works. It’s not normal to enlist newspapers and private detectives in a form of corporate espionage in order to further the global expansion plans of its owner.
Hacking into the phones of members of the royal family? Not normal. Hacking the phone of a murdered schoolgirl in search of a scoop? Not normal. Employing more than 100 private investigators over a period of 16 years to hack, blag or otherwise obtain information on 35,000 occasions? This is not how normal newsrooms behave.
It’s not normal for a news organisation to pay nearly $800m to keep another story about the sleazy way it operates out of court. But yet another Murdoch company—Fox News—was it seems knowingly broadcasting lies about supposed attempts to rig the 2020 US election. Many Fox journalists didn’t believe the conspiracy theories they were broadcasting—but they pumped them out, anyway. This, I repeat, is not normal.
Now consider the CEO of Murdoch’s UK news operations, Rebekah Brooks. A court in 2014 found that she didn’t know about all the illegal activity that was happening on an industrial scale while she was editor of the News of the World. That an editor should be so innocently unaware of how her newsroom’s major scoops were obtained is—how can one put it?—not normal.
Brooks was reportedly given an eye-watering £10.8m payoff from Murdoch for resigning, claiming to have done nothing wrong, in July 2011. Not normal. Equally abnormal was Murdoch’s decision to rehire her four years later. I’m struggling to think of a company that has rehired an executive who had presided over an utter ethical catastrophe, but I can’t. So I think it’s fair to say this was not normal.
Her company has fought like a tiger to deny any suggestion that illegal behaviour was rife at the Sun, where she was editor for six years, as well as at the News of the World. But yesterday’s settlement with Prince Harry and the former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson included the admission that there had indeed been ”unlawful activities” in connection with the Sun, including during the period from 2003-2009 while she was editor.
These unlawful activities were, according to the Murdoch camp, carried out by private investigators, not by journalists. On whose behalf these sleuths were digging up the dirt on “targets” we cannot know, but we are invited to believe it had nothing at all to do with the Sun newsroom. Believe that if you will. There are people who believe the Moon is made of green cheese, but we do not consider such people to be normal.
You may be asking yourself how, given yesterday’s admission that Brooks led a company which had benefitted from illegal activity, she is still CEO. You may be thinking: “This isn’t normal.” And you would be right. It isn’t.
It may be helpful to imagine how a Murdoch newspaper would editorialise about a normal company—say, a bank, or utility company—which insisted on retaining as its CEO someone who admitted leading a major corporation which had gone in for illegal activity, and which had shelled out £10m+ to keep it out of the public eye. The verdict would be blistering.
That’s normal. Keeping such a CEO in office isn’t.
Have Murdoch executives at all times told the truth and nothing but the truth to the courts, to parliament and to the Leveson Inquiry, which was set up to examine newspaper ethics and which took evidence on oath? With a normal company, you’d assume so. But let me break it to you gently, this is not a normal company.
A normal company, faced with an imminent and high-profile police inquiry, would probably decide, on balance, that that would not be a good time to delete more than 30m emails. It might look—how can one put this delicately?—fishy. And yet there does seem to have been a mass destruction of evidence which the cops might have found immensely useful. “Regrettable” was the word used by Murdoch’s team yesterday. Such a deliciously normal word.
What happens next depends on whether or not people in power consider Murdoch’s company should be treated like any other—or whether there is some sort of “Murdoch exception.”
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that MPs would be beyond furious that a significant number of them—including cabinet ministers—were targeted over the years and had their communications intercepted? One MP who dared to question the Murdoch operation subsequently found out that the News of the World had paid thousands upon thousands of pounds to snoop on him and his partner—about 50 days of leg work in all. Not normal.
Do MPs just shrug, accept they were harassed and lied to… and move on? That’s certainly how to normalise what happened. In 2018 MPs voted to scrap Leveson 2—the second stage of a public inquiry which would have looked at criminality in the newspaper industry. So maybe they will prefer to turn a blind eye.
And the police? Mark Rowley, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, has already set up a small team to review any evidence of criminal behaviour, perjury or destruction of evidence. He will now be sent a further dossier of the evidence which—thanks to the 11th hour settlement—was not aired in court.
Let’s hope that, unlike some of his former colleagues, he treats the Murdoch organisation like any other normal company. What are the chances?
I will not waste ink on Ipso, the “independent” regulator set up in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry and which was supposed to be much tougher—with new powers to set up inquiries into serious and systemic ethical breaches. It even has a standards investigation panel ready to spring into action. They never have. They probably never will.
It’s a regulator of sorts, but let’s not pretend it’s a normal regulator.
Why does this matter? To pretend that the Murdoch organisation is normal is to diminish the work of thousands of honest, hard-working journalists—many of them working for Murdoch—who would never dream of behaving criminally or covering up that behaviour with lies and smears. We’re all working in an industry that is an existential struggle to win trust. If we treat Murdoch as “normal,” we might as well haul up a white flag and go and work for Elon Musk.
Rupert Murdoch has now spent around £2bn in keeping the truth about the way his news organisations operate out of the courts in the UK and US. Please don’t shrug and say it’s normal. It’s not.
