As media mogul Rupert Murdoch?s empire battles its worst crisis ever, after the phone hacking expose in the UK, this once-almighty controller of information in the Anglo-Saxon world finds himself bereft of political allies. The man who made and unmade PMs and Presidents through the smears and cheers of his domineering newspapers and TV networks is now at the receiving end. One intriguing aspect of Murdoch?s career is his economically irrational refusal to disinvest from the increasingly unprofitable print newspaper publication business. Earnings from print papers have been on a secular decline for his News Corp for a while, even as its film production and cable TV segments have boomed.
Yet, Murdoch prizes the print medium as a political tool whose intangible benefits far outweigh return-on-investment calculations. He is savvy to the reality that political opinion in advanced economies is still swayed by older newspaper reading publics rather than the digerati. It is no mean fact that whichever political party Murdoch?s stable endorsed in British elections since 1992 has won and repaid, ex post facto, its debt to this great concentrator of information power.
Is Rupert Murdoch just a diabolical larger-than-life media tycoon who relishes in his power over ruling elites like the villain in the James Bond flick Tomorrow Never Dies, or is he a front for more entrenched interests and institutions? News Corp has a wide range of investors, including the who?s who of Wall Street such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BlackRock et al. The biggest holder of News Corp?s shares outside the Murdoch family is John Malone?s Liberty Media, a leading conservative telecom tycoon who has frequently bristled against regulatory authorities.
Murdoch?s print and audiovisual output is clearly a standard bearer of the financial industry and of big businesses in general.
That there is strong propagandistic content in the Murdoch papers and TV channels makes them invaluable for Wall Street, the City of London and their allied corporations in the US, the UK, Australia and beyond. The rant against re-regulation and ?uncertainty? since the 2008 financial crisis, allegedly destroying economic freedoms and growth, has been prominent in the Murdoch media spin. The excessively libertarian and anti-regulatory stances that emerge from Murdoch-owned enterprises like Fox News have performed an important defensive operation for Wall Street and the City of London by reinforcing popular beliefs that big government is coming back and that this must be prevented.
Repeated usages in the Murdoch press of phrases like ?assault on business? and the push to limit the Barack Obama administration?s spending have actually worked wonders in building up public opinion against further fiscal stimulation of the US economy. Opinion polls in the US are now returning numbers in favour of downsizing the state?s role in the economy, despite the chronic weaknesses of high unemployment and low growth.
The fascination with how Murdoch?s British tabloids undermines the privacy of the rich and the famous as well as the distressed should not be allowed to obscure the larger structural influence of his media in critical public policy matters like taxation, distribution of wealth and white collar crimes. The victims of unethical journalism by The News of the World (practices also shared by its rivals) may number in a few thousands, but the victims of the taxpayer-bankrolled corporate bailouts, home foreclosures and pink slips number in the millions. Their story of mass injustices is in the public realm in spite of the stifling stranglehold of the Murdoch press because of courageous reportage by more independent institutions. But the cause of bringing to book the culprits of the financial crash and its aftermath has been squelched through the conservative onslaught from the Murdoch media.
Can the consent manufactured by Murdoch?s media about the inherent evil of government regulation of the economy also disintegrate with the baron?s fall? For a healthy media environment, all ideological points of view, including that of the Right, must be available to facilitate informed choices. But Murdoch?s line should not be allowed to become the preponderant one. The issue with Murdoch is not that he is an arch conservative per se but rather how much muscle he had accumulated by bending and destroying regulatory bodies in his own domain of the media as well as in the wider economies of English-speaking countries.
In the era when WikiLeaks and alternative online media are competing against Murdoch and his likes, the future of balanced news and analysis still looks hopeful. If the ?old media? based on editorial gate-keeping and cozy ties with states or corporations does not keep up with the new media and ring in ideological plurality into its content, the former could lose further ground.
The author is vice-dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs