Rupert Murdoch
I have lived long enough - nearly to be fifty; more than many people do. And I have lived to see many great evils faced, thwarted, defeated. What I have learned from my life is not that evil is unconquerable and victorious; quite the contrary. I have seen the most wicked and corrupt state in the twentieth century, the Soviet Union, borne down by its own wickedness. I have seen the Sicilian Mafia, apparently invincible when I was young, battered and reeling under blow after blow. I have seen freedom spread across eastern Europe, Latin America, east Asia, mostly in countries that had never known it for long, and endure and take root. I have seen three indomitable countries - Eritrea, East Timor, and now South Sudan - fight their way to independence against all the odds, against overwhelming enemies and universal indifference. Until they won, there had been nobody who did anything to help them; they took all their weapons from their enemies. And if many things went wrong, from the sorry rise of left-wing populism across Latin America to the terrible tyranny that gripped Eritrea as soon as the foreign enemy had been driven out, I am still certain that those evils will not last for ever. Other evils will arise, some which we know, some which we can't even foresee. But I believe that individual evils will always, in the long run, lose.
Which is why I am not very surprised, though I am ecstatic, at the Murdoch scandal. There is one thing that must be understood: to me, finding out about the British popular press was one of the shocks of my adolescence. Coming from Italy, where the Press was generally respected and self-respecting, where the main business of the papers was to investigate organized criminality, terrorism, and public and private corruption, and where every now and then a journalist died because some villain had objected to being found out, the whole world of red-top taploids, sex obsession, huge titles and Page Three Girls was both alien and repulsive. Finding out that this, and not the famous and prestigious broadsheet titles whose names rang across the continent, was the standard British press and the standard reading of Britons, was a shock such as I cannot render to those who grew up with it and find such things natural.
Now Murdoch had invented nothing; before he bought the News of the World, both the graphic horrors of his mastheads and the brutality of its editorial contents had been patented by the Daily Mirror, and the salaciousness and hysteria were the daily fodder of cheaper papers across the board. Murdoch, however, refined it all like a criminal chemist refines coca into crack cocaine, leaving out anything that was wholesome and decent and pushing to extremes everything that was tasteless and addictive. One thing that struck me, for instance, was that while the DAily Express had the great Giles, and the Daily Mail had Mac, and while the Mirror had a wonderful comics page featuring Andy Capp, The Perishers and so on, the cartoons and comics in the Sun were so bad - bad in a technical sense, poorly drawn, poorly conceived, unfunny, forgettable - as to be incredible in what was supposed to be the most profitable newspaper in the country. The same goes for its columnists: the Daily Mirror had Beachcomber and Keith Waterhouse, but no Sun or NotW columnist has ever been worth re-reading, let alone reprinting. It was not only vulgar; it was coolly, deliberately stupid, always in search of the worst, not just in content, but in style.
I came to Britain just in time to watch Murdoch at the height of his power and success; and coming where I came from, it was, to me, a terrible shock. In Italy, at the time, press and pornography were two wholly separete things; in spite of a few timid efforts on state TV, broadcasting was incredibly decorous by today's standards - there was no Berlusconi yet - and in general sleaze was the one thing that the Italian media had not yet experienced. Something like The Sun was wholly impossible to imagine to me, from my background; I could not believe that the English press amounted to this. Of course, the English themselves had grown up with the slow evolution - or devolution - of their press, and were used to it to the point of not noticing it. They had become used to the monstrous in their daily lives. I have never yet managed to get one Briton to fully understand my revulsion at their media; not even when Berlusconi developed his own Italian counterpart formula, for TV rather than for newspapers.
But as I regarded the Murdoch and Maxwell press as a complete evil, I was sure, by my own beliefs, that they could not endure. Maxwell is long gone, and I have long wondered whether Rupert Murdoch would die like him - he is old enough - before the fruit of his crimes came back to destroy his creations. That sooner or later that fruit would ripen I had little doubt: Murdoch is and has always been the kind who makes scandals, like Richard Nixon or his old enemy Maxwell. His methods demand, not collaborators, but accomplices, and accomplices have to be paid off and protected. There never was any hope that what he had built would outlive the criminal methods used to build it.
Now his methods have caught up with him. The closure of the NotW is Rupert Murdoch's last desperate throw to avoid being personally involved in the scandal. In fact, nobody has any doubt that the moving power behind the illegality and corruption - as Peter Oborne called it, a criminal enterprise - was Murdoch himself. And if his former allies in Britain hope that the scandal can be controlled and kept away from the core of the company, they are deluding themselves. This is no longer restricted to Britain: Murdoch has mighty enemies abroad, especially in Italy and in America, and Berlusconi and the US networks are not going to miss the opportunity to trash Fox and Sky.
And finally, I have said that the Republicans would regret allowing Fox to effectively take the American conservative movement over (remember my article on the Glenn Beck rally?) and the time is coming even faster than I had foreseen. Nobody involved with Murdoch is going to come out of this with his hands clean. Or hers - alas for Sarah Palin and everyone who supported her.
Which is why I am not very surprised, though I am ecstatic, at the Murdoch scandal. There is one thing that must be understood: to me, finding out about the British popular press was one of the shocks of my adolescence. Coming from Italy, where the Press was generally respected and self-respecting, where the main business of the papers was to investigate organized criminality, terrorism, and public and private corruption, and where every now and then a journalist died because some villain had objected to being found out, the whole world of red-top taploids, sex obsession, huge titles and Page Three Girls was both alien and repulsive. Finding out that this, and not the famous and prestigious broadsheet titles whose names rang across the continent, was the standard British press and the standard reading of Britons, was a shock such as I cannot render to those who grew up with it and find such things natural.
Now Murdoch had invented nothing; before he bought the News of the World, both the graphic horrors of his mastheads and the brutality of its editorial contents had been patented by the Daily Mirror, and the salaciousness and hysteria were the daily fodder of cheaper papers across the board. Murdoch, however, refined it all like a criminal chemist refines coca into crack cocaine, leaving out anything that was wholesome and decent and pushing to extremes everything that was tasteless and addictive. One thing that struck me, for instance, was that while the DAily Express had the great Giles, and the Daily Mail had Mac, and while the Mirror had a wonderful comics page featuring Andy Capp, The Perishers and so on, the cartoons and comics in the Sun were so bad - bad in a technical sense, poorly drawn, poorly conceived, unfunny, forgettable - as to be incredible in what was supposed to be the most profitable newspaper in the country. The same goes for its columnists: the Daily Mirror had Beachcomber and Keith Waterhouse, but no Sun or NotW columnist has ever been worth re-reading, let alone reprinting. It was not only vulgar; it was coolly, deliberately stupid, always in search of the worst, not just in content, but in style.
I came to Britain just in time to watch Murdoch at the height of his power and success; and coming where I came from, it was, to me, a terrible shock. In Italy, at the time, press and pornography were two wholly separete things; in spite of a few timid efforts on state TV, broadcasting was incredibly decorous by today's standards - there was no Berlusconi yet - and in general sleaze was the one thing that the Italian media had not yet experienced. Something like The Sun was wholly impossible to imagine to me, from my background; I could not believe that the English press amounted to this. Of course, the English themselves had grown up with the slow evolution - or devolution - of their press, and were used to it to the point of not noticing it. They had become used to the monstrous in their daily lives. I have never yet managed to get one Briton to fully understand my revulsion at their media; not even when Berlusconi developed his own Italian counterpart formula, for TV rather than for newspapers.
But as I regarded the Murdoch and Maxwell press as a complete evil, I was sure, by my own beliefs, that they could not endure. Maxwell is long gone, and I have long wondered whether Rupert Murdoch would die like him - he is old enough - before the fruit of his crimes came back to destroy his creations. That sooner or later that fruit would ripen I had little doubt: Murdoch is and has always been the kind who makes scandals, like Richard Nixon or his old enemy Maxwell. His methods demand, not collaborators, but accomplices, and accomplices have to be paid off and protected. There never was any hope that what he had built would outlive the criminal methods used to build it.
Now his methods have caught up with him. The closure of the NotW is Rupert Murdoch's last desperate throw to avoid being personally involved in the scandal. In fact, nobody has any doubt that the moving power behind the illegality and corruption - as Peter Oborne called it, a criminal enterprise - was Murdoch himself. And if his former allies in Britain hope that the scandal can be controlled and kept away from the core of the company, they are deluding themselves. This is no longer restricted to Britain: Murdoch has mighty enemies abroad, especially in Italy and in America, and Berlusconi and the US networks are not going to miss the opportunity to trash Fox and Sky.
And finally, I have said that the Republicans would regret allowing Fox to effectively take the American conservative movement over (remember my article on the Glenn Beck rally?) and the time is coming even faster than I had foreseen. Nobody involved with Murdoch is going to come out of this with his hands clean. Or hers - alas for Sarah Palin and everyone who supported her.