The paper lion as paper tiger

Indigo/Getty Images
Rebekah Brooks, then chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s company News International, with Murdoch and his son James at the Cheltenham Horse Racing Festival, March 18, 2010. Brooks resigned from News International in July 2011 after the Guardian reported that the News of the World had engaged in phone hacking in the early 2000s while she was its editor. In May 2012 she was charged with “conspiracy to pervert the course of justice” for concealing materials from police investigating phone hacking and bribery allegations.

What Rupert Hath Wrought!
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

... the great awe, or plain fear, Murdoch inspires ... has shaped our national life for a generation. In her testimony to Leveson, Brooks said that she was “elected” by her readers, which is cute but silly and offensive. No one elects tabloid editors. She also said at one point, with fascinating self-importance, that “we needed to get the Welfare Bill through,” as though the News International tabloids were a branch of government—and to be sure, that is the way they have been treated. Murdoch’s own objections to the headline aside, to say that it was the Sun wot won it is almost certainly untrue.

Much academic research has confirmed my own instinct that newspapers do not in fact decide the results of elections. But politicians believe they do, and that is what empowers Murdoch. Successive party leaders and prime ministers have thought that they could be elected, and then govern, only with his consent. A former Blair aide said that they always felt at Downing Street as though Murdoch were the invisible twenty-fifth presence at the Cabinet table; and the recent conduct of Cameron, Hague, Gove, and Hunt has conveyed the strong impression that Her Majesty’s Government is a subsidiary of News International.

Quite apart from the benefits to all newspapers of the Wapping putsch, “Murdochia” is not simply a monolithic evil empire. Even Fox Television gave us the glorious achievement that is The Simpsons and Sky Sports has no more devoted, or addicted, viewer than this writer, who was only one of several hundred million people from England to Brazil to China watching the climax to the English soccer season, with Manchester City winning the pennant in the dying seconds. The admirable Times Literary Supplement remains the piano player in Murdoch’s London bordello, while The Wall Street Journal has continued its tradition of scrupulously objective reporting (on its news pages, at least) while covering the News International story, and Sky News, the British channel, has been exemplary in reporting on Leveson.

There is a final defense of Murdoch: if he has enjoyed the kind of sway he has, then the blame lies not with him but with the democratically elected leaders who have truckled to him. Now they, even Cameron and his unimpressive entourage, must realize that the game is up for this extraordinary old man. Whatever happens to Brooks and the other defendants, or however long it takes the despondent investors of News Corp to be rid of the toxic London papers, the spell is broken. Rupert Murdoch has gone from Svengali to Tar Baby, sticky and tainting to the touch. Cameron thought he was going to profit from his closeness to the great magnate; it could yet finish his prime ministership, with “laugh out loud” as his political epitaph.