“It is not blue or red, it is green” – Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of NewsCorp

 As a student, I was brought up with the idea that one of the most dangerous figures in modern history was Rupert Murdoch. This was in the 1990s and Mr. Murdoch owned a good portion of the British Press, in particular the Sun, which was the most widely read paper and at the higher end of the market, he owned the Times. When the Times started selling copies at GBP 1 per copy, my deputy headmaster gave an assembly talk about how Mr. Murdoch was cutting the price of his high end paper to gain control of young minds.

My deputy head had a point. Mr. Murdoch owns a good chunk of the media in the Western World. This position makes him valued by politicians in the UK and the US for a good reason. I’m old enough to remember the 1992 election in the UK, when the conservatives under John Major pulled off an upset. The Sun declared “It’s the Sun Wot Won It.” So, much for political neutrality of the media. The headline was not lost on a young Labour MP called Tony Blair, who made it a point of courting Rupert Murdoch when he became leader of the Labour Party. Mr. Blair subsequently won a landslide in 1997 and stayed in the top job for a good decade.

While Mr. Murdoch has plenty of influence in the politics of the Western World, there are times when the system does bite back. In 2011, his paper, The News of the World got shut down by order of Parliament after they were illegally hacking into phones and bribing police. More recently, Mr. Murdoch has had to take a stand in a law suite brought by Dominion Voting System against Fox News, which owned by Rupert Murdoch.

The key point from this trial is that Mr. Murdoch admitted that his hosts knew that theories about voter fraud in the 2020 election were false and yet they promoted the theory that the election was stolen because they needed the ratings. Mr. Murdoch has now famously said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdhvZ1yQ_nE

 

 Mr. Murdoch has effectively stressed that even at the age of 91, his main focus is on money. Politics or ideology is a secondary concern to him and he also touched on one of the arguments that would appear in my university communication classes – namely who shapes whose opinion – the audience or the media? While politicians court Mr. Murdoch because they believe he can shape opinions, he seemed to imply that he was merely behaving as a normal businessman and giving his target market what it wants to hear. Who is he to tell Trump voters anything different from what Trump tells them provided they make his channel more attractive to advertisers. Mr. Murdoch was the lone voice from the media in 1997 who refused to be apologise to hiring paparazzi, who had been blamed for the death of the very popular Princess Diana. His point was simple, he was willing to pay the paparazzi because they took pictures of the popular princess because the public that were in anguish over how the press had ruined the princess’s life couldn’t get enough of newspapers with pictures of the princess.

Mr. Murdoch is probably what you’d call an old school newspaper tycoon, who happily gives the paper buying and tv viewing public what they want. Politicians see him as a friend and threat while the public don’t care as long as he provides them with content they want.

However, as the case with Fox News is showing, one has to ask if the media needs to be held to certain standards and who should enforce them? There’s something clearly wrong in the opinion section of Fox News, where the anchors know that certain people are lying but they still get to promote the lies because its good for business. However, do we need the other extreme, as happens in the Singapore mainstream, where editors effectively edit government press releases (The no fail PR strategy in Singapore – get the government to send the press release – it effectively becomes an order to attend events).

A model of balance could be found in the UK, where there editors and producers are allowed to make judgements on the news value of a story without fear of how it might make certain members of the government feel. However, at the same time, there are regulatory bodies like Ofcom, that have the power to take the media to task should they cross certain lines.

Societies do need to find that balance and the problem that old school tycoons like Mr. Murdoch are giving way to a myriad of niche players like the infamous Alex Jones of infoWars. However, whilst the task is challenging, it must be done.