Some powerful media outlets are viewing Rupert Murdoch‘s announcement on September 21st — that the 92-year-old is stepping down as chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp — the television and newspaper empires he has built up over more than 70 years, with scepticism. For instance, the Economist has asserted that “Rupert Murdoch isn’t going anywhere just yet” and the magazine is of the firm opinion that as “chairman emeritus” he will still wield plenty of clout. While we are not sure of the future trajectory, we need to access his role as as a media Moghul seriously.
There are many defining scholarly works that help understand the far-reaching impact of Reaganomics and Thatcherism in the world of political economy. The impact created by Rupert Murdoch, with his global expansion in the information milieu, is similar to that of the Anglo-American impact of the early 1980s. Mr. Murdoch led the expansion of the media market at the cost of its credibility, trust and impact. The democratic deficits we face today have a direct relationship to the undermining of the editorial independence of free media. Many fail to understand the relationship between credible information and a vibrant democracy. What happens when we reduce news media to just an industry devoid of its socio-political obligations? Mr. Murdoch was at the forefront of reducing news media to just a business enterprise and yet his far-reaching influence has not been properly studied.
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Sir Harold Evans, the legendary editor of London-based The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981, has documented the dark side of Mr. Murdoch , for instance, his empowering of managers at the cost of editors in his 1984-book Good Times, Bad Times. His revised introduction to the book’s later editions after the phone-hacking crisis is a clear indication that what happened later had its origins in the way he was permitted to renege on his solemn promises to the English parliament. The phone hacking case is not only about the unethical behaviour of the tabloid press, but it was also a single act that undermined the trust factor in news media itself, and Mr. Murdoch was central to this downward slide
It is pertinent here to recollect what Sir Evans wrote: “The experiences I describe in Good Times, Bad Times have turned out to be eerily emblematic. The dark and vengeful undertow I sensed and then experienced in the last weeks of my relationship with Murdoch correctly reflected something morally out of joint with the way he ran his company. In the decades that followed my year at the Times, the inside rot was matched only by the menace that came to represent the civil discourse and the whole political establishment.” Sir Evans’s writings help us understand the full import of his declaration that ‘Rupert Murdoch is the stiletto, a man of method, a cold-eyed manipulator’.
It is a fact that Leveson’s commission was constituted in the United Kingdom because of the excesses committed by the tabloids owned by Mr. Murdoch. In his final report, Justice Leveson said that the U.K. press had for too long “wreaked havoc in the lives of innocent people.” He criticised the transactional relationship between powerful newspaper owners, editors and politicians and called for more transparency in their contacts. It was the Murdoch press at the centre of this controversy.
Mr. Murdoch has stepped down at a time when the legacy media is under severe financial strain. But, the present digital information ecology seem to have internalised the model developed by him and it needs more than just a change in the person at the helm to restore trust in credible news.
