Bad Press

This is a breakdown of the book which will be hooked to those two weeks of revelations, arrests and resignations in July 2011, from the Guardian expose of phone hacking to the appearance of the Murdochs in the House of Commons. Rooted in sourced and dramatic detail, the chapters are also thematic – exploring the key social, political and cultural causes of the decline and fall of the Murdoch Empire, not only in the UK, but throughout the English-speaking world.

INTRO: Self-Censorship

DATELINE 04/07/11. The world we have lost: the world before July 5th, when Newscorp’s £16 billion acquisition of BSkyB seemed inevitable and Murdoch’s grip on broadcasting as well as the press ineluctable. This will partly be a personal confession about how, despite the slow erosion of most the institutions I’ve held dear throughout my adult life, I was complicit in this too. Like the citizens under Soviet rule, we were captive minds held in a velvet prison: only in this case the threat wasn’t from the state but a corporation: the ideology apparently of competition and free markets, and the censorship internal.

Chapter 1. Monopolies in the Information Age
05/07/11 As The Guardian prints the explosive allegations that teenage murder victim Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked, the opening chapter follows the train of events that led to the dominance of the dark arts of hacking, surveillance and effective ‘identity theft’. These were only the symptom of a much deeper problem. In the information economy, news is as important as steel and coal a hundred years ago. And if the market is dominated by monopolies, corrupt ‘restrictive practices’ are bound to occur….

Chapter 2. Leverage
06/07/11. As Ed Milliband and other senior politicians call for senior News Corp executives to resign, this chapter explains how, from its early days as News Ltd in Australia, News Corp has always used political clout to fix the market rules. Rupert’s father, Keith Murdoch was famed, ever since his Gallipoli letter, as a master of secrecy and intrigue. Rupert carried on this tradition, supporting Conservative or Labour governments at whim, especially if they passed legislation favourable to his commercial interests.

Chapter 3. Too Big to Jail
07/07/11 As the payments to police become more apparent, and senior Met Officers are caught up in the Hackgate scandal, this chapter explores how monopoly power in the media ended up corrupting police officers and bleeding into the criminal underworld. Ultimately, the police’s failure to pursue revelations of industrial hacking wasn't due to overt bribes. With senior Met officers, former Home Office ministers such and opposition figures earning hundreds of thousands a year as columnists for News International, the organisation was deemed ‘too big to take on’.

Chapter 4. Showbusiness for Ugly People
08/07/11 As Andy Coulson is arrested, this chapter takes his rise from editor of the celebrity 'Bizarre' column to the Government's chief press officer as the ultimate expression of what Carl Bernstein calls the ‘Murdochification’ of the culture. Murdoch's acquisition of the Sun and the News of the World in 1969 was the beginning of a radical tabloid agenda, combining the red top’s classic obsession with crime, sex and scandal with a post-Profumo targeting of politicians. If politics is ‘show business for ugly people’ the model turned celebrity and gossip column methods on elected representatives, cowing them with the threat of personal destruction.

Chapter 5. Legal Privilege
09/07/11 Murdoch announces his imminent closure of the News of the World and this chapter follows the next phase in the Murdoch story through the 80s and early 90s as he moves from the red tops to the upmarket broadsheets and broadcasting. At every stage of its acquisition of The Times, the Sunday Times, Today, and then Sky and BSkyB, Newscorp breaks the law and multiple commitments to Parliament. But he’s unstoppable. With vertical integrations in publishing, sports and movie rights, Murdoch becomes the most powerful press baron in British history, while simultaneously becoming a US citizen to allow him to create the Fox Network.

Chapter 6. Mythic Dynasties
10/07/11 More information comes in about the systematic hacking of the Royal Household and this chapter unpicks the paradox of Murdoch’s vengeful obsession with other dynasties from the Packers in Australia, the Windsors in the UK, and the owners of the Dow Jones. But his avowed hatred of the ‘establishment’ is his clear strategy of creating a dynasty within Newscorp itself: a paradox that almost takes on tragic King Lear-like dimensions as Rupert marries Wendy Deng and creates two rival generations beneath him.

Chapter 7. The Electrification of the Word
11/07/11 When the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt is forced to refer the News International bid for BSkyB back to Ofcom, this chapter looks at Murdoch’s attempt to reinvent himself in the new millennium: his relationships with New Labour, new technology and new media. But the top down hierarchy of Newscorp is structurally out of tune with the networked world. His new media acquisitions like Myspace end in disaster, and the pluralism of online media help to destroy the advertising for News of the World, and force Jeremy Hunt’s hand.

Chapter 8. Newscorp Nation
12/07/11 The scandal crosses the Atlantic with congressional complaints and a shareholder suit filed against Newscorp complaining that the Murdochs treat the company as a ‘family candy store’. This chapter analyses the growth of Newscorp’s US Empire, especially the Fox Network and the 'tabloidisation' of American broadcasting. Beyond the sanctions of any one country (and avoiding paying tax in most of them), globalised companies like Newscorp have grown like nations within themselves, more powerful than many states, but without any democratic accountability or transparency.

Chapter 9. Strange Sad Death of the Fourth Estate
13/07/11 On the day that News International finally withdraw its bid for BSkyB, this chapter broadens its range by looking at both the explosion of ‘media’ as a key part of the knowledge economy, and the simultaneous decline in the role and function of the journalist as purveyor of truth since Watergate. Partly thanks to the tabloidisation of both print and broadcast news, a career in journalism becomes a more attractive alternative than activism to a whole generation of would-be politicians. Thus we have a fulfilment of Baldwin's prophesy of 'power without responsibility' - the inexorable rise of the punditocracy, with the ability to shape the political process without the awkwardness of facing the electorate.

Chapter 10. Contagion or Convergence
14/07/11 Spurred by the New York Times and more and more online activism, the FBI launches multiple enquiries into News Corps activities both in the UK and the US. More arrests in the UK and an avalanche of bad news from around the world – Australia, Italy and Holland – shows that uncompetitive and illegal practices are not isolated to the News of the World, or News International, but are rife throughout the organisation.

Chapter 11. Freudian Communications
15/07/11 UK and US papers selectively leak the family dynamics, with Elisabeth Murdoch allegedly complaining that “Rebekah and James fucked the company.” This revelation gives us an insight into the family dynamics of the new Murdoch generation, less enamoured of Rupert’s conservative past, evincing a more socially liberal background (and key the love-in with New Labour) and explores the key role of Matthew Freud and the softer psychological arts of spin and public relations.

Chapter 12. Controlling the Narrative
16/07/11 More attempts to spin and control the narrative come forward, and subtly another key weakness in the ‘market in news’ is exposed: its susceptibility to what Nick Davies dubbed ‘churnalism’, hidden persuaders, commercial advertorials, and subliminal emotional manipulation. The irony here is that, while defended by legal privilege and controlling other narratives through confidentiality agreements, the Murdoch’s vociferously defend their own privacy, while having industrially invaded the privacy of others.

Chapter 13. The Problem of Free
17/07/11 On the day that Les Hinton resigns and Rebekah Brooks is arrested, this chapter looks at the economic and technological forces which are partly to blame for the Newscorp crisis. The problem of ‘free’ is simultaneously the market problem of new media which has led to a decline in newspaper sales and the problem of raising revenue for real journalists. But it also raises the other problem of a ‘free’ press: a corporate freedom of expression had completely subsumed the individual access to a right of reply. Free speech is a dialogue, and as a Weberian hierarchy, Newscorp is only interested in a monologue.

Chapter 14. Anti News
18/07/11 As their stock price tanks and Newscorp engages in firefighting against ‘reputational damage’, the penultimate chapter looks at one of the perversities of 21st Century corporate capitalism – that companies end up raiding their own cultural capital. Just as Goldman Sachs made profits by betting their own products were worthless, and the energy company Enron ended up making money by selling power cuts to California, Newscorp has become an anti-news organisation: using intrigue and secrecy to influence politicians and game legislation, and finally desperately trying to suppress information about itself.

Chapter 15. The Most Humble Day
19/07/11. The Wizard of Oz moment when Rupert appears before the Parliamentary Select Committee: the statements made there by his son James would ultimately unravel in a trail of emails, contradictory statements, votes of non-confidence by major shareholders, further Parliamentary recalls and (by the time the book is finished) lead to the end of the Murdoch dynasty within Newscorp as he withdraws from the board. But something more important happened. Now toxic to politicians, no longer unapproachable and remote, the mystique of his power has gone, and the Myth of Murdoch is finally exposed as something we’ve colluded with in our own imaginations.