MEDIA STUDIES
The Times: was it murder?
Yes, by Rupert Murdoch
STEPHEN GLOVER
Only last week the Guardian ran a leader criticising Mr Murdoch for his price-cutting policies. Now it emerges that the Guardian and its sister title the Observer have embarked on a similar, though more limit- ed, tactic. The editors of both newspapers have written to as many readers of the Independent and Independent on Sunday as they can identify offering them free copies of the Guardian and Observer for a week and cut-price copies for a further two weeks. 'A paper set up to challenge the hegemony of a few powerful press barons has been swallowed up by a large newspa- per group with experience only of running tabloid newspapers,' the two editors assert.
Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, says theirs is a modest scheme. That is true. His group could not afford the long-term subsidies enjoyed by the Times. But Mr Rusbridger's techniques are similar in nature to Mr Murdoch's. He is trying to drive a weak rival out of business. The Guardian is barely profitable and the Observer is losing a lot of money, so the costs of this scheme are met from other profitable parts of the Guardian Media Group such as the Manchester Evening News. This is cross-subsidy plain and sim- ple, exactly as practised by the much vilified Mr Murdoch. Moreover, the two editors bend the truth somewhat in their letter. They write as though the two Independent titles have suddenly been 'swallowed up' by Mirror Group Newspapers, though in fact the company has been running them since March 1994, and increased its shareholding from 30 per cent to its existing 46 per cent nearly three years ago.
This is as perfect an example as you could wish to find of high-minded liberals saying one thing from the pulpit and doing another in the marketplace. They cannot escape the charge of hypocrisy. And yet I don't think we should be too hard on Mr Rusbridger and his colleague, Will Hutton of the Observer. For even as we may be amused by their inconsistency, and Mr Rusbridger's casuistical attempts to justify it, one has to concede that these men are not exactly like Mr Murdoch. If I am as honest with myself as I am asking Mr Rus- bridger to be with himself, I have to confess that my objections to the Times's predatory pricing do not really have to do with any beliefs I may have about how markets should be regulated. They have much more to do with Mr Murdoch himself and his malign cultural influence.
Imagine that since September 1993 Mr Murdoch had cross-subsidised the Times to make it a better paper, more like the Frankfurter Allgemeine or the New York Times or Le Monde than the dumbed-down thing he has produced. Would we then complain? Of course not. What we really object to is his transformation of a once elevated paper into the vulgar hybrid that is now the Times, It may still carry many good things, but it has enthusiastically embraced the trivial and commonplace. Other broad- sheets have erred in similar ways but their offence is less because none of them was the Times. At its worst the paper has slipped further into the gutter than any of them. Last Saturday it ran an excerpt from a recent book about Diana, Princess of Wales under the headline, 'Diana: was it murder?' This appeal to soft-headed con- spiracy theorists is only the latest of many misjudged serialisations.
Whatever one might have said in the past `This could be tricky, he's on performance- enhancing drugs!' about Messrs Rusbridger and Hutton, nei- ther of them, or the newspaper group they represent, threatens our culture. Murdoch does, even if the Roman Catholic Church has seen fit to bestow a papal knighthood on him. That is why I complain about the Times. I would forgive Murdoch everything if he had nurtured the precious newspaper he acquired in 1981.
As for the Independent, it should stop bleating about the tactics of the Guardian, which it would biff if it possibly could. The best way to react would be to improve the paper. Then the Independent could write to Guardian readers offering them cut-price copies of the Independent.
The first Sunday Business, as launched nearly two years ago, was one of the bigger cock-ups in recent newspaper history. Its publisher and editor, Tom Rubython, ran out of money almost before he had started. The paper, which was wild, loquacious and unreliable, staggered on for some time. Why the Barclay brothers should have paid some £200,000 for the title of that unla- mented venture is a bit of a mystery.
But the title is all that the relaunched Sunday Business shares with the earlier ver- sion. The first issue, published last Sunday, was unusually successful. In keeping with the promises of its editor-in-chief, Andrew Neil, and its editor, Jeff Randall, the paper looks solid and serious and grown-up. The news pages are clear and elegant, though the leader page and some of the features pages look messy. The paper doesn't read like a dummy that has stumbled ill-pre- pared into the world. It had plenty of proper stories and several scoops.
I have no idea whether Sunday Business will attract the 80,000 or so readers it needs to break even. No one knows how many people are prepared to pay 50 pence on a Sunday for a two-section paper dedicated mostly to business and with only the most cursory coverage of sport and fashion. It certainly deserves to succeed. But whatever happens the remarkable competence of this relaunch confirms that the Barclay broth- ers, who also own the Scotsman and the recently revamped European, should be regarded as proper publishers. They have made themselves more plausible suitors for the Independent should that title come on the market, as I believe may happen before the end of the year.
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