MEDIA STUDIES
The real casualty in all this is not Mr Murdoch
STEPHEN GLOVER
The editor's headline-writing skills did not desert him when his pen hovered over my column last week. 'A Chinese storm is about to break over Mr Murdoch.' If one were to cavil, it would be over the word `storm'. Hurricane would have been nearer the mark..Rupert Murdoch has taken a ter- rible bashing during the past few days.
Even I, one of Mr Murdoch's sterner critics, have occasionally rubbed my eyes in disbelief to hear some of the things that have been said about the wicked Australian press proprietor. To call him 'the biggest gangster of them all', as did the Daily Tele- graph last Friday, was going it a bit. The Telegraph has now discovered that Jon- athan Mirsky, until recently East Asia edi- tor of the Times, told a forum on press free- dom in January that his old paper does not cover China in a serious way on account of Mr Murdoch's business interests there.
Let's start with Mr Patten. I am told he is as pleased as Punch. He has got a new pub- lisher and a lot of free publicity. He has also been paid some money by the Mail on Sunday, whose Black Dog column had sug- gested that his book was dumped because it was so boring, as I mentioned last week. Incidentally, I was wrong to say then that Black Dog's immediate source was an American PR company. It was Sir Tim Bell. But he may possibly have been unaware that the version he gave the newspaper on Mr Murdoch's behalf was baloney.
Let's put Mr Patten's tribulations in per- spective. On Tuesday the Independent dug up a real Chinese dissident called Wei Jing- sheng who is writing a chapter for a miscel- lany due to be published by HarperCollins. The book has been put on ice on account of Mr Wei's deeply felt criticisms of the Chi- nese regime. I don't know how easy it will be to find another publisher for the book, and don't expect Mr Wei's problems will be taken quite as seriously as Mr Patten's have been. We prefer our dissidents to be chubby and resident in France or Barnes.
Now for HarperCollins. Is it finished as a serious publisher, as Peter Hennessy, one of its authors, asserts? I doubt it. At the time of writing Simon Heifer is the only HarperCollins author to have handed back his advance. Perhaps others will do so. We shall see. But writers and journalists are rather better at huffing and puffing than at personal self-sacrifice. The loss of Stuart Proffitt, who has resigned from Harper- Collins because of the Patten affair, may be grave, but there are other clever editors where he came from. If HarperCollins con- tinues to offer good advances, it will proba- bly attract good authors.
However, the tenure of Eddie Bell, chair- man of HarperCollins, may be short, as I suggested last week. Mr Murdoch's com- ment that 'our people cocked it up' does not bode well for him. I shall remember Mr Bell for his memorandum to Anthea Dis- ney, a Murdoch sidekick in America, which the Telegraph thoughtfully reproduced in tow in its bumper package last Friday. Mr Murdoch is so awesome a figure that he is referred to by Mr Bell by acronym, `KRM' being Keith Rupert Murdoch. Mr Bell reduces `KRM's' reported hysterical denunciation of the book CKill the f—ing book!) to the banality of memorandese: `KRM has outlined to me the negative aspects of publication.'
Has Mr Murdoch been damaged? Only in the sense that a schoolboy who habitual- ly smokes in the bike shed is damaged when finally caught by his housemaster. And as the same miscreant may be in the habit of boiling newts alive and scattering drawing-pins on the headmaster's drive without ever being found out, so I bet Mr Murdoch has done worse things in his life without being detected than dropping Mr Patten's book. The point is that he was, unusually, discovered on this occasion. It was naughty to pretend the book was dumped because it was tedious.
The greatest casualties of this affair are the Times and its editor, my old friend Peter Stothard, who now faces accusations from Mr Mirsky. When I think of him as a principled left-winger at Oxford, walking down the Broad in something approximat- ing to a kaftan, it is sad to see him in his present predicament. The Times ignored the scandal until last Saturday — by which time the Telegraph had already blown sev- eral gaskets — when it produced a short 350-word story that made practically no sense in vacuo. As for the Sunday Times, it `We're accusing you of counnycide.' covered the story the following day as Prav- da might once have written about charges made by the manager of an obscure Siberi- an power station against a much respected member of the Politburo.
No paper — I mean no paper — writes about the sins and omissions of its propri- etor or editor or even its senior journalists with total candour. Readers will recall how the Guardian reacted when it emerged that hundreds of thousands of pounds had passed through the bank account of one of its journalists, Victoria Brittain, on behalf of a highly controversial Ghanaian politi- cian called Kojo Tsikata. The paper homed in on MI5's bugging of Ms Brittain and more or less ignored the bank account. Right-wing newspapers also protect their friends. It is a natural instinct to leap to the defence of those who employ you or whom you employ when they come under fire.
But it was idiotic of Mr Stothard to imag- ine that he could ignore this story altogeth- er. His media editor, Ray Snoddy, has attempted to exculpate his editor by saying that he himself had only just returned from holiday and his calls to Messrs Patten, Bell and Murdoch went unretumed. This is very lame. The Times has dozens of reporters and does not have to rely on Mr Snoddy alone. If the little Spectator could write about this affair last Thursday, surely Mr Stothard, with his much quicker newspaper deadlines, could have produced something for his readers around the same time. His remark, quoted in this Wednesday's Times in connection with Mr Mirsky's allegations, that he has never taken an editorial deci- sion to suit Mr Murdoch's interests does not quite ring true.
Mr Stothard could not be expected to cover this scandal in the exultant manner of the Telegraph, which has launched a jihad against the Times. All that was needed was a calm and balanced account such as would have been published by the Financial Times if its parent company were riven with dis- sension. If he had done this, all past errors would have been wiped away. He would have re-established the Times as a paper of record that can rise above the machinations of a businessman, and shown himself a great man rather than a frightened hireling. Had he then been sacked he would have been the greatest hero in journalism, a man who put his country and a famous newspa- per before his career. If only my old friend had had the courage.
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