Media in the age of Murdoch

As Green Left Weekly celebrates its 100th issue, one of Australia's best known and most respected journalists, JOHN PILGER, talks to Frank Noakes, in London, about the media and its changing role.

“When I started”, John Pilger recalls, “the primary source of most people's information was the press; it's now television, so that is a big change. That happened around the late '60s, early '70s.

“Technically, it's changed substantially. I was a foreign correspondent for a long time, and just getting material back was really one of the most difficult parts of the job. News wasn't instant, nothing was instant really. Even with television, there was a delay of up to a week in getting the film back.

“It's quite interesting if you compare it with the time William Howard Russell was sending his dispatches by horse and steamer back from the Crimea. That used to take Russell five or six days. I made a comparison of this during the Falklands war in 1982, when it took British television about the same time to get their reports back, even though they had satellite facilities on the ship. The only significant difference was that in Russell's day there was no censorship and during the Falklands war there was.”

The press has also become narrower, Pilger says. “I suppose the other real change is the notion of journalism as a fourth estate. When [Thomas Babington] Macaulay [English essayist and politician] envisaged a fourth estate, he talked rather romantically of journalism, but it was a useful romanticism. I think that's probably gone; journalism is now regarded as much more of a functional process, a much more functional occupation. And although there may be more media, there's less diversity now, there's less willingness to discover, to explain ideas.

“I remember a friend of mine who ran the Northern Lands Council in Australia, Pat Dobson, talking about

this. He was saying in the 1960s and early 1970s that the Australian media was prepared to play a limited educating role, as far as the Aboriginal experience was concerned; it was prepared to tell people something that they didn't know about Aboriginal affairs. That brief period of wanting to explore and discover and educate, I think that's gone.”

Is the press more ideological now?

“The press has always been very ideological. I worked for the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, it was run by Frank Packer, an extreme right-winger in every way.

“But the press has become more global; the diversity has gone and the number of outlets around the world that are independently owned have declined. We're coming down to half a dozen conglomerates. The global empire of Rupert Murdoch exemplifies the media society that he, and those like him, have built throughout the years. Also, journalists are more frightened these days. There are fewer jobs, and some of them are very well paid, so you've got quite a lot to lose if you lose your job.

“Australia is the best example because there is no Western democracy with as restricted a press, a media. You have the situation of Adelaide, where Murdoch is everywhere you look, even owning the printing presses. You have a national press effectively divided between Murdoch, with 70%, Conrad Black controlling the rest, and [Kerry] Packer now moving up to take a share of both; that's a situation that's not reflected anywhere else in the world.”

Do we expect too much from journalists? “Journalists are no different from anybody else. They serve institutions, lawyers serve institutions and architects serve institutions. The difference is that the institution is information, and therefore it reaches into all our lives and in a political sense is instantly important.

“Perhaps too much is expected of journalists; they are institutionalised. In the legal profession I can think of only a few people who I would expect to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; they're all mavericks, that is, they're all opposed to the tenets of the institution and navigate their way through the institution. The same with journalists: the best journalists are mavericks, those who are not intimidated.”

Often politicians and their parties blame the media for their failures. How much influence does the media have on that score? Pilger says nobody really knows because there's no scientific way of determining it. But, he says “I have my doubts about whether the media is crucial in helping a party get into office or be kicked out of office.

“I think in Australia perhaps in the past it has made a difference. There's no doubt that the campaign against Whitlam was largely responsible for undermining his government. The campaign was not merely abuse; it was disinformation. And disinformation can be very effective when a political party is under siege, as Whitlam's was. There's no doubt that because there's so much media, as opposed to so much information, saturation media, that disinformation must get through after a while.

“I think the Murdoch campaign against Whitlam was quite successful, but that's only a guess.”

Still, the public should not be underestimated, says Pilger: “People don't accept automatically the media as truth, in fact, they don't like the media very much and regard journalists as a lower form of life than doctors and lawyers. People are rather sceptical of the media.”

In Britain, one can pick up on any day any tabloid newspaper (sometimes known as the gutter press) and read outrageous rubbish. And with the exception of the Daily Mirror, all the tabloid papers support the Tories. So why do so many people buy them? Murdoch's Sun, arguably the worst, alone sells around 4 million copies a day.

“Millions of people read them because they haven't got anything else to read. In a class-based society like Britain, with feudal undertones, the readership of newspapers is based on class still, and the tabloid tradition is part of working-class tradition.

“The so-called broadsheet, or quality, papers very much reflect the middle class, and you're asking people to cross class lines in their reading habits. What a lot of people want is better tabloid newspapers. I think it's a myth that they like what they read; they read it because if people are offered only McDonald's to eat, they'll eat McDonald's.

“I worked for a tabloid paper, the Daily Mirror, in its heyday, and it actually did cross class lines and was an enormous success doing just that. It didn't patronise people, it didn't trivialise serious stories and at the same time it remained lively and true to its basic working-class orientation, while managing to attract university students, so it can be done.

“I think Murdoch's arrival in Britain has really been the most influential. The tabloids and much of the rest of the media have followed the Murdoch way of making money. It doesn't necessarily have a logic because the readership of the tabloid newspapers declined dramatically. The answer to the question: why do people read them?, is that many have stopped reading them.”

Notes for Press & Broadcasting students: John Pilger interview.

1. This interview was conducted in 1993, so bear in mind that some figures etc are now dated.

2. John Pilger is an internationally renowned and respected journalist and author. He wrote several prominent articles in the Daily Mirror last year during the bombing of Afghanistan, as part of the Mirror's campaign to be seen as a 'serious' newspaper and ditch its red-top image.

3. Kerry Packer is an Australian 'media mogul' with extensive television interests.

4. Gough Whitlam was a left wing Labour Prime Minister in Australia in the 1970s. He was controversially sacked by the Governor General (the Queen's representative in Australia) in 1975.