MEDIA
The Men Who Killed The News
Eric Beecher
Scribner, $36.99

A book can be a long time in the making. In the case of The Men Who Killed The News, the gestation was 10 years. The tricky thing, especially when a book deals with elements of contemporary culture, is that the world you are describing will not stand still. As author, journalist and publisher Eric Beecher admits in the afterword to this authoritative and meticulous volume, “when I first began to think about writing this book, a decade ago, its central premise was uncomplicated”.

Perhaps less so now. The changes in the West’s information architecture have been radical; changes that have left the world so lucidly described in this book a little in their wake. Beecher’s premise, and here we revert to the book’s introductory chapter, was to make an account of “the cumulative damage inflicted on liberal democracies by owners of journalism who place profits and power ahead of civic responsibility and decency”.

He goes on to make this case through an encyclopaedic accumulation of anecdote and evidence. What fills the bulk of these pages is an assiduously researched and brightly written account of news media owners and their exercise of “insidious editorial power”. It reaches back to Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst and fetches up with Rupert Murdoch, before noting the growing anti-democratic pall cast by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s unprecedentedly liberal dissemination of self-serving and often malignant falsehood.

It’s the rapidity of this last moment of change, one that also includes the burgeoning frontier of artificial intelligence and its unknown intersections with truth and public information, that catches this book on the hop. Historically, it is on certain ground. Beecher’s grasp of his subject is impressive, if at times the book seems to favour the assembly of history over the crafting of argument. He has the journalist’s gift of placing us in the room, for example, the 1930s office of Sir Keith Murdoch in the Herald and Weekly Times building, a corner of its “mahogany row” that Beecher himself would occupy as Rupert Murdoch’s editor of the Melbourne Herald in the 1980s, but only for two years: “I resigned when my moral compass became dysfunctional ... after a year at News Corp, I found myself being tested, regularly, by ethical issues that became too precipitous for me to jump.”

Sir Keith’s office is the scene for one of the book’s best and most telling anecdotes, told by a former Herald copy boy who took in his boss’s tea during a meeting with then prime minister Joseph Lyons. “I put the tea down on the big desk and went out through the door. As I went through it, I turned and there, with his hat in his hand, like a man seeking a job, stood the prime minister before Murdoch’s desk. As I shut the door, I heard the leader of the nation say: ‘Yes, sir’.”

As the pages turn, mogul after mogul repeats this relationship with political power, from Hearst to Robert Maxwell, from lords Rothermere and Northcliffe to Conrad Black, and Murdoch’s infamous editor of The Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, who once assured then-British prime minister John Major that “I’ve got a large bucket of shit lying on my desk and tomorrow morning I’m going to pour it all over your head”.

The media mogul, Beecher argues, is a participant in the game of power, the beneficiary of the press’s elevated status as democracy’s fourth estate. “This is the paradox at the heart of the free press. The custodians of journalism are entrusted to protect it, yet incentivised to exploit it ... Using their privileged status, they have intimidated governments, invaded personal privacy, peddled mistruths, stirred up sensationalism, dispensed patronage, denigrated their enemies, twisted social values, and in the process, accumulated obscene fortunes.”