Did Woke make a mistake with the phone-hacking scandal?
A revisionist look at Murdoch and his Mates
Last month, ITV released a seven part series on the phone hacking scandal, The Hack, fronted by David Tennant (playing Nick Davies, the Guardian journalist whose reporting led to the Leveson inquiry).
The purpose of this article is not to review the show, which I nonetheless found amusing and enjoyable for predictable reasons. The show depicts 2009-11, a period described by the Dragon as the hegemonic period of Britpoppery (the mythic period), and so we are treated to seeing the pomp and pageantry out in full display.
The then Editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger (played by Toby Jones) has a fictional office which had me doubled over with laughter, the camera quivering over a sign which reads ‘The Manchester Guardian’. Alastair Campbell makes a very strange appearance as himself, railing against ‘Murdoch and his mates’ - the coup de force is when Gordon Brown, played by an actor who in no way resembles the former Prime Minister - starts thundering about how Murdoch was evil because his reporters pointed out his failings in Afghanistan and that this was demoralising, his CGI glass eyeball rolling about all over the place as he repeatedly reminds viewers that he was the son of a preacher.
The inclusion of Campbell, Rusbridger and Brown reminds us that the phone hacking scandal was a project of the left. This is heightened by the honest admission that Brown wanted the scandal to blow up because it would hamper Rupert Murdoch’s bid to take over BskyB, essentially a political act against the right-wing press.
If Murdoch had pulled off the takeover he would have owned Sky News in its totality, and Britain would have had an equivalent to Fox News in the mid 2010s. In our timeline, thanks to the intervention of Ofcom and the CMA (egged on by the phnoe hacking scandal) this did not happen. Comcast, the American entertainment conglomerate (which also owns CNBC) bought Sky instead. Sky’s editorial direction then became indistinguishable from ITV and the BBC, meaning that there was no ‘centre-right’ broadcast media in Britain until the launch of GB News in 2021.
The question is this: knowing what they know now, would it have been wiser for Woke to allow Murdoch to have a monopoly on the right-wing broadcast press?
Before I begin my critique of the subject matter, I think it’s an important disclaimer for the audience that I, again, confess my own likely susceptibility to corruption. I am a morally dubious, ruthless individual who has a big chip on his shoulder about his upbringing - a perfect mark. I have not taken any money from Rupert Murdoch or his mates to write this article, but I am exactly the sort of person who would do so if commissioned.
What’s more, I am emotionally drawn to the ‘News of the World’ period of British politics as it is the last time that Britain was an unapologetically first world country with resources to match it. The vast sums of money that private investigators and police received from journalists were not caveated with ‘yeah, Americans would think this was piddling’. The gap in GDP per capita between the United States and Britain was a mere two thousand dollars, by 2025 it’s risen to some $35,000. I like the idea of a piratical British press rollicking po-faced celebrities in a moneyed environment as this buccaneering attitude comes close to how I perceive Britain as a historic entity. Wealthy, bigoted and exploitative.
With those priors dealt with, let us return to Murdoch. The classic image (reprinted below) of Murdoch’s cookie hoarding sums up well the traditional Leftish analysis of the Murdoch press, that it is a group of billionaires and their mates who stigmatise foreigners and whip up division to distract from their wealth hoarding and prevent substantial political change.
This narrative is not wrong because it over-eggs the influence of the Murdoch press. It is wrong because it misrepresents the editorial direction that the Australian oligarch has given in his time at the top of the media. Murdoch’s worldview is, indeed, robustly Thatcherite on the economy, but he is also fanatically in favour of higher immigration. Murdoch has testified in Congress on the need, not only for more legal immigration, but for pathways to citizenship for illegal immigrants. He has joined forces with titans of industry to support initiatives like the ‘New American Economy’ which lobby relentlessly for higher levels of immigration.
It is the weakening of Murdoch’s power that is enabling the ‘vibeshift’ on immigration, much moreso than the ‘online right’. After GB News was launched, partly at the behest of another Media Mogul – Paul Marshall – Murdoch created Talk TV, which used huge sums of money to pay presenters like Julia Hartley-Brewer to keep them in his stable. The venture has been a failure, despite Murdoch’s extraordinary financial resources. GB News now regularly crushes the BBC and Sky on ratings. Neil Oliver now delivers twenty minute monologues about digital vaccines in his captivating Renfrewshire timbre to millions of households up and down the country. The Lion ROARS.