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- [00:01]
A
I'm Daniel James and you're listening to 7am. For decades, Rupert Murdoch's media empire has helped shape politics and public debate, and in doing so has often left lasting consequences for some of the people caught in its sights. From politicians to public figures to everyday people, the consequences can be devastating. Journalists Matthew Ricketson and Andrew Dodd have a name for what when the attention becomes a campaign, they call it getting Murdoched. Today, co author of their new book, Getting Murdoched, Matthew Rickardson on the people who found themselves on the receiving end and the media culture that could outlast Rupert Murdoch himself. It's Friday, august 14th. Matthew, thanks so much for speaking with us on 7am You've witnessed up close and you've even experienced it. So what exactly do you mean by getting Murdoched?
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B
Getting Murdoched is when a person is the kind of subject of hostile attention from the Murdoch media, usually based on what you say or you believe that doesn't accord with what they say or believe. You can get monstered by one media outlet owned by Murdoch, or you can get monstered by what Stephen Main calls the full Murdoch symphony. The tabloid newspapers, sky after dark. And since the late 1980s, Rupert Murdoch has owned around about two thirds of the daily and Sunday newspapers in this country. Now, newspapers are not as influential or as large a part of the media ecosystem these days as they were, but they all have online editions, they all have of kind of reach into social media and so on. And so it is fair to say that Murdoch, along with the abc, has the biggest media footprint in the country.
- [02:07]
A
Okay, so let's talk about some of the targets of some of these prolonged campaigns, some of whom people would remember, like Brittany Higgins and Yasmin Abdul Majeed. Scott McIntyre, what are the stories, out of all the people that you've spoken to for this book, that stay with you the most?
- [02:24]
B
Well, the Brittany Higgins story has stayed with us. I mean, it has its origins back in 2019 when she claimed and then was proven in a civil court to have been raped on a minister's couch in the federal Parliament. When I say it's a complicated story, it's because it spawned a kind of almost a cottage industry of legal actions and what we were interested in, not to the exclusion of the other, but to investigate how one newspaper, and in particular one columnist at one newspaper, that is the Australian, the newspaper, and the columnist is Janet Albrechtson, have focused inordinately on the Britney Higgins case.
- [03:06]
C
I think at the Australian, we have done such a tremendous job of making sure that we have covered this case from just about every angle that we could because it seemed to us that much of the media were not interested in hearing from other women. In this case, that believal women only applied to Brittany Higgins.
- [03:24]
B
What happens in the process, as she writes about 123 articles over a two and a bit year period, is that most of the articles are very critical of Brittany Higgins and treat Bruce Lerman and his claims and so on very lightly.
- [03:41]
C
From the moment that this case started, I was never, and I don't want this to sound callous, but I was never terribly interested in what happened that night. I was interested in whether there could be a fair trial. And I think the moment that it became trial by media, trial by Parliament, trial by just about every institution in this country that coalesced against the presumption of innocence, including a Prime Minister at the time who got up in Parliament and said that he was apologising for things that had happened that night.
- [04:11]
B
The effect of that is to tilt the scales very heavily against Brittany Higgins and in favor of Bruce Lehrman. And then at a more human level, there's a question of what impact that coverage has had on Brittany Higgins. And we interviewed her partner, David Shiraz, and he told us that it has had a profound impact on her mental health. I don't think that's all that surprising. I mean, we're talking about not only the volume of articles, but, you know, we're talking about front page news stories and long columns, investigations and so on.
- [04:45]
A
What about some of the longer term impacts on some of the other people you spoke to, Matthew?
- [04:49]
B
Well, in the case of Yasmin Abdul Majeed, there was a period and it's died away a little bit, but not entirely where anyone who said anything that News Corp people didn't agree with on Anzac Day got it in the net.
- [05:02]
A
Let's go back to this. Sheila Yasmin Abdel Magid, I've mispronounced, but who cares? So she posts Lest we forget on Facebook.
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B
Can we show this again?
- [05:12]
A
So she posts Lest we forget, Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine, Kaboom. I got that one in there.
- [05:17]
B
All the lefty talking points. She tweeted lest we forget. And she added she was thinking also about refugees on Manus island and other places. A friend of hers said, oh, you know that's not gonna work out. Well, you looks like you're hating on the diggers. And she said, oh, okay, I hadn't really seen it like that, but I'll take that tweet down, which she did. Didn't stop the pylon. Then she became a target, if you like. And so just about anything she did was put under the microscope. Abdelmaghid was invited to the Australian National University to discuss leadership, even though she's no leader. And she joined a panel of professors and department heads, even though she herself is no academic. Again, identity politics. Would she have been invited had she not been a black Muslim woman? So she was on the Council for Australian Arab Relations, which is a government related body. She was tasked with going overseas and talking about, you know, both the virtues of democracy and trying to take that to various countries that weren't democracies in the Middle east and elsewhere. That got turned into. This is a kind of a taxpayer funded jaunt where she's going to go over and spread propaganda about, you know, Islam and so on.
- [06:30]
C
Thousands of dollars of taxpayers, money by the Department of Foreign affairs and Julie Bishop to send her all around the Middle east to preach from her book about how wonderful Australia is to women and Muslims and a whole range of other things. She then says it's a feminist religion. She does all of this. I mean, she is absolutely without credibility.
- [06:48]
B
I mean, this was a very smart, energetic, vivacious, vibrant young woman. She described herself as a smart mouth in a hijab. That was her phrase. This is not a sin or a crime, as far as I can see, to be either vibrant or, you know, to express yourself fully and briskly and vibrantly and so on. And she got the full Murdoch symphony, she got it from a range of outlets and she got hounded over a period of time and she eventually left the country. This happens to ordinary people as well. The worst example is the 13 year old schoolgirl, Millie Dallow. She went missing in 2002 and her phone was hacked by a private investigator operating for News of the World. This was happening while her parents were absolutely devastated and desperately anxious to see whether she was alive or not, where she was and so on. And as it turns out, she had been murdered during this period. At around this time, one of the senior editorial executives at the News of the World, he spelt out very clearly what the practices of the paper were at this time. When he was talking to a reporter who was kind of asking questions about why he had been asked to do a particular story, this executive said, listen, what we do is we go out and destroy people's lives. That's what we do. Look, it's rare to see it all put that bluntly, but that kind of level of Cruelty and disregard for other people, for other people's lives and for the effect of their coverage on other people's lives.
- [08:33]
A
Coming up, can you still get Murdoched without Rupert? So, given the lives you've seen destroyed by this global empire which for decades has struck fear into the hearts of even the most powerful, aren't you poking the bear with this book? What makes you decide to write it and risk the empire's wrath?
- [09:03]
B
Look, there is a. There is a reason why a book of this kind has not been written before. There are now about nine biographies of Rupert Murdoch out there, probably 40 other full length studies of Murdoch and News Corporation and what it does. Very little of it pays attention to the effect of what the Murdoch media outlets have been doing now for seven decades plus and as you say, across three major countries, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. And even less attention has been paid to the impact of their Murdoching, as we are calling it, on, on individuals. We were particularly concerned about the impact on ordinary people who, whether it's because they have a view that doesn't line up with what News Corp's view is on a particular issue, who they are, that is, they might identify as a trans person and particularly if they've identified as trans younger in their earlier years, these are people who are in a vulnerable state. And if nothing else, you would hope that the media's coverage of that issue would recognise the complexities of the issue and the sensitivities around it for both the individual and their family and others. We are not in the heads of either Rupert Murdoch or his family or his editors, so we don't know why exactly they do what they do. But consistently, going back decades now, Murdoch's media outlets have been hostile towards and targeted vulnerable and minority communities.
- [10:38]
A
Matthew, in the book, you look at how much of this Murdoch culture is actually driven by Rupert Murdoch himself. So can you tell us a bit more about that?
- [10:45]
B
It is in the sense that he, he has said, he said this at an annual general meeting of News corporation in the mid-1990s, that the company is an expression of his views, his beliefs, his ideas, and he's proud of that. He's not kind of, you know, Lord Voldemort sitting in the corner somewhere, directing every single person in that sort of way. Or what has happened is that over time he's moved from hiring editors, some of whom disagreed with him, who he then sacked, to hiring people who either agree with him already or come to agree with him. A former editor of the sun newspaper in the uk David Yelland is on the record saying that as a kind of Murdoch editor, one of the things you do is you wake up in the morning and you say, what would Rupert think about that? Or what would Rupert think about this? So it's become a kind of self reinforcing company now in that sense, that doesn't mean that they're all doing everything identically. Possibly a better way to think about it is to think of News Corp as a federation in that sense, which holds together but has different kind of aspects and needs and purposes.
- [11:54]
A
How much has this way of doing news impacted the media landscape more broadly, do you think, Matthew?
- [12:01]
B
Yeah, that's a really good question because I think that's actually the way in which Murdoch's tabloid outlets in the UK operated. I'm talking about the sun and the News of the World had the effect of dragging other tabloid newspapers further down with them. And the reason that's a critical point is that they're so aggressive and they're so dogged in pursuing sensational material, often with a very cruel edge to it. I mean, the phone hacking scandal is the most egregious example of that. There's a moment we're now living in a social media age where so much of, you know, the newspapers, as we talked about earlier, are a smaller part of the media ecosystem. There was an opportunity, it seems to myself and Andrew, where Murdoch's outlets could have led some kind of more considered and purposeful and positive way of doing media in the mid-2000s to combat the kind of flood of misinformation and disinformation that you see on social media which starting then and is now rampant. They chose not to, they chose to both perpetuate it and to be, you know, in the swill alongside it. And so there's a sort of feedback loop often between either Murdoch's media outlets put something out there which gets picked up by social media and amplified and extended, or vice versa. Some troll in social media will pick something up, say some small item about a climate scientist paper, a minor error. It'll be brought to the attention of an Andrew Bolt or someone like that, and they will then start to bloviate about it as a result. We're in a media ecosystem now where people think about notions of whether it's balance or fairness or simply investigating and putting out a range of perspectives on an issue as somehow quaint or old fashioned or whatever. And I'm absolutely not persuaded that it of much value at all that in fact we need more of that and less of this kind of intense anger and rage and yelling and screaming at people on a personal basis, I don't see how that is helping us at all.
- [14:11]
A
I mean, are we stuck with this permanent change as part of a new outrage industry, Matthew, or is there something that can be done in a regulatory sense to stop this type of pile on, given the impacts it can have on people's lives, health and reputations?
- [14:26]
B
The short answer on regulation is that there should be, but there hasn't been. And it's not for want of various people advocating for it, including myself, but also many others. It's an area where there's few votes because politicians are very wary about doing it because they don't want to upset various powerful media people. People in the media don't want you to do it because, you know, at the basic level, nobody likes being regulated, nobody likes being scrutinised. But most people in their saner moments accept that some level of scrutiny and regulation is needed because that's how you make various and institutions accountable for what they're doing. So it hasn't worked, unfortunately. I would love it if it did, but it hasn't. I think if we've got to the position we're in now, we should be able to get out of it at least partly, though, it's got to come down to individual people actually making their views known that this is not the kind of media they want. If you're not showing other ways in which to do media, you know, I mean, I'm obviously talking to you on this podcast and there's. There are other ways of doing media than simply looking at the ABC or the Sydney Morning Herald or whatever, then those need to grow, those need to be supported. And there is some attempts by government to do that, but it's partly, at least our own responsibility to kind of make our views known. And what we hope is our book makes some kind of contribution to people being both informed about the issues, you know, debating the issues. I mean, like this book, like any other, is open to debate and argument and contest and having a proper discussion about these things rather than yelling and screaming at each other.
- [16:07]
A
Well, Matthew, the book is a valuable contribution to a national conversation on these very important matters. And we thank you for coming on.
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B
7:00am thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it.
- [16:33]
A
Also in the news, whistleblower David McBride has been released from a Canberra prison, granted parole after more than two years behind bars. The former army lawyer was sentenced to five years and eight months jail for leaking the classified documents behind the Afghan files, which exposed alleged war crimes by Australian special forces. He'll serve the rest of his sentence under supervision in the community and has revealed he's been treated for lung cancer and will need an extended period of recovery. And thousands of high school and university students have walked out of class today protesting Pauline Hanson and One Nation organisers say One Nation's stance on issues like immigration, multiculturalism and student debt is harmful to young people. Politicians, including the Victorian premier and Liberal Senator Alex Antick have criticised the walkout saying kids should stay in school. I'm Daniel James. Thanks for listening to 7am we'll be back tomorrow.
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B
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