Book Reviews | 11:00 AM
The men who killed the news by Eric Beecher, published by Scribner Australia.
By Rudi Filapek-Vandyck
Eric Beecher’s 400 pager on the questionable status of global news reporting media is a project ten years in the making.
As a whole lot has happened over that period, the title no longer fully covers the content. By now, social media and Gen.Ai are as big a threat as the likes of Murdoch and Bezos. But ten years have also provided plenty of time to analyse and research the subject and 50 pages of literature references indicate the author has spent his time well.
In his younger years as a driven, gung ho journalist, Beecher worked two years inside the Murdoch empire, as editor of The Melbourne Herald. This experience provides some of the most valuable insights given this information is not available from our local library.
“When Rupert Murdoch lured me away from my job as editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, then arguably the best newspaper in Australia, I was thirty-six and loved being a serious journalist.”
Page 165: “When I finally resigned, I left without a payout because I refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement that would have gagged me from ever talking or writing about my experiences at the company. We all need to decide for ourselves what we can live with […]”
Needless to say, Beecher is not a fan of the Murdoch empire, which is not surprising given his passion for old fashioned ‘truthful’ news reporting. Then again, there’s plenty of historical background in the book to suggest not everything was as straightforward as one might have believed throughout the decades past.
Maybe deep throat and US president Nixon resigning in 1974 were more of an exception rather than the rule? If this still triggers a public debate, the changes since then, globally and universally, are hardly up for any discussion.
The news media today are but a bleak shadow of what they still represented only 10-20 years ago, and the trend is not getting any better. Now Elon Musk is in on the game, as is Zuckerberg’s Meta, and Ai already is writing content and populating websites.
One of the stand-out anecdotes relates to the Fairfax board when Beecher presented his future outlook around 2003, suggesting the mighty newspaper empire needed to act as the likes of REA Group, Seek and Carsales were eyeing its ‘rivers of gold’; classifieds ads that provided the financial security underneath the many newsrooms and printing presses.
The response?
“After I finished presenting my findings to the full Fairfax board, a visible agitated director strode to the head of the boardroom table, picked up a copy of one of the company’s hefty broadsheets, bulging with classified ads, and dramatically held it aloft. Then he told his fellow directors that he never again wanted anyone coming into the boardroom suggesting that people would ‘buy houses or cars or look for jobs without this!’ as he dropped the lump of newsprint onto the boardroom table with a loud thud.”
And just like that, Australia now has its own Kodak or Nokia reference point.
The rest, as they say, is history. REA Group and (renamed) Car Group are now among the largest and most successful companies on the ASX and the once mighty Fairfax is but a small (and shrinking) part of the Nine Entertainment media group, whose size is equally steadfastly sliding south (another restructuring is already in motion).
The men who killed the news offers so much more as it recalls the empires built by Conrad Black, William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, Robert Maxwell, Silvio Berlusconi, Kerry Packer, and many others. They all abused their power, manipulated the truth and distorted democracy, as per the book’s subtitle.
In an era of general distrust and widespread conspiracies and misinformation, where will this end? Can democracy survive without a solid counter-force against attempts to kill the news and replace it with self-serving propaganda and misinformation?
“No-one knows how this story will play out because the traps are so freshly laid.”
The book includes several examples of media that have successfully withstood the pressure. These are the small group of exceptions that, maybe one day, might be able to reverse the trend.
Eric Beecher is chair of Solstice Media, The New Daily and Private Media, the publisher of Crikey. In 2007, he received a Walkley Award for journalistic leadership.
The men who killed the news. The inside story of how Media Moguls abused their power, manipulated the Truth and distorted Democracy by Eric Beecher, published by Scribner Australia.
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