Payback Time for Murdoch as Parliament Reasserts Itself
At last Rupert Murdochs ambitions have been curbed by Parliament, says Paul Linford.
14 Jul 2011, 16:18
Rupert Murdoch: Fall from grace
Thirty years ago, when Murdoch was negotiating to buy The Times and the Sunday Times from the Thomson Organisation, he accepted a series of guarantees which were then endorsed by the government - and by extension Parliament - as conditions of his takeover.
They included undertakings that an editor could not be dismissed or the two titles sold or transferred without the express agreement of the board of independent national directors which was established in order to safeguard their editorial independence.
It was the existence of these guarantees that enabled the then Trade and Industry Secretary John Biffen to avoid a reference to what was then known as the Monopolies Commission - much as this time round Murdoch hoped to avoid having his BSKyB bid referred to its present-day successor by offering to hive-off Sky News into an independent trust.
As history shows, Murdoch succeeded in conning everyone - the Thomson Organisation which had sold him the papers in good faith, and the politicians who endorsed the deal. Within a year every single one of the guarantees had been broken.
Among other things, he transferred the ownership of the Times and the Sunday Times out of Times Newspapers Ltd and into News International without even the independent directors' knowledge, still less their approval.
He also famously fired the editor of The Times, Harold Evans, again without the directors' approval, having also repeatedly broken a guarantee not to issue direct instructions to journalists or to try to influence the political policy of the paper.
Evans' departure after the most illustrious career of any national newspaper editor in the past 100 years paved the way for Murdoch's subsequent rape of the Times and The Sunday Times as newspapers of hitherto unimpeachable integrity.
Although this will all seem like ancient history to some, The Times deal is significant in that it was the last explicit opportunity Parliament had had until now to curb Murdoch's ambitions for media expansion.
If the end result of yesterday's events is that he is forced to sell the two newspapers he acquired in such a disingenuous fashion, then history really will have come full circle. I wonder if Harry Evans might be interested in buying them?
One further historical footnote. Five Conservative MPs voted against their own government in 1981 to call for the Times Newspapers deal to be referred, one of whom was Jonathan Aitken.
Aitken later became a reviled figure in our profession after his misguided attacks on "bent and twisted journalism" at The Guardian. Perhaps the Murdoch stable would have been more deserving of the epithet.
Comments (3)
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What's surprising isn't that the guarantees were broken, but that it was done with such utter impunity. Another lesson yet to be learned?
14/07/2011 16:47"It is the first time in years that Parliament is setting the political agenda and not the media ..."
I wonder whether the commentator who said this on BBC 5 Live yesterday in reaction to a full House and the tri-partisan accord against media wrongdoing had any idea of how pathetic an assessment of our democracy he was delivering.
14/07/2011 17:20Good article.
It was the Tories that killed the Times.
14/07/2011 17:37