An exposé of the culture of “whatever it takes,” Eric Beecher’s The Men Who Killed the News is an idealistic book for its time.

Eric Beecher is a rare man: he is at once a journalist, a media owner and an idealist. In 1984, at the age of 33, he became the youngest editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and has worked all over the world as a journalist. He is currently chairman and major shareholder of Private Media, owner of several Australian news sites, including Crikey.

With The Men Who Killed the News, he has produced a book that is both a cry of indignation at the abuses of media power and an attempt to chart a future for journalism.

The cry of outrage comes first. In a sweeping overview of the history of the press dating back to the late 19th century, Beecher vividly illustrates how newspaper magnates, from William Randolph Hearst in the 1880s to Rupert Murdoch today, have cynically degraded the profession of journalism in pursuit of wealth and power.

It draws on a wide range of stories, creating a kind of one-stop shop for the reader who wants to understand how public trust in the media has eroded to the point where Donald Trump is able to stick the “fake news” label.

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Review: The Men Who Killed News – Eric Beecher (Scribner)

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The men who killed the news belong to two technological ages.

The first belong to the era of industrialization, which allowed the rapid daily production of tens of thousands of newspapers and the creation of a vast monopoly on public access to information. These men included not only Hearst and Murdoch, but also Joseph Pulitzer, Henry Luce and A. O. Sulzberger in the United States, and Lords Beaverbrook, Rothermere and Northcliffe in Britain.

The second belongs to the era of the digital revolution, which has given birth to two behemoths whose power is several orders of magnitude greater than that of all the tycoons of the past combined: Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

The common factors to all, as Beecher convincingly argues, are the abuse of power, the manipulation of truth, and the distortion of democracy.

The power of the tycoons of the day, though eclipsed, remains formidable. Among them, it is Murdoch who attracts Beecher’s attention the most. He joins the ranks of former Murdoch editors who have exposed the moral bankruptcy of News Corporation from the inside.

He recounts his experience when, as editor of the Melbourne Herald, he and his deputy, Bruce Guthrie, attended a meeting of News Corp executives in Aspen, Colorado. The proceedings were enlivened by a presentation by the editor of Murdoch’s London Sun on the hits, lies and smears on which the newspaper’s circulation was built. The presentation was called “WIT (Whatever It Takes).”

At the end of this overviewGuthrie raised his hand: “Do you have any ethical framework at the London Sun?” When the derision had died down and Guthrie had repeated his question twice, the editor admitted that they didn’t really have any ethical framework at all.

Beecher writes that Murdoch was shocked to discover a “wanker” among them.

The dilemma of responsibility

In a chapter titled “The Moral Compass,” Beecher compares News Corp’s culture to that of other newspapers: the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Le Monde and, in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald, where he was editor from 1984 to 1987 before being lured to Murdoch’s Herald and Weekly Times. He is right to pay attention to organizations like these, because they have been faithful to the functions of the media that are essential to a well-functioning democracy.

At the same time, Beecher points to the unresolved dilemma of democratic systems in many Western countries: how to hold the media accountable without violating the principle of freedom of expression. He identifies the resulting paradox. In the absence of an effective accountability mechanism, media moguls, as the guardians of journalism, are tasked with protecting it but have incentives to exploit it.

Beecher does not explore ways to solve this problem. This is a pity, because the Leveson inquiry into the wiretapping of Murdoch’s Sun and News of the World, and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, have both suggested an approach that might amount to self-regulation based on legislation.

At the same time as Leveson, the Finkelstein Inquiry into media regulation in Australia recommended statutory authority. In Scandinavia, regulation has been based on law since at least the end of the Second World War. A discussion of these possible solutions would have considerably strengthened this part of the book.

Impact of the Internet

The erosion of public trust through centuries of ethical failures is the first of two major themes in the book. The other is the commercial failure caused by the effect of the Internet and social media on the revenues and information monopoly that newspapers, radio and television have long enjoyed. Here, the men who have killed news are displaying desperation, complacency and hubris on a historically grand scale.

The desperation is evident in the way that major newspaper dynasties, such as the Graham family of the Washington Post, have had to sell their stakes to digital billionaires, in their case Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to save their newspapers financially. This pattern is repeated in the United States and Europe.

The complacency and hubris are illustrated by Beecher’s account of being asked by a Fairfax director, when the company still owned the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Australian Financial Review, to write a report on the future of the company.

It was the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, a time when evidence was beginning to show that the Internet was having a measurable impact on advertising revenues. At the time, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age were still publishing about 200 pages of classified ads a week, generating a combined annual profit of about $200 million. But the company had no Internet strategy and no board member had any media experience.

In his report, Beecher raises the possibility of a “worst-case scenario” in which classifieds move online, virtually wiping out the company’s profits. He recommends the urgent creation of a digital business to compete with the parent company.

At these words, “a visibly agitated director” walked over to the boardroom table, picked up a large piece of paper which was a Saturday newspaper, dropped it on the table with a thud and declared that he never again wanted anyone to come into the boardroom saying that people would be looking for a house, a car or a job “without it!”

It is no surprise that in 2018 what was left of the Fairfax empire ended up in the hands of Nine Entertainment, an organisation whose editorial culture is as far removed from that of the Fairfax newspapers as possible.

Looking to the future, Beecher addresses the central question facing the media institution: can journalism fulfill its democratic function without being supported by financial subsidies?

The answer is obviously no. Journalism has always been subsidized, either by advertising, as in commercial media, or by taxpayers in the case of public broadcasting.

Survival prospects

Without significant advertising revenue, how can commercial media survive? Beecher cites some success stories.

The New York Times, with 10 million subscribers, is one of them, more than the other 11 major newspapers in the United States and Western Europe combined. The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Economist are the others. What they have in common is that they produce original journalism, considered indispensable by their audiences.

The lesson is this: To succeed, newspapers will have to accept that mass media are an anachronism. Instead, they will have to focus on the needs of a relatively small audience. The watchword is “must-have”: what information can our audience not do without?

Beecher lists types of journalism—collaborative, solutions-oriented, constructive, and more—that could make a contribution. These types of journalism all point to the need for a radical cultural shift in news values ​​and journalistic perspective. Negativity and conflict, long the most attractive values ​​for newsrooms, are now causing people to avoid the news or seek distractions on social media.

Beecher discusses the idea of ​​government assistance, acknowledging that it involves collaboration between adversaries: politicians and the journalists whose job it is to hold them to account. This works with public broadcasting, but only because the relationship is governed by elaborate legislation designed to protect editorial independence and because of long-established conventions.

He highlights the benefits of the Australian News Media Bargaining Code, which forced Google and Facebook to pay Australian media companies for their content. But even as his book comes out, we see Facebook refusing to renew its deal under the code and Google adding a clause that allows it to cancel its deal after each year.

Ultimately, Beecher rightly returns to the urgent need to restore public trust. There is no silver bullet. News publishers, he says, must demonstrate their commitment to ethical journalism and professional conduct in a nonpartisan, nonideological, non-arrogant and credible manner.

His idealism must be taken seriously. Journalism must play its part in building public trust in democratic institutions if societies like Australia’s are to retain the liberal values ​​on which democracy is based.

The Men Who Killed News is a book for our times.