It was the trade unions that provided Murdoch with his greatest coup. Maxwell, having been thwarted in his attempt to acquire the News of the World, hoped to buy the ailing Sun from the Daily Mirror’s owners, IPC. He would maintain the Sun’s left-leaning politics and would not let it challenge the Mirror directly for dominance. Delighted, IPC agreed generous terms of sale. But Maxwell also made it clear that in taking on a loss-making paper he would have to cut jobs and costs. The unions objected to this, and Hugh Cudlipp, IPC’s chairman, feared it might trigger a wave of union militancy that would disrupt production of the company’s highly profitable Mirror. Cudlipp had fathered the Sun in 1964 as a middle-market broadsheet (it replaced the defunct trade union-backed Daily Herald bought by IPC three years earlier) and did not want to contemplate infanticide. So he sold it for the trivial sum of £500,000 (of which only £50,000 was a down payment) to Murdoch, a man who – compared to Maxwell or the alternative of certain death – had the unions’ blessing. Over the next three years, the circulation of Murdoch’s Sun rose from under one million to over three million. The paper’s mix of sauce and sensationalism earned its new owner the sobriquet ‘Dirty Digger’. But more to the point, he now had his cash cow and could plan for expansion accordingly.
Yet Murdoch’s next forays into Fleet Street were unsuccessful. It seemed The Times would never come up for sale – Roy Thomson had pledged as much and was not in apparent need of ready cash. But the future of another illustrious title, the Observer, edited by Gavin Astor’s cousin David, appeared far less certain. In 1976, however, it preferred to sell itself for a mere £1 million to Atlantic Richfield rather than to the downmarket tabloid owner of the Sun and the News of the World. Like Thomson with Times Newspapers, Atlantic Richfield was a company making large profits from oil exploration that talked the language of moral obligation rather than business opportunity (at least until 1981 when it sold the loss-making paper to Tiny Rowland). In 1977, Murdoch’s was one of the raised hands in the crowded bidding for the fallen Beaverbrook empire. The prospect of breathing new life into the once mighty Daily Express, where nearly a quarter of a century earlier he had learned the subeditors’ craft from Edward Pickering, was naturally appealing. But he lost to a higher bid from Trafalgar House who placed a building contractor, Victor Matthews, behind the chairman’s desk of the newly named Express Newspapers.
But by this stage, Murdoch’s News Limited had spread to three continents. His first American acquisitions came in Texas when in 1973 he bought the San Antonio Express and its News sister paper. After a slow start the titles became increasingly profitable. An attempt to launch a rival to the National Enquirer proved unsuccessful but he was not to be put off by temporary reverses (he merely transformed his product into Star, a women’s magazine that by the early eighties returned a $12 million annual profit). The great test of his mettle came in 1976 when Dorothy Schiff sold him the liberal leaning New York Post. He paid $10 million for a paper that was haemorrhaging money, but rather than taking time to regroup he immediately pressed ahead, spending a further $10 million to buy New York magazine and Village Voice.
In the twenty-eight years between his father’s death and his acquisition of The Times, Murdoch had progressed from owning one newspaper in Adelaide to becoming a major presence across the English-speaking world with annual sales of over A$ 1 billion (£485 million). His News Corporation was valued on the Sydney stock exchange at £100 million. It owned half the shares in its British subsidiary, News International (owner of Times Newspapers and the tabloids of News Group Newspapers). The other half of News International’s shares was quoted on the London stock exchange with a value of £35 million. Yet the perceived imperative of keeping personal control had not been squandered in the midst of this expansion. The Murdoch family’s holding company, Cruden Investments, still owned 43 per cent of the parent company.100
Murdoch was able to pursue a policy of aggressive expansion because of the profitability of his London tabloids and by pointing to a proven track record in turning around under-performing titles. It was enough to secure credit from the banks. But his growing band of critics had come to credit him only with debasing the profession of journalism. Aside from his patronage of The Australian (and even here there had been evidence of his interference in editorial policy), he was now held in contempt by those who believed he had built success upon a heap of trash. His titles sensationalized events, trivialized serious issues (when indeed they bothered to report serious issues at all) and frequently allowed their zeal in getting a scoop to overcome questions of taste, fairness and honesty. More than any other, it was Murdoch’s name that had become associated with ‘tabloid journalism’ as a pejorative term.
From November 1970, the Sun sported topless women on its page three. Feminists and arbiters of decency loudly condemned this popular move. In fact, it was not exactly a Fleet Street first: as long ago as 1937 the high-minded Hugh Cudlipp, then editor of the Mirror’s Sunday sister paper, had reproduced a topless damsel chaperoned by the obtuse picture caption ‘a charming springtime study of an apple-tree in full blossom’. Even newspapers owned by such respectable figures as Lord Thomson and edited by William Rees-Mogg were not immune. Five months after the Sun launched its topless page three girls, The Times pictured one of them nude in a full-page advertisement for Fisons’ slimming biscuits (one reader asked whether the paper’s self-regarding 1950s advertising slogan ‘Top People Take The Times’ should be replaced with ‘Topless People Take The Times’; another wrote, ‘I hope this delightful picture has the same effect on The Times’s circulation as it does on mine.’). Although it proved a sell-out issue, it did not, however, start a broadsheet trend. In contrast, page three nudity became synonymous with the Sun. Those who did not believe masscirculation newspapers were the place for entertainment or triviality hated Murdoch’s winning formula every bit as much as a previous generation had chastised Northcliffe for giving the people what they wanted in place of what was thought good for them. In the case of the Sun and the New York Post, Murdoch had indeed taken serious-minded newspapers downmarket. But many of his offending newspapers (in particular the News of the World, the Perth Sunday Times and the Sydney Daily Mirror) had been peddling titillation, half-truth and questionable journalistic standards long before his arrival on the scene. But the increasing size not only of headlines – now often involving a comic pun – but also graphic photographs certainly made their wares more pervasive and intrusive.
Murdoch was not interested in the critics of his tabloids. In his eyes they were cultural snobs, seeking to enforce their own tastes on millions of people whose lives were lived in conditions about which the arbiters of taste demonstrated scant concern or understanding. Papers like the Sun and the New York Post were responding to a need, reflecting what their readers wanted to unwind with in the course of what was otherwise a day of toil. But Murdoch went further in the defence of his titles. They were not just a form of cheap entertainment; they were genuine upholders of a fearless fourth estate. What the cultural establishment branded scandal-mongering was, more often, an attempt to hold to account those in public life for their actions – public and private. While the self-righteous broadsheets lazily reported ‘official’ news after it had happened, the popular press regularly created the news in the first place, by uncovering what was actually going on behind the veneer of authorized pronouncement. It was, Murdoch asserted:
not the serious press in America but the muck-rakers, led by Lincoln Steffens and his New York World, who became the permanent opposition and challenged the American trinity of power: big business, big labour and big government. It was not the serious press which first campaigned for the Negro in America. It was the small, obscure newspapers of the Deep South.101
Nor was this a phenomenon of the New World. Having sympathized with the Confederates in the Civil War, zealously advocated the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s and adopted an understanding attitude towards Stalin in the 1940s, The Times had, in its high-minded way, not always walked with angels.
Yet, it was the social and political comment in Murdoch’s tabloids