Extract from The Guardian
In a book dedicated to ‘the bullied’, two former News Corp journalists outline a behaviour pattern they call ‘getting Murdoched’, which they say harms individuals and public debate
Soon after, he received a call from a reporter for The Sun, then the UK’s most prolific tabloid newspaper. The reporter asked: “What would you say if I told you we are going to do an exposé on your children’s drugs and drinking habits tomorrow?”
Nutt’s response, he tells the authors of a new book on the tactics and culture of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, was “Well, I’d say you were a despicable piece of shit.”
Under the headline “Off his Nutt”, The Sun published photographs taken from his children’s Facebook pages which showed his son Steve smoking a roll-up, another son Johnny “prancing NAKED in the snow in Sweden”, and his daughter, Lydia, holding a bottle of spirits “uploaded two years before she turned 18”. Nutt complained to the UK regulator, the book recounts, but it was several weeks before the photos were taken down.
In Getting Murdoched, Australian journalism academics and former employees at The Australian newspaper, Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson, claim personal attacks like this are part of a pattern in the 95-year-old Murdoch’s sprawling global media empire, which today operates under News Corp and Fox Corporation. “As former reporters we get that good journalism and editorial abuse share many of the same characteristics. For example, good journalism requires lots of persistence. Bullying entails too much of it,” they write. And while they say that “of course good journalism has been published and broadcast in News outlets”, they argue that in many cases a line has been crossed.
“Murdoched”, a term Dodd and Ricketson coin for the book, means to be “editorially attacked when one’s ideas or deeds do not accord with the media proprietor’s programs or publications”.
The book examines “murdoching” across the US, the UK and Australia, including dozens of interviews with prominent people and ordinary citizens about the way they were treated in newspapers, such as The Sun and the New York Post, and cable television network Fox News.
Dedicated to “the bullied”, the book focuses squarely on Murdoch’s “way of doing journalism”, Dodd and Ricketson write. The techniques include unleashing a torrent of articles against particular targets “contesting even the tiniest of points, so as to wipe the critic’s original ideas from everyone’s mind”. Another is to attack the critic personally, “pitilessly and repeatedly”. When all else fails, “murdoching” is “simply continuing to assert something as true as if no one has ever shown it was false”, they write.
“Murdoch perverted the fourth estate function of journalism,” Dodd and Ricketson write. “Instead of it being a way to hold power to account, Murdoch saw it as a means of holding individuals to account, especially those who held views contrary to his own.”
The consequences, they argue, are severe: these tactics have a chilling effect on democracy and seriously harm those who are targeted. And across the US, the UK and Australia, the three markets where Murdoch’s outlets are dominant, they write, the techniques employed by the company’s journalists are similar.
Well known Indigenous Australian academic Larissa Behrendt felt the onslaught of “murdoching” when she posted a bad joke on social media. She had watched an episode of US series Deadwood, which featured a man having sex with a horse; and, earlier, on another program, she saw Indigenous leader Bess Price commenting on welfare measures for Indigenous people.
Behrendt conflated the two programs and tweeted: “I watched a show where a guy had sex with a horse and I’m sure it was less offensive than Bess Price.”
Behrendt’s post was picked up by The Australian, which published a front page story headlined: “More offensive than ‘sex with a horse’: Larissa Behrendt’s Twitter slur against Bess Price.” But it didn’t stop there. Although Behrendt immediately deleted the post and apologised to Price, the stories in the national broadsheet kept coming. There were 16 articles in 16 days. “It appeared as an assault on urban, progressive and outspoken Indigenous people,” the authors write.
It is one of the 50 cases examined in Getting Murdoched. Ricketson says the Murdoch method often involves a reporter picking up on something someone has said on social media, “either inadvertent, ill advised or easily able to be distorted”.
“Then they will blow it out of all proportion and say it disqualifies you from whatever it is you’re trying to do,” Ricketson tells the Guardian. Common targets, they argue, include climate scientists, women’s rights advocates, Muslims and LGBTQ+ community members.
The authors believe Behrendt was a target because she had already been derided in another Murdoch paper as a fair-skinned person who had “chosen” to identify as Indigenous for “political and career clout”. (That previous article resulted in a 2011 federal court ruling that Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt breached human rights laws.)
Behrendt told the authors the Price incident felt like a “psychological assassination”. “I just felt destroyed by it,” she said. “I felt like I’d never come back from it.”
“This is unfortunately what happens again and again,” Dodd tells the Guardian. “The consequences for her were personally devastating. This is the dark art that is practised by News.”
“There are lots of tactics, and there are lots of different ways of being ‘murdoched’”, Dodd says.
Ricketson says so much has been written about Rupert Murdoch, in terms of his biography, his succession battle and his business ventures, but not much about the effect of News’ outlets on the body politic and on individuals. Dodd was more motivated by seeing what he describes as bullying “on an industrial and global scale” and watching “the effect that it has on individuals on a very granular level”.
In the US, the authors spoke to a trans teacher from California, Flint Del Sol, whose online posts about his job and the student library for LGBTQ+ kids he created attracted the attention of Fox News. The story, headlined “California high school teacher boasts ‘queer library’ with material on orgies and BDSM/kink”, caused Del Sol to retreat from the world and the school to “freak out”, although it stood by him, he told the authors. He said he had shared his posts hoping to support other trans teachers and “create a community”.
“[Fox News] wrote an article that essentially slandered my reputation, and my community, intentionally mischaracterising the nature of my library and the materials available to my kids,” del Sol told the authors.
After three more Fox stories over the following months, he faced abuse, with some opponents calling the school and threatening to burn it down with kids inside. Eventually, there was a bomb hoax.
Del Sol left the profession two years later and attributed his decision to being afraid for his life.
“I left teaching because I was sure that one day I wouldn’t come home,” Del Sol told the authors. “I hope no teacher ever has to experience what I experienced.
“It destroyed my nervous system and eroded my faith in the goodness and critical thinking of people who had trusted their children to me for more than a decade.”
Dodd says because News Corp is a global organisation, it becomes an echo chamber across the markets. He says he has watched campaigns on Fox News against the transgender community migrate to become talking points on the right-wing Sky News Australian channel.
“It’s that much more dangerous as a company,” he says.
Prof Nutt’s son eventually had a letter published in The Sun, clarifying that the Facebook posts did not show drug use or underage drinking.
The original article, Dodd and Ricketson write, seemed designed to punish Nutt for his progressive views and suggest he was a hypocrite lacking in credibility and moral authority.
“His children – unfairly exposed, misreported and held up to ridicule – were collateral damage,” they write. “Almost none of the tenets of ethical journalism were observed.
“In other words, they had been murdoched.”
News Corp and Fox News were approached for comment.
Getting Murdoched by Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson is out now through Hardie Grant Books in Australia. US and UK releases will follow.
Amanda Meade was a reporter on The Australian until November 2012.
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