Speaker 1: I'm Daniel James and you're listening to seven AM. For decades,
Speaker 1: Rupert Murdoch's Betty V Empire has helped shape politics and
Speaker 1: public debate, and in doing so has often left lasting
Speaker 1: consequences for some of the people coordinate sites, from politicians
Speaker 1: to public figures to everyday people. The consequences can be devastating.
Speaker 1: Journalists Matthew Richardson and Andrew Dodd have a name for
Speaker 1: what happens when the attention becomes a campaign. They call
Speaker 1: it getting murdocked. Today, co author of their new book
Speaker 1: Getting Murdocked, Matthew Richardson on the people who found themselves
Speaker 1: on the receiving end and the media culture that could
Speaker 1: outlast Rupert Murdoch himself. It's Friday, August fourty eight. Matthew,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for speaking with us in seven AM.
Speaker 1: You've witnessed up close and you've even experienced it. So
Speaker 1: what exactly do you mean by getting murdocked?
Speaker 2: Getting murdock is when a person is the kind of
Speaker 2: subject of hostile attention from the Murdoch media, usually based
Speaker 2: on what you say or you believe that doesn't accord
Speaker 2: with what they say or believe. You can get monstered
Speaker 2: by one media outlet owned by Murdoch, or you can
Speaker 2: get monstered by what Stephen Man calls the full Murdoch symphony,
Speaker 2: the tabloid newspapers Sky after Dark, And since the late
Speaker 2: nineteen eighties, Rupert Murdoch has owned around about two thirds
Speaker 2: of the daily and Sunday newspapers in this country. Now
Speaker 2: newspapers are not as influential or as large a part
Speaker 2: of the media ecosystem these days as they were, but
Speaker 2: they all have online editions, they all have kind of
Speaker 2: reached into social media and so on, and so it
Speaker 2: fair to say that Murdoch, along with the ABC, has
Speaker 2: the biggest media footprint in the country.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's talk about some of the targets of
Speaker 1: some of these prolonged campaigns, some of whom people would remember,
Speaker 1: like Britney Higgins and Yasmin abdul Mage, Scott McIntyre. What
Speaker 1: are the stories out of all the people that you've
Speaker 1: spoken to for this book that stay with you the most.
Speaker 2: Well, the Britney Higgins story has stayed with us. I
Speaker 2: mean it has its origins back in twenty nineteen when
Speaker 2: she claimed and then was proven in a civil court
Speaker 2: to have been raped on a minister's couch in the
Speaker 2: Federal Parliament. When I say it's a complicated story, it's
Speaker 2: because it's spawned a kind of almost a cottage industry
Speaker 2: of legal actions. And what we were interested in, not
Speaker 2: to the exclusion of the other, but to investigate how
Speaker 2: one newspaper and in particular one columnist one newspaper that
Speaker 2: is The Australian. The newspaper and the columnist is Robertson,
Speaker 2: have focused inordinately on the Britney Higgins case.
Speaker 3: I think at The Australian we have done such a
Speaker 3: tremendous job of making sure that we have covered this
Speaker 3: case from just about every angle that we could, because
Speaker 3: it seemed to us that much of the media we're
Speaker 3: not interested in hearing from other women in this case,
Speaker 3: that believa all women only applied to Britney Higgins.
Speaker 2: What happens in the process, as she writes about one
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty three articles over two and a bit
Speaker 2: year period, is that most of the articles are very
Speaker 2: critical of Brittney Higgins and treat Bruce Lehman and his
Speaker 2: claims and so on very lightly.
Speaker 3: From the moment that this case started. I was never
Speaker 3: and I don't want this to sound callous, but I
Speaker 3: was never terribly interested in what happened that night. I
Speaker 3: was interested in whether there could be a fair trial.
Speaker 3: And I think the moment that it became trial by media,
Speaker 3: trial by parliament, trial by just about it every institution
Speaker 3: in this country that coalesced against the presumption of innocence,
Speaker 3: including a Prime Minister at the time who got up
Speaker 3: in Parliament and said that he was apologizing for things
Speaker 3: that had happened that night.
Speaker 2: The effect of that is to tilt the scales very
Speaker 2: heavily against Brittney Higgins and in favor of Bruce Lehman.
Speaker 2: And then at a more human level, there's a question
Speaker 2: of what impact that coverage has had on Britney Higgins.
Speaker 2: And we interviewed her partner, David Sharaz, and he told
Speaker 2: us that it has had a profound impact on her
Speaker 2: mental health. I don't think that's all that surprising. I mean,
Speaker 2: we're talking about not only the volume of articles, but
Speaker 2: you know, we're talking about front page news stories and
Speaker 2: long columns, investigations and so on.
Speaker 1: What about some of the longer term impacts on some
Speaker 1: of the other people you spoke to you, Matthew.
Speaker 2: Well, in the case of Yasmin abdul Majid, there was
Speaker 2: a period and it's died away a little bit, but
Speaker 2: not entirely, where anyone who said anything that News Corp
Speaker 2: people didn't agree with on Anzac Day got it in
Speaker 2: the net. Let's go back to this Shla Yasmin abdil Margid,
Speaker 2: I've mispronounced, but her kids.
Speaker 1: So she posts less we forget on Facebook?
Speaker 2: Can we show this again? So she posts less we
Speaker 2: forget manis Narrusiria, Palestine, kubboom.
Speaker 1: I got that one in there, all the lefty talking points.
Speaker 2: She tweeted, lest we forget, and she added she was
Speaker 2: thinking also about refugees on Manus Island and other places.
Speaker 2: A friend of hers said, oh, you know that's not
Speaker 2: going to work out. Well, it looks like you're hating
Speaker 2: on the diggers, and she said, oh, okay, I hadn't
Speaker 2: really seen it like that, but I'll take that tweet down,
Speaker 2: which she did. Didn't stop the pylon. Then she became
Speaker 2: a target, if you like, and so just about anything
Speaker 2: she did was put under the microscope.
Speaker 4: Abdil mcgid was invited to the Australian National University to
Speaker 4: discuss leadership if no, she's no leader, and she joined
Speaker 4: a panel of professors and department heads even though she
Speaker 4: herself is no academic. Again, identity politics being invaded had
Speaker 4: she not been a blacks and a woman.
Speaker 2: So she was onder Council for Australian Arab Relations, which
Speaker 2: is a government related body. She was tasked with going
Speaker 2: overseas and talking about, you know, both the virtues of
Speaker 2: democracy and trying to take that to various countries that
Speaker 2: weren't democracies in the Middle East and elsewhere. That got
Speaker 2: turned into this is a kind of a taxpayer funded
Speaker 2: jaunt where she's going to go over and spread propaganda
Speaker 2: about Islam and so on.
Speaker 5: Thousands of dollars of taxpayers money by the Department of
Speaker 5: Foreign Affairs and Julie Bishop to send her all around
Speaker 5: the Middle East to preach from her book about how
Speaker 5: wonderful Australia is to women and Muslims and a whole
Speaker 5: range of other things. She then says it's a feminist religion.
Speaker 5: She does all of this, I mean, she is absolutely
Speaker 5: without credibility.
Speaker 2: I mean, this was a very smart, energetic, vivacious vibrant
Speaker 2: young woman. She described herself as a smart mouth and
Speaker 2: a hejab. That was her phrase. Not a sin or
Speaker 2: a crime as far as as far as I can see,
Speaker 2: to be either vibrant or to express yourself fully and
Speaker 2: briskly and violently and so on. And she got the
Speaker 2: full Murdock symphony. She got it from a range of outlets,
Speaker 2: and she got pounded over a period of time, and
Speaker 2: she eventually left the country. And this happens to ordinary
Speaker 2: people as well. The worst example is the thirteen year
Speaker 2: old schoolgirl Millie Dawlo. She went missing in two thousand
Speaker 2: and two and her phone was hacked by a private
Speaker 2: investigator operating for News of the World. This was happening
Speaker 2: while her parents were absolutely devastated and desperately anxious to
Speaker 2: see whether she was alive or not, where she was
Speaker 2: and so on, And as it turns out she had
Speaker 2: been murdered during this period. At around this time, one
Speaker 2: of the senior editorial executives at the News of the World,
Speaker 2: he spelt out very clearly what the practices of the
Speaker 2: paper were at this time when he was talking to
Speaker 2: a reporter who was kind of asking questions about why
Speaker 2: he had been asked to do a particular story, this
Speaker 2: executive said, Listen, what we do is we go out
Speaker 2: and destroy people's lives. That's what we do. Be it's
Speaker 2: rare to see it all put that bluntly, but that
Speaker 2: kind of level of cruelty and disregard for other people,
Speaker 2: for other people's lives and for the effect of their
Speaker 2: coverage on other people's lives.
Speaker 1: Coming up? Can you still get murdered without Rupert? So,
Speaker 1: given the lives you've seem destroyed by this global empire
Speaker 1: which for decades has struck fear into the hearts of
Speaker 1: even the most powerful, aren't you poking the bear with
Speaker 1: this book? What makes you decide to write it? Risk
Speaker 1: the empires of rash.
Speaker 2: Look, there is a reason why a book of this
Speaker 2: kind has not been written before. There are now about
Speaker 2: nine biographies of Rupert Murdock out there probably forty other
Speaker 2: full length studies of Murdoch and News corporation. And what
Speaker 2: it does, very little of It pays attention to the
Speaker 2: effect of what the Murdoch media outlets have been doing
Speaker 2: now for seven decades plus, and as you say, across
Speaker 2: three major countries Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States,
Speaker 2: and even less attention has been paid to the impact
Speaker 2: of their murdocking as we are calling it on individuals.
Speaker 2: We were particularly concerned about the impact on ordinary people
Speaker 2: who whether it's because they have a view that doesn't
Speaker 2: line up with what news corps view is on a
Speaker 2: particular issue, who they are, that is, they might identify
Speaker 2: as a trans person, and particularly if they've identified as
Speaker 2: trans younger in their earlier years. These are people who
Speaker 2: are in a vulnerable state, and if nothing else, you
Speaker 2: would hope that the media's coverage of that issue would
Speaker 2: recognize the complexities of the issue and the sensitivities around
Speaker 2: it for both the individual and their family and others.
Speaker 2: We are not in the heads of either Rupert Murdoch
Speaker 2: or his family or his editors, so we don't know
Speaker 2: why exactly they do what they do, But consistently, going
Speaker 2: back decades now, Murdoch's media outlets have been hostile towards
Speaker 2: and targeted vulnerable and minority communities.
Speaker 1: Matthew, in the book you look at how much of
Speaker 1: this murderch culture is actually driven by Rupert Murdock himself,
Speaker 1: So can you tell us a bit more about that?
Speaker 2: It is in the sense that he has said. He
Speaker 2: said this at an annual general meeting of News Corporation
Speaker 2: in the mid ninety nineties, that the company is an
Speaker 2: expression of his views, his beliefs, his ideas, and he's
Speaker 2: proud of that. He's not kind of, you know, Lord
Speaker 2: Voldemort sitting in the corner somewhere directing every single person
Speaker 2: in that sort of way. What has happened is that
Speaker 2: over time he's moved from hiring editors some of whom
Speaker 2: disagreed with him, who he then sat, to hiring people
Speaker 2: who either agree with him already or come to agree
Speaker 2: with him. A former editor of The Sun newspaper in
Speaker 2: the UK, David Yelland, is on the record saying that
Speaker 2: as a kind of Murdoch editor, one of the things
Speaker 2: you do is you wake up in the morning and
Speaker 2: you say, what would Rupert think about that? Or what
Speaker 2: would Rupert think about this? So it's become a kind
Speaker 2: of self reinforcing company now in that sense, that doesn't
Speaker 2: mean that they're all doing everything identically. Possibly a better
Speaker 2: way to think about it is to think of News
Speaker 2: Corp As a federation in that sense, which holds together
Speaker 2: but has different kind of aspects and needs and purposes.
Speaker 1: How much has this way of doing news impacted the
Speaker 1: media landscape more broadly, do you think MESSI.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a really good question, because I think that's
Speaker 2: actually the way in which Murdoch's tabloid outlets in the
Speaker 2: UK operated, I'm talking about The Sun and the News
Speaker 2: of the World, had the effect of dragging other tabloid
Speaker 2: newspapers further down with them. And the reason that's a
Speaker 2: critical point is that they're so aggressive and they're so
Speaker 2: dogged in pursuing sensational material, often with a very cruel
Speaker 2: edge to it. I mean, the phone hacking scandal is
Speaker 2: the most egregious example of that. There's a moment that
Speaker 2: we're now living in a social media age where so
Speaker 2: much of the newspapers, as we talked about earlier, a
Speaker 2: smaller part of the media ecosystem. There was an opportunity,
Speaker 2: it seems to myself and Andrew, where Murdocks outlets could
Speaker 2: have led a some kind of more considered and purposeful
Speaker 2: and positive way of doing media in the mid two
Speaker 2: thousands to combat the kind of flood of misinformation disinformation
Speaker 2: that you see on social media, which was starting then
Speaker 2: and is now rampant. They chose not to. They chose
Speaker 2: to both perpetuate it and to be in the swill
Speaker 2: alongside it. And so there's a sort of feedback loop
Speaker 2: often between either Mrrock's media outlets put something out there
Speaker 2: which gets picked up by social media and amplified and extended,
Speaker 2: or vice versa. Some troll in social media will pick
Speaker 2: something up, say some small item about a climate scientist paper,
Speaker 2: a minor error. It'll be brought to the attention of
Speaker 2: it Andrew Bolt or someone like that, and they will
Speaker 2: then start to bloviate about it. As a result. We're
Speaker 2: in a media ecosystem now where people think about notions
Speaker 2: of whether it's balance or fairness, or simply investigating and
Speaker 2: putting out a range of perspectives on an issue as
Speaker 2: somehow quaint or old fashioned or whatever. And I'm absolutely
Speaker 2: not persuaded that it much value. Would that in fact,
Speaker 2: we need more of that and less of this kind
Speaker 2: of intense anger and rage and yelling and screaming at
Speaker 2: people on a personal basis. I don't see how that
Speaker 2: is helping us at all.
Speaker 1: I mean, are we stuck with this permanent changes part
Speaker 1: of a new outrage industry, Matthew, or is there something
Speaker 1: that can be done in a regulatory sense to stop
Speaker 1: this type of pylon, given the impacts it can have
Speaker 1: on people's lives, health, and reputations.
Speaker 2: The short answer on regulation is that there should be,
Speaker 2: but there hasn't been, and it's not for want of
Speaker 2: various people advocating for it, including myself, but also many others.
Speaker 2: It's an area where there's few votes because politicians are
Speaker 2: very wary about doing it because they don't want to
Speaker 2: upset various powerful media people. People in the media don't
Speaker 2: want you to do it because you know, at the
Speaker 2: basic level, nobody likes being regulated, nobody likes being scrutinized.
Speaker 2: But most people in their saner moments, except that some
Speaker 2: level of scrutiny and regulation is needed because that's how
Speaker 2: you make various people and institutions accountable for what they're doing.
Speaker 2: So it hasn't worked, unfortunately. I would love it if
Speaker 2: it did, but it hasn't. I think if we've got
Speaker 2: to the position we're in now, we should be able
Speaker 2: to get out of it. At least partly, though, it's
Speaker 2: got to come down to individual people actually making their
Speaker 2: views known that this is not the kind of media
Speaker 2: they want. If you're not shown other ways in which
Speaker 2: to do media, you know. I mean, I'm obviously talking
Speaker 2: to you on this podcast, and there's there are other
Speaker 2: ways of doing media than simply looking at the ABC
Speaker 2: or the Sydney Morning Herald or whatever. Then those need
Speaker 2: to grow, those need to be supported, and there is
Speaker 2: some attempts by government to do that, but it's partly
Speaker 2: at least our own responsibility to kind of make our
Speaker 2: views known. And what we hope is our book makes
Speaker 2: some kind of contribution to people being both informed about
Speaker 2: the issues, you know, debating the issues. I mean, like
Speaker 2: this book, like any other, is open to debate and
Speaker 2: argument and contest and having a proper discussion about these
Speaker 2: things rather than yelling and screaming at each other.
Speaker 1: Well, Matthew, the book is a value to contribution to
Speaker 1: a national conversation on these very important matters. And we
Speaker 1: thank you for coming on seven AM.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Also in the news, What's the Blower, David McBride has
Speaker 1: been released from a Canberra prison, granted parole after more
Speaker 1: than two years behind bars. The former Army lawyer was
Speaker 1: sentenced to five years and eight months jail for leaking
Speaker 1: the classified documents behind the Afghan files. What's exposed alleged
Speaker 1: war crimes by Australian special forces. He'll serve the rest
Speaker 1: of his state to under supervision in the community, and
Speaker 1: it's revealed he's been treated for lung cancer and will
Speaker 1: need an extended period of recovery. Thousands of high school
Speaker 1: and university students have walked out of class today protesting
Speaker 1: Pauline Hanson and One Nation. Organizers say One Nation's stance
Speaker 1: on issues like immigration, multiculturalism and student debt is harmful
Speaker 1: to young people. Politicians, including the Victorian Premier our liberal
Speaker 1: senator alexanderik have criticized the walkout, saying, Kingschen stay in school.
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel James, thanks for listening to seven AM. We'll
Speaker 1: be back tomorrow