books

The Men Who Killed the News

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

This book by Eric Beecher is long -or it seems long – and it may not tell us much that is new – but we should read it.  I may have missed it, but the subtitle could be the aphorism ‘Power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.’

We get all the moguls.  They are devoid or style and humanity.  They are in it for power – bought with money.  The main villain is of course Rupert Murdoch – and the book makes it clear that he could not give a bugger. 

It also makes it clear that things could get worse under the presently nominated successor, Lachlan Murdoch.  If his action against Crikey is any indication, Lachlan has no judgment at all.  In a lifetime in the law, much of it involving the press, I have never seen anything like it.

His sad case raises another point.  None of these moguls shows any sign of contentment.  If life involves the pursuit of happiness, each is a pathetic failure.  And that goes for those who kowtow to them.  I have no idea what it may have been like to work in an Ottoman harem, or Oriental knock shop under the Red Guards, but that is how the well-paid tributaries of Rupert and Sons look to me. 

Rupert is just frankly vicious.  He knows no other way.  And he doesn’t even look like leaving us soon.  He may have time to claim the record of Henry VIII as a retail terminator of his wives – although not even Harry – what an awful rock to build a church on – could do so by email.  When Rupert goes, there will be a massive funeral, but not one mourner.  The damage he has wrought to the governance of Australia and the U S is beyond assessment.

As is the damage he has done to the profession of journalism – that he has devoted his life to perverting.  People in a profession do so as a vocation that serves a public purpose.  The public need for the functions of journalists is as clear as that for doctors and lawyers.  All of them have to put food on the table, but when money becomes paramount, as it does in the Murdoch world, professionalism goes clean out the window, and you are left with tits, lies, and downright hit jobs.

One chapter is called ‘Give ‘em what they want.’  There is a remarkable resemblance between the moguls and people like Trump, Boris, Farage, and now Musk.  They know how to fish the gutter – the contents of which they regard with contempt.  And the people so hooked think it is Christmas – so that the working people of the U S thought they may be better off under a government of billionaire egomaniacs.

All this is so cold that Michael Corleone could have blushed when he replayed the primal sin of murdering a brother.  Rupert sacked the guy who published the Hitler diaries after he, Rupert, had personally ordered their publication – the sort of thing Hitler avoided – and as the truth came out, said ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained – after all, we are in the entertainment business.’  (The German victim at Stern said ‘I couldn’t believe that anyone would have gone to the trouble of forging something so banal.’  That brought to mind Hannah Arendt, and my reaction to scammers posing as bankers – they were so banal, they had to be real.)

And when Rupert said ‘this is the most humble day of my life’, he butchered the language, but he was humiliated because he was caught with his hands in the till.  As was everyone at Fox when they were caught despising Trump.

And in the course of my legal practice, I have seen with my own eyes people very high up in the Melbourne community quail at the prospect of Rupert coming after them.

Mr Beecher quotes a remark of Edmund Burke I could not recall- ‘the world is governed by go-betweens’.  That is so true – and so many wheedling ratbags.  And the press is forever in danger of joining the swill.  It is very sad, because public trust is evaporating in almost every aspect of our communal life. 

Possibly the most potent quote comes at the start – from Janet Malcolm, who is about as respectable as you can get on this subject.

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows what he is doing is morally indefensible.  He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust, and betraying them without remorse. 

Mr Beecham says: Journalism is by nature an exercise in manipulation. 

Well, so in some ways are those who practise medicine or the law.  But the problem for journalists is that they have to spend so much time in dealing with people in politicsor business who are on the make.  And manipulators work on manipulators and whole industries evolve to murder the very idea of truth and to salute evasion.  And they do for lucre, the potential pollutant of every profession.

And then along came AI.  Can anyone trust anyone now?  Mr Beecher concludes by saying that ‘he never imagined that the intervention of machines, controlled by another group of human beings behaving badly, could usurp the moguls and make things worse.’

Perhaps I should insert a form of disclaimer.  In my time in the law I acted for and against the press and have a settled view on where the power lies, but in dealing with journalists on a daily basis about issues I was involved in, I had hardly ever any complaint about dealing with them in confidence.  Which is more than I could say for my lot.

Finally.  I have very much enjoyed many summer schools at Oxford and Cambridge, but those drongoes at Oxford who established the Rupert Murdoch Chair in Communications should be utterly ashamed of themselves.  Alan Bennett said: ‘If the University thinks it’s appropriate to take Rupert Murdoch’s money, perhaps they ought to approach Saddam Hussein to found a chair in peace studies.’ 

Or they could cross the channel to see the sluts in white boots at Pigalle.

Some pairs in King Lear

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Two old men, King Lear and the Earl of Gloucester (or Gloster), drive a theme with two plot-lines.  They are both now past it, and they are out of touch with the next generation – which in their case contains predators to whom they are vulnerable.  They respond by casting out the innocent child.  If Hamlet is about angry young men, King Lear is about angry old men.

Two sisters compete for nastiness.  ‘Tigers, not daughters.’  Bradley looks to give the palm to Regan – notwithstanding that Goneril murders her, and offers to give the same medicine to her own husband in order to make room in her bed for the bastard.  Bradley remarked that Regan had ‘much less force, courage and initiative than her sister, and for that reason is less formidable and more loathsome.’  Tales of evil sisters have a long history, but these too are hard to beat.  When Regan says she is sick, Goneril, the poisoner, says, aside: ‘If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.’  The humour is very black and morbid at the end.  But Regan does have ‘Let him smell his way to Dover.’  And that is pure evil.  Perhaps Bradley had in mind that being weaker, and second in line, Regan was the crueller bully when she got her chance.

Two sons, and brothers of sorts, are very different.  The bastard lives up to the argot in his title.  Gloster’s legitimate son, Edgar, is very hardly done by, but he finishes in triumph, while taking out the bastard, and coming into power.

The two husbands of the evil sisters fall out almost immediately, we are told.  Cornwall is the archetypal villain.  Albany comes fully to understand his folly in marrying Goneril.  Cornwall gets his due from a servant – exquisite irony.  Albany is set to retire hurt.  He was not built for this sort of game.

Two members of the aristocracy – two nobles, if you prefer –react in their own way to events above them.  Kent is nothing if not forthright – and he is ferociously loyal.  He is the first out of the family to feel the wrath of the king in his descent into madness.  Gloster is appalled at what is happening, but he plays the role of the dutiful courtier.  But when civil war is started, he has to take sides, and he pays the ultimate price in the cruellest scene of this playwright outside of Titus Andronicus.

The two French wooers of Cordelia are very different.  Burgundy is naturally unsettled that the offer of wealth has been withdrawn by a cranky king of perfidious Albion.  (He takes the Macron view of commerce.)  France is curious and big hearted – but at the end, he picks a bad time to have an alternative engagement, and his wife is murdered.

Two victims stand out because they are effectively disinherited for no good reason – Cordelia and Edgar.  Cordelia is the victim of her father’s hot blood, and the evil of her sisters.  Edgar is the victim of the evil of his sibling, and the pompous rashness of his father.  Gloster commits what might be called the Othello mistake – he convicts a loved one without hearing from him first.  (The mechanics of the two frauds are very similar.)  By contrast, Lear puts some kind of test to his daughter, and then snaps when she refuses to play the game.  There is thus a symmetry of evil and rashness in the story of two of the principal victims.

Two characters are sacrificed because they are simply not up to it.  Neither Gloster nor Albany is set in anything like the heroic mould.  They are courtiers who make up the numbers and who become collateral damage.  Albany survives, but his interest in ruling has died, and it will be a while before he thinks of marrying again.  One such ‘interlude’ is enough.

Two characters are cracked in the head – the Fool by nature, and Poor Tom by design.  The first adds to the theatre; Poor Tom does not do that – at least for most audiences today.

Two are there to meet in a fight, like that at the OK corral – Edgar and Oswald.  And each is up for it.  But Kent was the more natural antagonist: ‘His [Oswald’s] countenance likes me not.’   On this form, he could become an honorary member of the Marylebone Cricket Club. 

(The spray that Kent gives Oswald at 2.2.14ff could excite the jealousy of the coach of Melbourne Storm.  He is justly famous for his sprays of his manly entourage.  One of the milder forms of abuse of Kent for Oswald is ‘the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.’  Speaking of Melbourne Storm and rugby league – which is not the upper-class version of rugby – at their first meeting, Kent labelled Oswald ‘you base football player.’  The Everyman annotation reads: ‘a low game played by idle boys to the scandal of sensible men.’  The football reference makes dating the action in the play even more difficult, but the analogy is now complete.  This play is about the heaviest of this playwright on the stage.  Kent on Oswald is the play’s one belly laugh, and it should be played for all it is worth – otherwise the audience, too, might go mad.)

And there is something of the mathematics of the western in the fugue of the finale – two of the black hats get taken out by two of the white hats. 

And, finally, there is also an element of Greek tragedy.  Lear, Gloster, and to some extent Albany, are cleansed and enlightened by their suffering – Bradley says ‘purified.’  Which is what members of the audience might aspire to as the curtain comes down, and they go out to face the world.

The purpose of the play is to answer the question: ‘Is man no more than this?’  For that purpose, we the audience take upon ourselves the mystery of things, ‘as if we were God’s spies.’  And the answer is that all that stands between us and the primal slime is about as strong as a Tallyho cigarette paper.  That is why the study of evil in the theatre of the grotesque of the ages in King Lear is seen as this author’s greatest work.

Shakespeare – theatre – drama.