My Life In Journalism: From Adelaide to London and New York

Fifty-two years after being sent out to buy a sandwich for his first boss, one Rupert Murdoch, when Les finally left Murdoch’s employment in 2011, the business of news had been turned upside down, in a tumble of social and technological change. Les Hinton in a former senior executive with News Corp, a journalist and author The Bootle Boy: An Untidy Life in News (Scribe, 2018). Les Hinton addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 18 July 2018

 MY LIFE IN JOURNALISM: FROM ADELAIDE TO LONDON AND NEW YORK

LES HINTON

I’m here to talk about my life in media over the last 50 years. Most of it spent working with Rupert Murdoch – the Sun King, the Dirty Digger. Call him what you want – and a lot of people do – but there is no denying that he is a colossus. Or that he will go down in history as the last great newspaper tycoon.

I bring you my story from that perspective. From the arc of journalism. From the days when our main source of news – often our only source – was newspapers. I have also managed magazines, TV and radio stations, and sundry digital enterprises – but still,

Rupert Murdoch thinks of himself in the same way, despite his numerous other interests, from Sky to Fox to Hollywood. Rupert loves the news. He loves the heat and speed and exhilaration of delivering it to millions of people.

Once upon a time, we newspapermen worked in a haze of blue smoke, amid the clatter of typewriters. When the mighty presses beneath us rolled into action, and shook our desks as if we were in the middle of an earthquake. In those days, “cut and paste” and “C.C.” were not computer commands – but involved scissors, and glue, and a long-ago thing called carbon paper. In those days, newspapers – ink smeared on crushed trees – drove the conversation of nations and set the agendas for that gimmicky new thing – television.

I was there at the height of the age of news on paper; and I was still around when dusk began to fall. As newspapers became creaking super-tankers in the new digital age, swamped in the wakes of the high-speed algorithm-fuelled speedboats of the digital age.

But this is not a story of despair. It is a story of change. Yes, newspapers are struggling through an existential disruption. But that is not a bad thing for the most important people of all – the consumers of news and information, and the enlightenment this new world promises them.

I started out in Adelaide, as a copy boy aged fifteen who had attended thirteen schools, in ten years, in eight countries, as the son of a British Army sergeant.

During this chaotic education, I developed an enthusiasm for working as a newspaper reporter. My parents thought this was a deluded ambition.

But I arrived at the offices of an evening newspaper called The News in Adelaide, and through some miracle found myself in a one-to-one interview with the editor-in-chief – Rohan Deakin Rivett. He was a brilliant man – the son of an eminent scientist, and grandson of Australia’s second prime minister, Alfred Deakin. I don’t know whether he mistook me for someone else, or simply took pity on me, but he gave me a job on the spot.

This job involved running messages, and buying sandwiches, and cigarettes. It was the lowest rung in newspapers, but it held out the hope of a cadetship – the chance to spend four years learning what it takes to become an actual journalist.

I was fifteen years and three months old – a lad with no useful education, no testimonials, or family connections, and who knew nothing about Australia – except that Don Bradman had been good at hitting cricket balls.

It was the start for me of a phenomenal life. I’m living proof that anything can happen. I am also living proof of what arriving in a land of opportunity actually means. That it was not just an idealistic cliché that Australia was a place that gave people a shot. And that included a kid who was fresh off a migrant ship.

I am totally certain that, in those days in Britain, I would never, ever have had the chance that Australia gave me.

A big part of my early fascination in newspapers was that the best papers were so powerful. Their proprietors and their editors were immensely influential. And the writers who travelled the world for them were household names. In those days, when most homes did not have television, the great foreign correspondents were – literally – the eye-witnesses for millions.

It was 1959 when Rohan Rivett gave me that job. Soon after, one morning in the reporters’ room of the Adelaide News, a plump-faced man with a cigarette gave me a ten shilling note and instructed me to buy him a ham sandwich.

“Yes, Mr Murdoch,” I said.

Rupert Murdoch was 28 years old and the Adelaide News was his only daily newspaper. For the next fifteen years, Rupert and I did not have a more elevated exchange. I remember him from those days only as an earnest head-down figure, darting through the office. But I remember very well the day in 1960 when I was organising files in Rohan Rivett’s office, and he told me excitedly: “This is a day you will remember all your life. It is the day that Rupert Murdoch stepped beyond Adelaide to begin growing a great Australian newspaper company.”he told me excitedly: “

Rupert had just bought the Sydney Daily Mirror.

I don’t think Rivett, or Rupert, could have imagined the scale of his understatement, and that the little “News” of Adelaide was the genesis of the News Corp empire that followed. But this is still May 1960. And soon after, Rohan Rivett became an early milestone in Rupert Murdoch’s career.  He became the first newspaper editor Rupert ever fired.

I don’t have the fingers to count the many who followed in Rivett’s footsteps.

My tenure with Rupert lasted rather longer than his: – 52 years to be precise. It was mostly an accidental career. My highest ambition as a youth was to become a foreign correspondent.

I devoured books about newspapers and the great press barons through history. I read about the founders of modern newspapers — Hearst, Pulitzer, Packer, Fairfax, Northcliffe, Beaverbrook. I did not find many of these men appealing. They sounded mostly brutal and difficult. I decided there and then that I would never work at close quarters with an overbearing newspaper proprietor.

Not everything works out in life. I hitched myself to the wagon train of Rupert Murdoch’s vast ambition, and ended up travelling the world for him.

I headed for London a couple of years ahead of Rupert and spent the only brief period of my career when he was not my ultimate boss. I got a job on the runt newspaper of Fleet Street. It was a broadsheet – on its last legs, losing sales and, by general consensus, doomed. It was called The Sun. And when Rupert bought The Sun, I stopped running.

One afternoon, when I had already figured the time had come to look for another job, the foreign editor looked up from a piece of news agency copy and addressed the room. “Anyone here ever heard of Rupert Murdoch?” he said.

I was the only one.

Until 1968, the name Rupert was associated by much of Britain with a talking bear in a Daily Express comic strip. Rupert Bear was a mild, eager-to-please fellow, nothing like the real-life version who was about to descend on Britain.

But the bear’s friends did appear to foretell some details of the life ahead for his namesake — there was Tigerlily, the mischievous Chinese girl, and the Fox boys, who were always causing trouble.

Perhaps the first recorded British insult thrown at Rupert was in January 1969 after he outwitted Robert Maxwell, the millionaire Labour MP, in a bitter battle to gain control of the News of the World. Rupert was smiling when he told a group of reporters: “Mr Maxwell called me a moth-eaten kangaroo.” He would be described in much, much stronger terms in the years to follow – here, in Britain, in America, and elsewhere.

Rupert Murdoch the outsider – the uppity lad from Down Under – went on in Britain to turn the sinking Sun into the biggest-selling daily newspaper in the English-speaking world. In London, he also bought the News of the World, then The Times and the Sunday Times. And, of course, as the years passed, much, much more in many other places.

In those early days, I watched it all from a distance. I was working on the road as a reporter and foreign correspondent. I covered the mean streets of Northern Ireland during the worst of the Troubles that claimed more than 3500 over 30 years; I saw the aftermath of a village massacre in Cyprus and what was the world’s worst plane crash in France, and the devastation of the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign; I went to the funeral of a Mafia godfather, covered presidential elections, and got very, very drunk with the Sex Pistols. And also with the Bee Gees. I guess that took me along the spectrum from the sourest to the sweetest of popular music in those days.

When I arrived in New York in 1976 as a foreign correspondent, America was still Rupert’s empire of dreams. He had nothing but a weekly supermarket tabloid and a couple of local newspapers in Texas. We occupied two floors of a dreary insurance company building in midtown Manhattan. There were no television stations, no big city dailies, no film studio, no magazines, and not a lot of friends.

Nor was there any contempt and obloquy, at least not yet. When his unfamiliar name occasionally appeared in the Press, it required explanation — he was “the Australian-born international publishing baron”.

But the wagon train rolled on, taking me with it, as I became an executive, to be sucked into the ever-higher reaches of his growing empire; and into the world of deep carpets and quiet offices, and away from the hurly-burly of a life on the road.

I spent 20 years in America. First, I worked with his growing group of newspapers and magazines, then I went to Hollywood and briefly to the world of television and entertainment; then back to London for twelve years to run the company’s newspaper group, where it sold one in three of the country’s national newspapers.

Then, finally, I was back in New York when Rupert achieved his long-held dream of owning the Wall Street Journal in 2007. I went from place to place, city after city, following as an adult in Rupert’s slipstream just as I had been swept along as a child by my father’s army life. It turned out that those childhood travels equipped me well for my untidy career as a nomadic adult.

But, of course, I had truly broken that promise I made to myself as a teenager – never to work with an overbearing media mogul. I was working shoulder to shoulder with the man who would become the biggest mogul of them all.

He was on the phone. He was walking into my office. He wanted breakfast with me, and dinner, and took me on long trips on his private jet and for weekends on his yacht.

I really was living in the belly of the beast. It was a hell of an exciting life. It was entertaining and fraught and exhilarating and exhausting. And I don’t regret a moment of it. But it wasn’t easy.

There was an unreliable rhythm to life with Rupert. Sometimes he called several times a day, asked you to lunch, laughed at your jokes, seemed fascinated by everything you had to say. This experience felt great, especially for newcomers and rising executives; they thought the boss had admitted them to his inner circle.

Old timers, seeing new executives dazzled by this best-friend treatment, knew they had become Rupert’s “flavour of the month”. It never lasted, because Rupert’s true best friend was always The Business. When the infatuation ebbed, the bewildered and abandoned executive agonised over what he or she might have done wrong.

But that was the way Rupert operated – and an occupational hazard of working for him. The secret was never to take it personally; he was oblivious to hurt feelings.

Maybe News Corp is a personality cult. It didn’t occur to me when I worked there, which might just be the proof that it is. Rupert’s attention was the drug of choice for some needy executives. And while he could be a tyrant at times, big business has never been short of tyrants, and not many earn the intense devotion he does.

He follows all his businesses closely. He is always ready to dive into every detail. He is a media emperor with, in many ways, the mind of a small businessman.

But it was in the world of newspapers that Rupert Murdoch truly became the master of his universe.

The special difficulty of working at his newspapers was that Rupert really did know more about the business than anyone else. He became the victorious old warrior of the newspaper world: interfering, argumentative, convinced of his point of view, and loving every detail of the job of putting out a newspaper.

He felt closest to his businesses in those places where he built them from nothing. Particularly in Australia and Britain, he felt an emotional ownership that was never quite the same elsewhere. And his charismatic authority was an actual aura in these places. Old hands were his agents, undaunted loyalists, spreading the word of their wonderful lives with Rupert, recalling small moments in his presence and seeming to feel blessed to have been victims of his ire.

They had tales of his furies and mistakes – but for them every transgression faded away in the burning light of his cleverness and energy. Like party commissars, they guarded his reputation, correcting the careless frankness of newcomers and internal dissidents.

When I contemplated writing this book, I was determined to provide my own version of the truth about him. I declined the invitation of publishers looking for another Murdoch axe job. There have been plenty of them and it also wasn’t how I felt about him.

But he has faults and I wanted to address them. This made a lot of company insiders nervous about what I might say about them, or the company. A couple of old acquaintances stopped calling. The only person I’m pretty sure didn’t worry about what I might write about him was Rupert himself.

Rupert built his empire as an outsider.  He has been a serial immigrant, travelling the world in search of a new place to be underestimated. From Adelaide to Sydney. Sydney to London. London to New York. New York to Los Angeles. And many other places around the world. He has been his own kind of revolutionary, overthrowing giants on three continents to become the biggest giant of all, an authentic colossus. But has long ago lost the underdog’s ability to surprise and subvert; the ability to be the little guy with not much to lose and so much to gain – the upstart with impossible ideas and boundless self-conviction.

I think that all his success has somehow drowned much of the original man – that he misses being a long shot. And now it seems he is to become the last, lonely titan of the newspaper world. Who would have guessed it? That the world of news, and the power of newspapers, would change so quickly?

The other great tycoons mostly faded long ago. The dynasties that began their rise before the turn of the twentieth century when high-speed printing, the first mass media, was at the frontier of information technology.

The age of the press baron has now yielded to a mightier generation of information moguls whose technology has swallowed the world and made newspapers seem puny. These pioneers – Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, the Google boys Larry and Sergey – have unleashed an infinite torrent of information and entertainment that crowd every moment of our lives and make human attention the world’s scarcest commodity.

When newspapers got around to launching websites in 1996, they had no coherent strategy to tackle what was to come. There was so little fear or understanding of the internet, they offered content free of charge, obeying the geek mantra that “information wants to be free”.

The Wall Street Journal, in an almost solitary act of sanity – long before Rupert Murdoch was its owner – made the decision to charge its users. But elsewhere, high-priced journalism – the product of generations of inherited experience and tradition – was sucked into a vast electronic maw, to be purloined and distributed to millions, unpaid and often unacknowledged.

The internet became a digital vampire, draining the lifeblood of the press and stealing its profits. Tiny start-up “news” sites and giant search engines sold low-price advertising alongside newspaper journalism they paid nothing to produce.

But the dilemma for newspapers went deeper than the decision to give its content away. Economically, a newspaper is a manufacturing and distribution business with huge fixed costs. It needs thousands of tons of paper, printing presses and buildings to house them, and fleets of trucks to distribute bundles of hard-copy news.

Newspapers were slow to react to this new world because they were in a trap.

Migrating into low-profit digital would undermine their traditional high-cost, high-profit operations; they would cannibalise themselves; and while readers and advertisers abandoned print, they would still have to carry the burden of costly printing presses and physical distribution. So, while newspapers edged along, riding two horses, hoping against reason that the threat might not be so great as they feared, freewheeling digital ate away their businesses.

A few decades ago, media was like a pyramid, with a few at the peak broadcasting to the masses beneath. But technology has turned the pyramid upside down. Now one person with a five-ounce mobile device has infinity at their fingertips. What it means is that, while this new age might be demolishing many of the businesses I grew up with, it is also creating an inestimably better-informed planet.

As a teenager in Adelaide, there were two daily newspapers, a couple of television stations each providing a total of, maybe, an hour of news a day, and local radio doing the same. Half a century later, in the same city – any city – technology offers an amount of information and variety of opinion that is virtually unquantifiable.

For all the challenges of anarchic and abusive social media; fake news; and the malign trickery of nations such as Russia – I am sure that is a good thing. The business of print might be in doubt, but meanwhile the biggest, most universal delivery system ever known is now in place, and there will always be an appetite for good writing and powerful opinions and important information. The new economics of journalism has still to be sorted, but there will always be stories to tell.

But it is undeniable that a great golden era is fading away.

And I want to say a few final words about the man who was my boss for half a century.

Rupert’s success has of course stretched far beyond print, but nothing has attracted more attention and criticism, and popularity, than his company’s journalism.

Of course, his rivals jump with glee at what they consider Rupert’s mistakes, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that. Nor has there been a shortage of mishaps to exploit during his long career.

However, I haven’t seen much comment on a recent study by the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, whose job is to monitor trends in all form of media.

It found that the most trusted newspaper in the United States was   — the Wall Street Journal.

And it found that the most trusted newspaper in the United Kingdom was The Times of London.

Both of them are, of course, two of the three flagships of Rupert’s newspaper group, the other being The Australian.

But – in the interests of balance – I must say that he could be hell to work for — and 60 years of success and tough tactics have yielded for him a bitter harvest of enemies.

As a boss, he could be hands-off or autocratic, charming or irascible, forgiving or fierce, and sometimes just a comprehensive pain.

But he also imbued his companies with a fantastic sense of possibility — and he got big results.

And in my view the image of Rupert Murdoch in the minds of his most bitter enemies is a kind of hallucination, a virtual devil, a crowd-sourced apparition created to be the object of all their rage and grief about big business, great power, global inequity, and everything else they see wrong with the world.

But for all his triumphs and disasters there is an overwhelming case that he has made an immensely positive contribution to the world of media.

And that for all his globe-trotting life, he remains a proud son of Australia and, someone this country can be proud of.