It seems unlikely that James Murdoch’s departure from the News Corporation board will make any difference to the outlook and style of the company’s Australian newspapers or its Sky News pay TV channel.
James has been on the outer at the top of the Murdoch organisation since its UK subsidiary, News International, was disgraced in 2011 over the hacking of people’s phones. James was executive chairman of News International at the time.
The scandal not only caused Rupert Murdoch serious reputational damage, but it sank his bid to get total control of Britain’s satellite broadcaster, BSkyB. The parliamentary inquiry into the hacking found him not fit to run a major international company.
The fallout marked the end of James’s rise at News. When, in 2007, he had been made chairman of BSkyB, executive chairman of News International, and chief executive of all News Corp operations across Europe and Asia, it seemed he was being groomed to succeed Rupert.
But by the middle of 2012 it had all come crashing down. He resigned his jobs at BSkyB and News International, and was recalled to corporate headquarters in New York, retaining his position as CEO for Europe and Asia.
Two years later, the elder son, Lachlan, was appointed to sit at the right hand of the father as non-executive co-chairman of News Corp and 21st Century Fox Inc.
As early as 1998, Murdoch had announced him as the heir-apparent but in 2005 Lachlan had quit, only to now return in triumph over his younger brother.
James found himself in the humiliating position of co-chief operating officer of 21st Century Fox, reporting to Fox chief operating officer Chase Carey.
Through all these comings and goings of the boys, News Corp’s Australian media outlets carried on their strident climate-change denialism, their barracking for the conservative side of politics, their crude populism and their culture wars, in particular over Australian history.
Sky After Dark has become Fox News lite.
That tells us that whatever titles and positions are bandied about, Rupert remains in charge.
During his career at News Corp, the one major issue on which James publicly differentiated himself from Rupert and Lachlan was climate change.
In 2006, a year after the Kyoto protocol took effect, Rupert announced that James had persuaded him that anthropogenic climate change was real.
In Australia, this played out at the 2007 federal election in a shift of support to Labor by some of the News Corp media, notably the Australian, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and the Brisbane Courier-Mail.
Labor, under the leadership of Kevin Rudd, campaigned strongly on the need for action on climate change, while the Liberal-National coalition under John Howard equivocated.
This shift in editorial outlook did not last long. After the implosion of the Labor government, News Corp threw its weight exuberantly behind Tony Abbott, the man who said climate change science was “crap”.
Aside from climate change, James’s public record shows him to share important aspects of his father’s and brother’s worldview.
In 2009, he gave the James MacTaggart memorial lecture at the Edinburgh television festival, which commemorates the Scottish writer-director who died in 1974.
In it he assailed the BBC in terms similar to those with which the Murdoch media in Australia assails the ABC: that it is a state broadcaster – as opposed to a public broadcaster; that it crowds out commercial media; that it is something public money should not be wasted on, and that it is a mouthpiece of the left.
He also argued for a very materialistic concept of press freedom: that the only guarantor of press freedom was profit.
This is a perversion of fundamental media ethics. While financial independence is certainly a necessary condition for press freedom, it is only half the story.
CP Scott, as editor-proprietor of the [Manchester] Guardian, put the true position best. A newspaper has “a moral as well as a material existence”. It must make enough money to be independent, but it must also recognise it has a civic duty to provide society with reliable and impartial news.
The James Murdoch view implies that the freedom guaranteed by profit belongs to the profiteer. News Corporation operates on that principle. Freedom of the Murdoch press is the freedom to publish what the proprietor agrees with.
For proof, ask some of Rupert’s former editors: Harold Evans (the Times), Kelvin MacKenzie (the Sun), Bruce Guthrie (the Herald Sun).
James might be gone, but the family philosophy lives on.