Anyone wanting a primer on the Murdochian school of newspaper ethics - and a hint as to how and why the News of the World has so spectacularly come to grief - could do a lot worse than read Bruce Guthrie's entertaining and revealing account of life with and without Rupert. It is titled Man Bites Murdoch.
Mr Guthrie has held more executive positions, including a clutch of editorships, in Australian journalism than you can poke a stick at. The book, while detailing his career and taking readers on an insider's tour through the highways and byways of modern newspaper life, is also an account of how, when summarily sacked as editor of News Ltd's Melbourne daily the Herald Sun in 2008, he took the organisation to court and won.
But returning to page 89 of his story ... Here the narrative describes a session at a News Corporation conference, in Aspen, Colorado, in June 1988.
I'll let him take up the story.
"First up was Tom Petrie, veteran news editor of The Sun in London ... Petrie had been news editor of The Sun for eight years and boldly boasted: 'We don't report the news, we make it.' His presentation was wildly entertaining with its stories of chequebook journalism, general skulduggery and, ultimately, 'heavy lifting' of rival papers' stories if they were unable to match them. For anyone who took journalism seriously it was appalling.
"In one of the more serious misjudgments of my career, I decided to wade into this morass of Sun exaggeration, invention and character assassination ...
"'Tom,' I said. 'Do you have any ethical framework at all at the London Sun?"'
With the mention of ethics and The Sun in the same breath, the assembled, writes Mr Guthrie, fell about in "shouts of derision, raucous laughter and general hysteria".
Rupert Murdoch, having defended stories of his London tabloids, later commented to his top Australian lieutenant Ken Cowley, "I see we have a Fairfax wanker in our midst" - referring to Mr Guthrie.
This scene is a perfect example of how media organisations develop a "culture" - and of how that culture is perpetuated and reinforced.
Unfortunately, this process can inculcate "group-think", a culture of compliance that begins in the attitudes of those at the top and works its way down. Those who fail to adapt to the mores of the company fall by the wayside. Those who challenge it outright are sacked or shunted so far sideways they wish they had been.
In the business of news, eliminating the individual conscience and discouraging a range of views can give rise to dangerously narrow attitudes and - as we now see from unfolding events in London - illegal practices.
The phone-hacking scandal engulfing not only the News of the World - the Sunday tabloid sister paper to The Sun - but the entire political-media environment in the United Kingdom, may be breathtakingly "disgusting" to some, including British Prime Minister David Cameron who hired the disgraced former editor of the NOTW Andy Coulson as his PR guru, but it should not come as any real surprise.
Unethical and deceitful methods have, as Mr Guthrie's episode reveals, been part of the stock-in-trade of Mr Murdoch's British "red tops" for more than two decades. At the heart of this has been a cavalier disregard, even contempt, for an ethics-based approach to "the fourth estate" - an approach evidently adopted only by "wankers" and losers.
The laissez faire, anything goes as long as it sells more papers, approach to journalism as exemplified by the NOTW is, of course, not only distasteful and sometimes obscene (witness the hacking of murdered British schoolgirl Milly Dowler's cellphone), but ultimately is destructive of the entire media project in Western liberal democracies.
That is, by reporting legitimately and responsibly on all aspects of social, cultural, commercial and political life in a society, rendering their workings transparent, media engender confidence in democratic processes.
Newspapers, and other media, are businesses and must make profits to survive and prosper. But when they jettison the responsibilities that come with the impulse to bolster the bottom line, arguably they forfeit some of the statutory information-gathering privileges they enjoy. And when they do that, it is usually because the corporate culture surrounding them either encourages or condones it.
It beggars belief that top News Corporation executives can now stand with their hands on hearts and say the endemic perfidy daily being revealed at the heart of the company's London empire was the work of a few isolated rogue operators.
Equally, that anyone should be fooled the closure of the News of the World is anything other than a calculated - and likely temporary - gambit to salvage Mr Murdoch's bid for monopoly ownership of British satellite network BSkyB.
- Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) of the Otago Daily Times. In the late '80s and early '90s he worked in London for Robert Maxwell's tabloid Sunday Mirror, and national UK daily broadsheet The Independent, and from 1994-2002 the Murdoch-controlled The Press in Christchurch. His play The Truth Game, set against a backdrop of the crises in modern journalism, runs at Dunedin's Fortune Theatre from October 7-29.
