The tables turned in 1995, when upstart opposition leader Tony Blair flew to Australia to court Mr. Murdoch, successfully winning the permanent support of the Sun and the Times, in exchange for more favours. Insiders felt, by this point, that politics had become a full-time matter of avoiding the wrath of the Murdoch press.
“No big decision could ever be made inside Number 10 [Downing St.] without taking account of the likely reaction of three men – Gordon Brown, [deputy PM] John Prescott and Rupert Murdoch,” Lance Price, who was Tony Blair’s media guru in those years, recently wrote. “On all the really big decisions, anybody else could safely be ignored”
Mr. Prescott conceded on Wednesday night that the media baron had become a bigger figure than many cabinet ministers. “I think there’s been a lot of cozying up by all the political parties to Murdoch,” he told BBC’s Newsnight. “I used to complain about it all the time.”
The News of the World’s excesses – which seemingly included listening to the private mobile phone messages of the police officers responsible for investigating the paper, and paying very large cash sums to other police in exchange for access to phones of the famous – are largely non-political, although they did involve phone-hacking acts that exposed the fine details of the sex lives of a dozen cabinet ministers, including Mr. Prescott.
And the effect will surely be political. In the past, the party in power always took great care to avoid angering the Murdoch papers, and the opposition tended to walk gently, too. Now Labour is outraged, and many Tories – including, reluctantly, Mr. Cameron himself – have joined the chorus. Mr. Murdoch’s ongoing application to buy up the remaining 60-per-cent share of his SkyTV empire could be jeopardized. His newspapers are likely to face far tighter monitoring and possibly regulation, and the ties between parties and the tabloids cannot but weaken.
Guardian parliamentary sketch writer Simon Hoggart wrote that Mr. Murdoch “has crossed a line and MPs feel, like political prisoners after a tyrant has been condemned to death by a people’s tribunal, that they are at last free.” That tribunal hasn’t happened yet, and nobody knows how many more victims will be found. But there is a real sense that the era of printing-press politics is rolling to an end.
Bad news for News of the World
The business behind the tabloid
The British public’s outrage at the current phone-hacking scandal is perhaps matched by its historical appetite for tabloid journalism. News of the World is a (chipped and scratched) jewel in the crown of News Corp.’s British publisher, News International. According to the most recent stats for the month of May, it is the largest-circulation Sunday newspaper in the Britain, with a circulation of 2.66 million. But its circulation is falling – having dipped below three million in 2009, for the first time in almost 47 years. And parent company News Corp. reported in May that declining ad sales in Britain – along with litigation costs, of course – were a major factor in pushing down profits in its publishing business for the first three months of this year. Earlier this year, News International kicked off a three-year internal review that includes considering how to cut costs. Last week, the company announced that it would pool its editorial resources for News of the World and its weekday sister publication, the Sun, and chief executive Rebekah Brooks told all New International employees that there are job cuts to come.
The advertising backlash
