Murdoch Derangement Syndrome
Published in: Melanie's blog
Not since the death of Princess Diana has there been a Robespierrian moment like this one. In the space of just over a week, what started as a scandal over alleged criminality and corruption involving the News of the World and the Metropolitan Police (where I have always thought the really important scandal lies; more on this later) has developed the kind of insurrectionary frisson that we last saw in the wake of Diana’s death in a car crash, when for a moment the monarchy itself seemed to be in danger at the hands of those who believed the Royal Family had effectively (and in the minds of not a few conspiracy nuts, actually) killed her.
This time round, the frenzied mob consists not of the public but members of Parliament, the BBC and the left-wing media baying for the blood of Rupert Murdoch. That difference aside, the similarities with the Great Diana Derangement are very striking. It’s not just the hysterical delirium, the loss of proportion and rationality in depicting Murdoch as a figure of diabolical power – of which Gordon Brown’s speech to Parliament, as deludedly selective as it was viciously enraged, was an all-too apt encapsulation rather than the weird aberration that it has been painted.
No, the really striking similarity with Diana Derangement is the toxic combination of the cult of the victim, mass credulity and pathological projection and displacement neurosis that is fuelling the frenzy.
After all, no-one cared when it was only celebrities who were thought to be in the frame. The explosion was detonated only when it was revealed that the News of the World hacked or ‘blagged’ the voicemail of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. That was indeed awful, not least because it cruelly raised her family’s hopes that she was still alive.
But since then, it has almost seemed as if someone was methodically and cynically going through a list of the most emotive targets possible for the demon hackers of Wapping – families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown’s sick child (though the Sun has pretty convincingly demonstrated that that one was a lie; whoops!), the victims of the London 7/7 bombings and now even the 9/11 victims in the US. The felling of Murdoch is the moment when victim culture was armed with rocket launchers.
Credulity because the hysteria is being ratcheted up with every fresh allegation regardless of whether or not it is true (see again Gordon Brown’s sick child, for example). People are waving their fists with every claim -- which they know must be true purely because they want to believe whatever fits their own prejudices. And so the irony is that they are assuming that what the media is claiming is by definition what actually happened -- just as they believed the myth of Diana and the alleged flinty-heartedness of the Royals that she had managed to convey through her manipulation of the media, that very same media whose collective neck the mob now want to place on the block.
As for psychological projection and displacement neurosis, this is on an epic scale. Murdoch is being treated with an infinitely greater degree of fury than, say, war criminals on trial at The Hague. Yet he has actually done good things for the media, as William Shawcross has bravely pointed out in the Spectator.
For sure, if the allegations against his organisation are true then it did very bad things too, and he must take the rap for that. But for heaven’s sake, many other newspapers -- including some which are currently burnishing their haloes -- have done similar things. The hypocrisy and humbug here are really quite staggering. It will be interesting to see if Lord Justice Leveson, who has been entrusted with the judicial task of cleansing the Augean media stables, lists all those newspapers and journalists who have made use of private investigators who employed dubious or illegal means to obtain information.
For many MPs, of course, this is actually payback time against the whole of the media for having exposed their institutionalised corruption over stealing large amounts of public money through the expenses scandal. But Murdoch’s real crime, and the real reason for the hypocrisy and double standards, is not that he may have presided over criminality or corruption, to which MPs are hardly strangers.
No, Murdoch’s real crime is to have exercised power at all. Just look at them, these MPs working themselves up into a tsunami of sanctimony – treacherous, unprincipled, dishonest, corrupt and above all powerless, as they suck up to party patronage and thus surrender the powers that reside in Parliament to curtail the government of the day, and even surrender the powers of self-government of the nation itself with their supine acquiescence to the EU.
And so because Murdoch does possess power, these powerless MPs invest him with truly demonic qualities. Thus the pathetic Ed Miliband tells the Spectator that Murdoch’s ‘spell’ is now broken. His spell? You’d think this sorcerer personally had lobotomised half the country and conjured away the free will of the rest. Those politicians who fawned on him chose to do so. And they fawn on other powerful media figures too. Didn’t David Cameron remake the Conservatives, after all, as ‘not-the-nasty-party’ in order to neutralise the BBC and the Guardian?
Similarly, Murdoch has been blamed for driving down standards throughout the rest of the media. But no-one forced those papers to spiral down-market and pander to the cult of celebrity. That cult most certainly was not the work of Murdoch alone but derives from a profound cultural malaise, a shallowness and narcissism rooted in a loss of certain essential values. I recall when in the eighties the Guardian introduced what I considered to be malicious trivia in its new section, G2. I thought that was a shocking repudiation of the journalistic values in which I had been trained. But the prevailing view was that it was a work of genius because it so perfectly caught the zeitgeist-- and its prime architect was a gifted chap by the name of Rusbridger, who went on to become the paper’s editor. Was that Murdoch’s doing? Hardly.
In other words, this is all classic displacement activity -- blaming a scapegoat for things you yourself have done or characteristics of which you yourself are ashamed. Britain is currently going down with all hands – loss of self-government to Europe, collapse of belief in itself as a nation, destruction of education standards, implosion of family life, loss of moral compass over dependency and victim culture, and so on.
The left hate Murdoch because he alone managed to thwart its hegemony over western culture and its agenda to undermine it. Maybe he has been a source of corruption in public life. If so, all responsible should be brought heavily to book. But the corruption goes far wider and deeper. It is a culture that has rotted from the inside out, and the Murdoch empire was merely a scavenger on the carcass. The frenzy against him is the rage of Caliban at his own reflection.
