Culture:
Rupert Murdoch and the Death of Trust
The recent ‘hackgate’ scandal brought a media tycoon
to his knees, and made a society ask, who can we trust?
Martin Saunders considers how we as a Church can
bring Jesus to a world that has lost faith in everything...
It was supposed to be silly season.
With Parliament in recess, all we
were really expecting from news
editors was a series of stories about
how hot/cold/rainy/muggy it was
compared to last year, and maybe a
few ‘chaos on the roads’ front pages
as schools broke up and everyone
made a dash for Heathrow.
How wrong we were. When it
was revealed that
The News of the
World had hacked the voicemail
of Milly Dowler, society found a
moral baseline it could universally
agree on. Hacking the phones of
criminals was one thing, the public
cried, doing the same to those of
murdered schoolgirls was quite
another.
Where public opinion led,
advertisers followed, and within
days,
The News of the World
– formerly the UK’s most-read
newspaper – was shut down. The
casualties didn’t end there. Major
figures in the police force, including
Metropolitan Police Commissioner
Sir Paul Stephenson, left their jobs,
whistleblower Sean Hoare was
found dead, Rupert Murdoch’s
trusted lieutenant Rebekah Brooks
fell on her sword. As the list of
people who suspected they had been
hacked grew, so too did the list of
those suspected guilty of enabling it
to take place. Eventually, inevitably,
it went right to the top.
Who can we trust?
The term ‘Media Tycoon’ is too
cheap for Rupert Murdoch. His is
an empire to make ancient Rome
wince. The man has even had a
Bond villain based on him.
Yet in July, we watched agog
as he was hauled before a panel of
British MPs. Looking every one of
his 80 years, he fumbled and paused
(some claim, very deliberately) as
politicians from across the party
divides cross-examined him. At
times, it felt less like the culture
select committee, and more like
the trial of a serial
killer. And then,
in an even more
peculiar turn, the
defining image of
‘hackgate’ became
the most powerful
man in the media
with a custard pie
dripping down
his face. A picture
not only of how
the mighty were
fallen, but also of
how the public’s
trust in Murdoch’s
empire had utterly
disintegrated.
It didn’t stop there. A
Channel 4
Dispatches
documentary at the end of the
month revealed compelling
evidence that successive Prime
Ministers had allowed Murdoch
the sort of influence over policy
that makes a mockery of the
democratic process, and again
leaves the public’s collective
head spinning with questions.
The programme confirmed
the worse cynic’s fears. It
documented a pre-Prime
Ministerial Tony Blair’s trip to
a News Corp conference on the
other side of the globe, and how
News International switched its
titles to Labour just days later. It
detailed Murdoch’s
frequent back-door
appearances at 10
Downing Street,
and unreported
meetings at
Chequers.
It provided
compelling
evidence that
many of the
major policy
decisions over
the last 20 years
– not least the
Allied invasion
of Iraq – were significantly
influenced by Murdoch and his
organisation. And while it has
been hard not to enjoy seeing
some of these revelations come
to light, it’s now time to take
a step back and ask the same
question that is on the lips of
an entire society.
Who now can we
trust?
In the last,
extraordinary
decade, every
institutional basis
for public trust
has been shaken
and damaged.
The attack on
the Twin Towers,
and closer to
home the 7/7
bombings, caused
our air of Western
invincibility
to evaporate; the actions of
fundamentalists and abusers
have degraded organised
religion and played into the
hands of answerless atheists.
Even the press, which was
once the medium through
which institutional Britain was
critiqued and scrutinised, has
become an institution in itself,
and a corrupted one at that.
The postmodern dream is fully
realised; the age of the trusted
institution is over.
The questions for the
Church are many. How do
we, as perhaps the most
institutionalised organisation
of the lot, gain the trust of a
disillusioned public? How much
of our baggage do we need to
leave behind if
we’re going to
engage with a
badly burned
culture? How do
we bring Jesus
to a world that
has lost faith
in absolutely
everything?
Check out Martin's Five moments,
here
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