Australian editor and media owner Eric Beecher. Photo: supplied
The enormous power wielded by media moguls is a loophole in our democracies, an Australian editor and media owner says.
Eric Beecher saw this first-hand when he was hired by Rupert Murdoch to edit Melbourne newspaper The Herald.
Years later Beecher, now publisher of Crikey, was sued for defamation by Lachlan Murdoch - who ultimately dropped the case.
His book is The Men Who Killed the News: The inside story of how media moguls abused their power, manipulated the truth, and distorted democracy.
The first thing he noticed was what he calls Murdoch's "presence of power".
"I remember once he came back for a federal election in Australia, the prime minister at the time was Bob Hawke, a well-known Australian prime minister.
"Murdoch had had a good relationship with Hawke, even though their political views were on different sides of the fence."
Hawke had been putting calls through to Murdoch, he said.
"Murdoch wasn't taking his calls and Rupert said to me 'Do I really need to talk to Hawke'?"
The separation of power between editorial and commercial was also at times decidedly blurred, he told RNZ's Nine to Noon.
"My phone rang one morning, and it was Ken Cowley, who was the managing director of News Corp in Australia. He had just received the previous day's copy of my paper… and he started screaming at me, which was very unusual. He was normally very calm and placid."
The front page carried an international story about a plane disaster, he said.
"A jumbo jet had crashed in Taiwan and killed 200 people. It was a news story. It was a news story breaking in our time zone.
"News Corp owned half of one of Australia's domestic airlines, Ansett, and he shouted at me 'Don't you know we don't put plane crashes on our front pages? We own half an airline'."
The book looks at what he calls "the shadow of power" through history.
"The shadow of power exists where you can't see it. The public particularly can't see it, but it's very, very present in our democracy and I think is a real danger to our democracy at times."
Beecher said the all-powerful media baron was not new. These people exploited a "loophole in democracy".
"Most European democracies have free press protections in their constitutions. In New Zealand and Australia and UK it's not quite as explicit, but it's practised in that way, and so it's what I call the protected species of democracy.
"And yet, on the other side, there is basically no ethical, moral or societal responsibility for the owners of that press to behave in a way that the owners or the practitioners of the law or medicine or other professions have to behave - none at all, it's all just self-regulation."
Now a new breed of media owner with a difference wields greater power, he said.
"What [Elon] Musk and [Mark Zuckerberg] have in common is they don't employ journalists, they don't employ editors, they don't create their own content.
"They are platforms and conduits of other people's content, which means the amount of content is just unbelievable and largely uncontrolled."
He believes there is a model for independent, privately owned media, but it will occupy niches.
"The New York Times, which is controlled by the Ochs Sulzberger family, and has been for a century or so, is a working example of ethical professional journalism that is profitable.
"It doesn't make anywhere near as much money as Fox News, but it's found the right formula for digital journalism."
