The Men Who Killed the News & Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied

Tuesday, 12 November 2024

◄ Eric Beecher’s The Men Who Killed the News

Eric Beecher is the principal owner of Private Media which publishes the daily Australian online newsletter Crikey. In June 2022 Crikey suggested that Murdoch hands weren’t so clean when it came to Trump supporters making their US Capitol attack in 2021. Lachlan Murdoch took this personally, threatened to sue Crikey and finally, after Crikey put an ad in the New York Times essentially saying ‘see you in court,’ did sue. But then, in the USA in April 2023, Murdoch’s Fox News paid out US$787.5 million to shut down a case brought against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems. Fox had claimed that their voting machines were rigged during the 2020 election, when Fox clearly knew they were not. This loss prompted Lachlan to cancel the case against Crikey and pay their A$1.3 million legal costs.

So Eric Beecher obviously has history with the Murdoch organization – News Corp, Fox News and assorted Murdochs, but particularly Lachlan and his dad, Rupert. The Murdochs are just one media mogul name in ‘The Inside Story of how Media Moguls Abused their Power, Manipulated the Truth and Distorted Democracy.’ It’s not a pretty picture and assorted villains feature on the front cover – Robert Maxwell (who fell or jumped, but probably was not pushed to his drowning death off his superyacht near the Canary Islands as the authorities circled in on him), Elon Musk (certainly the media villain of the moment), Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch (definitely Eric Beecher’s two favourite media villains) and Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken, owner of the Daily Express when it was ‘the most successful mass-circulation newspaper in the world.’)

There are plenty of other colourful characters – good and bad – to strut across the pages including Silvio Berlusconi, Jeff Bezos, Conrad Black (he had a spell in prison for his media activities), William Randolph Hearst (yes Citizen Kane features), Henry Luce (Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated – not many copies of them around today?), Joseph Pulitzer (the Pulitzer Prize), Mark Zuckerberg and many others.

◄ Claud Cockburn’s Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied

Subtitled ‘Claud Cockburn & the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism’ it’s written by his son Patrick Cockburn and this is without doubt a man long overdue for a good biography. Apart from that great book title quote he also came up with ‘The Cliveden Set’ to define the aristocratic Astor family who he accused of being Hitler appeasers in the run up to WW II. Much later he would also report that ‘Wherever there is a stink in international affairs, you will find that Henry Kissinger has recently visited.’

Claud Cockburn was a journalist for The Times of London, based in Berlin as thing started to go disastrously wrong in Europe in the inter-war years. He was also with The Times in the USA when the stock market crashed, so if the world was going wrong then he was inevitably there to see it happen. In fact he was so convinced that the world was running off the rails and that the media giants were not shouting loudly that it was all heading towards disaster that he quit The Times, decided he was a Communist (because nobody else was complaining) and set up The Week to proclaim the bad news which big media was ignoring. The Week never sold many copies, but it’s clear that lots of important people paid a great deal of attention to his mimeographed paper’s ‘canary in a coal mine’ warnings. And yes indeed Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and 1930s attitudes did indeed lead to disaster.

Patrick Cockburn concludes with a caution that his father Claud’s warnings are equally important today. In the 2020s we are right back to the same authoritarian/populist situation as in the 1930s when Claud Cockburn had his great awakening. Reviews in The New York Times, in The Tablet or particularly in The Guardian underline the importance of his conclusions today. I raced through to the end of the book to finish it before the 2024 US election.

Claud Cockburn and his guerrilla journalism never make an appearance in Eric Beecher’s book even though Cockburn’s mimeographed The Week might be compared to Beecher’s internet Crikey. But Eric Beecher’s book is generally about media behaving badly, Cockburn was often trying to prove that media could be sending out the right messages. He may have often (most of the time in fact) been penniless, but Cockburn definitely lead an extraordinarily interesting life and if there was anybody worth meeting you could almost be certain that he met them.

More good journalism? Well you wouldn’t say Wikipedia is a media source, but it’s certainly a wonderful source of accurate information, I’m a great believer in Wikipedia. If journalism is all about investigation and telling the truth then Bellingcat has to be approved of. The fact they they so often expose Vladimir Putin for the despicable dictator he is, has to be a good thing. From shooting down Malaysian flight MH17, to poisoning people in Salisbury, England or committing yet another outrage in Ukraine the Putin horror stories are regularly and accurately reported by Bellingcat.