Yahoo News The Rise Of The Murdoch Dynasty: A portrait of Murdoch’s enigmatic influence on Tony Blair and Brexit
It’s a tricky business, trying to understand someone as publicity-shy as media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
He is, this documentary asserts in its opening frames, an enigma. Tricky word, enigma. When it doesn’t refer to a code-cracking war machine, it usually means something that is both alluring and indistinct, and not in the business of explaining itself. As the comedian Larry David once noted: “I’m a walking, talking enigma. We’re a dying breed.”
So is enigma just another word for quiet fame, and a bit of attention to its attendant craft, reputation management? There are a couple of moments in the first episode (of three) of this documentary which support the notion.
One comes near the end, where Murdoch has surprised everyone by marrying Wendi Deng, and the pair of them are being interviewed. Murdoch is playful and transparently happy. Deng is pregnant, which is a significant moment in a story framed as a succession drama. (Deng is “a bomb inside the family”, the voiceover asserts, with scant evidence).
What happens is that Murdoch radiates contentment, and Deng looks towards him, as if to share the moment. The enigmatic mogul chides her gently, reminding her to face the camera; advising his wife that she will need to learn to act the part.
The second moment involves the enigmatic populist Nigel Farage. He bravely overcomes his camera shyness to deliver an opinion about the influence of Rupert Murdoch on the Tony Blair government. The background to this is an opinion column in The News Of The World, credited to the Prime Minister, in which Blair’s people have allegedly acceded to the paper’s demand that a line should be added in which TB asserts that Britain will not join the euro without a referendum.
The headline is “My Love For £: Exclusive By Tony Blair.” Farage asserts that Britain would have joined the euro if “Rupert” hadn’t intervened, “and I doubt Brexit would have happened”.
Interview over, the camera keeps rolling, and Farage confesses he asked Murdoch before consenting to the interview. “Historically, some of this stuff is really important.” Why does he say this on camera? We can only speculate, but the desire to show he is in touch with Murdoch may be part of it. It places Farage a little closer to the heat source than some of the Murdoch survivors, whose reliability and insight is based on the opposite impulse: they were fired.
But how true is Farage’s assertion anyway? Britain didn’t join the euro, and there wasn’t a vote on the subject. The influence on Brexit centres on the principle of a referendum, which becomes significant when amplified by a full squadron of Europhobic newspaper proprietors — but as a gotcha moment it’s something of a Freddie Starr hamster.
That’s the politics. In next week’s enigma variations: the Murdoch children, phone hacking, downfall, and a voiceover which fails to distinguish between horror and awed fascination.
The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty is on BBC Two tonight at 9pm
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