Why is murdoch called the dirty digger

Cynics noted at the time that, while shocking and seemingly inspired by recent events, even the closure might have contained a grain of opportunism; print, even profitable print, is a declining business. Folkenflik does a reasonable job conveying the breathless pace of the hacking scandal in , as reputations unraveled and Murdoch struggled to contain the corporate fallout. Where the book is weak is not in the reporting—Folkenflik is a very good media reporter—but in the analysis.

Murdoch comes by that contempt for government intervention by way of personal experience. He is a man whose very history tells him that regulations are designed to trip him up.

He is an entrepreneur who repeatedly had to win permission to buy television and newspaper properties in all three major English-speaking countries in which he became a dominant presence.

He even switched his citizenship in order to satisfy American regulators. Murdoch and his properties are forever booing and hissing at the public sector; he is a lusty advocate of the free market, he is frequently at odds with communications regulators, and he loathes publicly funded media. His personal Twitter feed is full of pithy aphorisms urging the dropping of regulation and the lowering of taxes. His engagement with the political process in every country he operates in is intense.

Whether being readily received by Margaret Thatcher, his great political ally in breaking UK print unions in the s, meeting with Russian oligarchs on his yacht, or consulting with Chinese party officials, Murdoch maintains close ties to regional power. He leans on the door of regulation so often and because of his facility with establishments, it gives way.

Is that something we should blame Murdoch for? He is only doing what all business people would do—he is just more efficient and persistent and strategic than most.

Too close, indeed, in the UK, where subsequent governments of opposing parties demonstrated obeisance toward him, his family, and his executives in a startling inversion of the normal patterns of patronage and lobbying.

Rebekah Brooks, the former Sun and News of the World editor who is now indicted on hacking charges, rode horses with British Prime Minister David Cameron, who, despite repeated warnings not to, also employed former Murdoch editor Andy Coulson as his head of communications.

That was before Coulson also faced charges similar to Brooks. Search within work. Related Content In this work Crisis? What crisis? Dirty Digger, The. All rights reserved. Sign in to annotate. Delete Cancel Save. There were spills aplenty along the way. Attempts to break into this burgeoning market saw him shamefully exclude the BBC from its satellites, fearing it would upset the regime. Murdoch was eventually eased out and lost a fortune.

Murdoch misread the digital revolution. Having spent a lifetime seeking to dodge regulators, he found himself lobbying for them to intervene. Working for Murdoch in the early s was an exhilarating but eerie experience. He was a natural tabloid journalist — sub-editor rather than writer —with none of the bombast of a Hearst or a Beaverbrook.

He was always trying to leave meetings. His greatest virtue was decision — intuiting that a bad decision was better than none at all.

As every editor knows, the great interferer is not policy but money. When I was at the Times in the early s the paper was losing money and Murdoch was facing bankruptcy. He blitzed it with staff cuts and price rises — and complaints when the circulation dropped. Murdoch was a poor people manager. His staff reacted in various ways. I remember standing on a Colorado street during a get-together and asking the Fox studios wunderkind, Barry Diller, how he was getting on with Murdoch.

I gather they are still on good terms. His motivation is complex, psychological as much as politico-commercial. Within 15 years he had risen to become a major force in Australian media, buying failing papers and turning them round with a mixture of sensation and irreverence, and starting that country's only national newspaper — the Australian.

The Murdoch approach to business was already evident — an inveterate deal-maker, gambling on opportunities others regarded as crazy and with a remarkable appetite for risk.

I knew Murdoch was routinely referred to as the "dirty digger". What I didn't know was that the title came from his very first big story in his very first British newspaper. He had bought the News of the World from the Carr family, who had owned it since , in In truth they sold it to him in order to avoid having to sell it to Robert Maxwell.

In the words of one insider from the time, the Carrs had run it like a family grocery store. Chairman Sir William Carr — never less than two bottles a day of scotch, that is — used the Savoy Grill as the company canteen.

In business terms, Murdoch made mincemeat of them. But it was his first big story — the Christine Keeler memoirs — that would get him noticed more widely.

Murdoch saw it as classic tabloid fare — anti-establishment with a decidedly racy twist and a great commercial opportunity. But the liberal establishment reacted with fury; all they could see was an old story rehashed purely for commercial gain by a grasping colonial for whom no gutter was too deep.

And thus the "dirty digger" was born and the essential fault line between Murdoch and liberal Britain was set. Murdoch had gone from near unknown to beneath contempt in just six months.

Murdoch and his Australian wife Anna found themselves virtually ostracised. Veteran journalist Chapman Pincher recalled Murdoch turning up to a society shooting party wearing a "brand new, brown, knickerbocker shooting suit and with a gun that hadn't been fired". Murdoch was trying to fit in. But what he talked to Pincher about in the course of the day was "English snobbery".

I knew Murdoch had bought the Sun but I hadn't appreciated how and why it had become so successful. By setting out to give readers what they wanted — as opposed to what someone else thought they should have — Murdoch rode the wave of an enormous social transformation.