Michael Leapman

Murdoch: how it all began

Rupert Murdoch’s biographer Michael Leapman reminds us how the media mogul got his hands on the News of the World by giving solemn undertakings that were not kept.

Book Review: Loonier than thou: media and the Left

I bought this book for two reasons: out of loyalty to the authors – two of them colleagues on the BJR editorial board – and because Ken Livingstone recommended it. At its launch, on a late summer evening on the top floor of City Hall, Livingstone stood with his back to the alluring view of the Thames and Tower Bridge and told us he had been so riveted by this account of how the media systematically traduced those of his political persuasion that he had stayed up most of the night reading it. Certainly Livingstone plays a starring role in the narrative; first as leader of the Greater London Council that Margaret Thatcher and her henchmen were hell-bent on destroying, then as the outsider who outsmarted the Labour Party machine to be elected Mayor of London and, finally, as the man who triumphantly introduced his congestion charge against near-universal media scepticism. Yet, while I am not asking for my money back, those less intimately involved will not find the book so compelling. For we have been here before. Much of it is an analysis of the already welldocumented “loony left” phenomenon of the 1980s, when the press zeroed in on left-wing local councils, Livingstone’s GLC among them, whose zeal to combat racism, homophobia and sexual discrimination carried them to excesses of authoritarianism. In the three chapters that Julian Petley devotes to the topic, under the heading “Loony Tunes”, he seeks to show that the press exaggerated such incidents and indeed invented critical aspects of them. Journalists routinely despise the fertile field of media studies – and by extension those academics who toil in it – because it represents an attempt to impose order and logic on what are, for the most part, a series of random editorial decisions, hastily arrived at. Many academics reciprocate their antipathy, Petley among them. His distaste for the press is all too apparent as he examines the processes that gave us such much-loved favourites as the school that banned Baa-baa Black Sheep, the council that discouraged black bin bags, and the official who sought a non-sexist term for manhole Loonier than thou: media and the Left

Book Reviews : The movie was more fun

essays in this uneven collection. Entitled &dquo;The myth of Saddam Hussein&dquo;, it starts as it means to go on: &dquo;It could be argued that there was no Gulf War of 1991.&dquo; He explains that the event was not a war but a series of massacres that &dquo;sprang out of the realms of myth, rhetoric and media spectacle&dquo;. What we have here is a conspiracy theory of the kind that was fashionable in the Seventies: ’A major war needed to be constructed to be seen to be

Max and Conrad drift apart

DO YOU REMEMBER Max and Perry, the two perky little river boats that used to ferry Telegraph staff down the Thames to the Isle of Dogs, after the daily and Sunday papers moved their offices there in 1987? It was only eight years ago, but already it seems like another age. One of the two editors they were named after, Peregrine Worsthorne, was sunk by unfriendly fire from his combative proprietor, Conrad Black, in 1989. A few years later the boats themselves, along with the whole River Bus service, fell victim to the recession and the Telegraph office decamped again, this time only a few hundreds yards

Book Reviews : What comes after the "but..."?: Rupert Murdoch by William Shawcross Chatto and Windus: £18.99

THE HERO OF THIS book is not really Rupert Murdoch but a dogged New York banker named Ann Lane. She specialises in corporate rescues, having trained on the nursery slopes of the Donald Trump bailout. The story opens with her ringing round the scores of banks that have lent money to the Murdoch empire, trying to get them to reschedule their loans to prevent his going the way of so many high-flying American tycoons of the heady eighties. One bank in Pittsburgh holds out. It wants its money. Lane gets her own bank president to &dquo;launch&dquo; on the outclassed Pittsburgh folk. Murdoch awaits the verdict. The call comes through: Pittsburgh has been won over. Trebles