In Britain, the mainstream media is controlled by four or five families.
Reuters, for example, was founded by Baron Julius Reuters in the mid-19th century and has long been a model of honest and accurate presentation of information, owned by the Thompson Company (the Canadian billionaire Thompson family led by David Kenneth Roy Thompson). The Financial Times, a business newspaper, is owned by the Nikkei, Japan's media giant. Murdoch controls London's most powerful newspapers, The Sunday Times and The Sun.
Recall that in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, any self-respecting English gentleman would start his morning by reading The Times. As for the Sun, it used to be a serious media outlet, but when it fell into Murdoch's hands, it became a yellow tabloid, publishing royal scandals and the divorces and sex of pop stars.
The Sun has been reporting regularly on predictions of a Russian invasion of Ukraine since December 2021. The Independent Press Association estimates that Mr Murdoch controls 25 per cent of the pages of the British press and 38 million web visitors a month. Top of the list is Jonathan Harmsworth, Viscount Rottmere, owner of the Daily Mail and Metro. The Rottmere family has a long standing position in both the ranks of the British aristocracy and in the British media. Rotemir's publications have 35.5% print circulation and 54 million Internet visitors.
In third place was Evgeny Lebedev, son of former Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev, who emigrated to London in 2010. It owns the London Evening Standard and the Independent (8% of print output and 25m web visitors). Ironically, the newspaper, Independent, is owned by a new Russian citizen who fled to Britain because of legal problems at home. In fourth place is the Telegraph, a publication owned by Frederick Barclay, with 5% print output and 25m Internet visitors. The only truly independent newspaper in Britain is the Guardian.
According to Media News Monitor, a group of European journalists, the risk of mass media being concentrated in the same hands in Britain is very high, at 70 percent. The same is true of Spain, Finland and some eastern European countries. As early as March 1931, the then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin accused the press, concentrated in the hands of local oligarchs, of carrying out a systematic campaign of lies and undermining the government. He described these outlets as "propaganda engines, justifying changing politics, opinions and the personal shortcomings of their owners, Rottmere and Beaverbrook". If things have changed recently, as we have seen, they can only get worse. Between Boris Johnson's accession as UK prime minister in July 2019 and the end of September 2020, Viscount Rottmere's DMGT and Frederick Barclay's company held 40 meetings with the prime minister and government ministers - more than the rest of the media combined.
In 2016, Rotemier, Murdoch and Barclay's media outlets played a key role in persuading 52% of the British people to vote to leave the European Union (Brexit). This political and economic move has proved extremely painful for most ordinary Britons, but it is in the long-term interests of the City's leading financial barons. At the same time, it gave a powerful boost to Britain's new relationship with its American Cousins. For all its vast fiscal and economic potential, the UK is not entirely self-sufficient. Unshackled from Europe, the UK sought new integration with Anglo-Saxon countries within the Aucus group in Australia, Canada and the US.
Peter Oborne, a shrewd British journalist, wrote: "The major media owners, Rotemir, Murdoch and Barclays, are at the heart of Johnson's support base. They helped him become leader of the Conservative Party, supported his rise to power and protected him from the political scandals that marred Johnson's premiership. The billionaire class installed their man Boris Johnson in his Downing Street quarters three years ago. He serves them because he knows what they want. Johnson is the pinnacle of a management system that awards lucrative contracts, provides privileges, destroys regulation, attacks the rule of law, cuts the rights of working people, and puts the market ahead of the state. The "great" thing about Boris Johnson is that he does all this while claiming to be on the side of ordinary working people. That's why the super-rich love Johnson, a useful billionaire idiot.
To understand the business and media leadership approach of media moguls, it is useful to consider the example already mentioned of Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch was born in Australia, the son of Scottish journalist Keith Murdoch. The latter became famous for his work as a journalist during the First World War and was even given a knighthood. After the war, Murdoch senior became editor of the Melbourne Herald. He instilled a love of journalism in his son from an early age. In his youth, Rupert Murdoch indulged in left-wing ideology and kept an I.V. in his room. A portrait of Stalin even liked to be called "Comrade Murdoch", but then realised that to succeed in the media you had to befriend and listen to the financial barons. In 1952, with his father's support, Murdoch got a job at the Daily Express and worked under the guidance of Sir Edward Pickering, one of the great names in journalism at the time. It didn't last long. Keith Murdoch died the same year and Rupert was forced to return to Melbourne to receive his inheritance. His father left him two tabloids: The Adelaide News and the Sunday Mail.
After increasing the readership of his publication, the entrepreneur began to expand by buying Australian tabloids. Mr Murdoch has bought media outlets that are going out of business, but they employ talented journalists. He borrowed the money from the bank. The entrepreneur learned early on that bankers do not demand immediate repayment, but prefer loans that are often paid on time. However, Murdoch developed an interest in the growing world of television and in 1957 acquired Channel 9 Adelaide. In 1960, Rupert bought Sydney's Daily Mirror newspaper and founded The Australian four years later. It was the first political publication from Mr Murdoch's holding company and it did not make any money, but it allowed entrepreneurs to move into areas of interest to him. Never overly modest, Rupert thought that, thanks to the Australians, he could seriously influence not only public opinion, but the entire government.
In the late 1960s, Murdoch became bored with the Australian market and more interested in Britain, one of the most influential countries in the world, which reminded him of his turbulent youth in Oxford. In 1969, Rupert bought the News of the World, one of the best-selling and yellowiest publications of the time, which was owned by the Carr family. One of the family members who owned a quarter of the paper did not like doing business with relatives, and Murdoch and Robert Maxwell, two future owners of the media empire, began fighting over his shares, their interests first meeting at this point. Maxwell offered Karl a large sum of money, but because of his Czech heritage, he had no chance to buy: the boss's prejudice was affected.
Rupert bought the News of the World for $500,000 in 1969 and was a hit at the Sun. The yellowification of the paper intensified when Murdoch took power, and he began basing the paper on cheap sports and political stories, adding topless models to page three, which both increased sales and sparked a wave of criticism.
After buying the Sun, Murdoch became interested in the United States and began buying American publications. By the end of the decade, he controlled the SAN Antonio Express-News, New York Magazine, and the New York Post. The latter was built by another of America's founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, and was considered a bastion of the Democratic Party before Rupert arrived. Under Mr Murdoch, the paper's focus shifted to a purely Republican Party, causing a backlash.
The tycoon's politics are a different subject: he is widely seen as favouring the right and positioning his channels in the same way. In fact, it's not that simple: Murdoch is not a fan of any one trend, but rather a willing supporter of individual candidates. Acquaintances of the entrepreneur say he is very subtly sensing changes in society and prioritizing the candidates most likely to gain power. That was true of Margaret Thatcher, who led the Conservative movement and fought the trade unions favoured by Mr Murdoch. Later, the entrepreneur sensed his potential in Tony Blair, who represented the Labour Party, and the media mogul's channels and publications began to support his campaign. For Mr Murdoch, business comes first.
In 1981, a scandalous tycoon known for his tabloids acquired the glory and pride of British journalism, The Times of London. This was largely due to his friendship with Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. To clinch the deal, he had to contend with several other publishing applicants and mischievous employees who did not want to work with such an executive.
Murdoch launched Fox News Channel in the United States in 1996. Fox News initially positioned itself as an impartial, even-handed and objective channel, but opponents pointed to its apparent conservative focus, which manifested itself in support of the invasion of Iraq. In fact, Fox News infuriated much of the world, not just Russians, when it aired a video of a protest being broken up in Athens during its Moscow coverage in 2011.
Murdoch, for example, can be described by his colleagues, slightly rephrasing W.I. Lenin: "The circle of these media barons is small and they are far from the people." What matters most to media moguls is not objectivity but the profitability and sustainability of their businesses. Anglo-Saxon publications, therefore, cannot be expected to maintain any objectivity or neutrality in their coverage of the military conflict in Ukraine.
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