Democracy dies in darkness, and new US press barons look set to flip the light switch

‘All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way.”

When Count Tolstoy wrote that celebrated first sentence of Anna Karenina in 1878, he perfectly described the fractious family of Rupert Murdoch. The 93-year-old, five-times-married media magnate has applied to a Nevada court in an attempt to unravel his long-standing family trust.

But trust, it seems, is the first casualty when the future of his $15-billion empire is at stake. Murdoch wants to disenfranchise three of his four adult children. Rupe, as he is commonly known, insists that after his death his oldest son Lachlan (53) has a free hand to control his powerful News Corporation, but above all the cash cow, Fox News.

Murdoch fears that his other children will shift Fox News away from its ultra right-wing stance. In the era of Donald Trump, Fox News has a huge audience, which gives him major political clout and vast profits.

But in the way of media magnates, he can’t say: “Truth be damned, my motive is money and power.” Thus Murdoch, as have other newspaper magnates more recently, couched his venality as an act of altruism.

According to The Wall Street Journal (which he owns): “Shifting voting control to Lachlan should be allowed because it is in the interest of all beneficiaries, including his other children.”

Anyone who watched the family back-stabbing in Succession, the TV series largely based on the Murdoch clan, will be clutching their sides with mirth. Such reflex insincerity was reaffirmed last week by two other billionaire US newspaper owners.

First up was multibillionaire Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post. Last Friday, to the shock of the Post’s editorial staff, it was announced that the newspaper would break with its history and not endorse any candidate for the US presidential election.

Faced with a furious public backlash, Bezos claims, to general ridicule, that he wanted to avoid “a perception of bias”.

Personally, I don’t think editorial endorsements sway voters, but the decision to quash an endorsement of Kamala Harris indicates something more sinister: both a gutless genuflection to Trump and a stark reaffirmation that when the crunch comes newspaper proprietors bow to money and power.

Within hours of that decision being announced, senior executives of Blue Horizon, Bezos’s space exploration company (shh, reliant on federal funds), met Trump.

Oligarchal chicanery, however, wouldn’t be complete without unintended satire. Will Lewis, picked by Bezos to be the publisher of The Washington Post last January, explained that not making any endorsement was “a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds”.

In fact, more than 250,000 have already made up their minds and cancelled subscriptions.

Alas, most Americans may have missed the really comic aspect of Mr Lewis’s respect for readers’ minds. He had previously been editor of The Daily Telegraph, known popularly in England as the Daily Torygraph for its relentless support for the Tory Party – services for which he was duly knighted in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list.

After the Torygraph, Lewis was recruited by Murdoch to clean up the mess created by the hacking scandal at News International. Sir Will, as we must call him, claims that he cooperated with the police, but is now widely accused of having orchestrated a cover-up instead.

Another claim to fame: on taking over as publisher of The Washington Post, Sir Will suppressed a news story about his alleged role in covering up the hacking scandal, precipitating the resignation of the then editor. This week, following this latest fearless act, more editors resigned.

Next up was the biotech billionaire who owns the Los Angeles Times. Patrick Soon-Shiong, having squashed the decision to endorse Harris, promptly insisted that this crude act of censorship was actually his civic duty.

“If we chose either one,” decreed Mr Soon-Shiong, “that would just add to the division.” Such po-faced righteousness is best honoured in the barb from Oscar Wilde on the death of Dickens’s Little Nel: “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.”

Nevertheless, most didn’t – leading to the resignation of several members of his editorial board and a flurry of cancelled subscriptions.

Critics quickly pointed out that this press baron retreat fits the description of “anticipatory obedience”. Whether in Australia, the UK or the US, Murdoch has always supported, via reporting bias and editorial endorsement, whichever candidate was likely to (or had already promised) to benefit his commercial interests.

In his reptilian way, at least Rupe doesn’t normally bother to dress up his opportunism with bogus rectitude. He leaves that up to minions. Murdoch’s US tabloid, The New York Post, has already endorsed Trump.

In contrast, Bezos and Soon-Shiong are relative newcomers to our rackety trade. Given how famously thin-skinned is the Republican candidate that their papers were not prepared to endorse, the oligarchs cravenly hid behind fake neutrality.

Though the term “anticipatory obedience” was coined relatively recently by historian Timothy Snyder in his book, On Tyranny, the syndrome itself has a long and noxious history. Many experience this daily in their workplace with executives anxious to curry favour by anticipating every whim of an autocratic boss. Politically, Snyder’s point is the lesson to be learnt by the resistible rise of Nazism: that by “mentally and physically conceding, you’re already giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian”.

If Trump wins the election and enacts half of the tyrannical ideas he has espoused, Bezos and Soon-Shiong will have contributed to the erosion of a free press. It’s a truly bizarre fact that these press barons are allowed to own influential newspapers while their personal quirks and records would preclude them from being hired as cub reporters.

In 2017, The Washington Post put a new slogan on that famous masthead: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

A mere seven years later, in the age of snowballing autocracy, two US multibillionaires have each casually flipped off light switches, darkening the democratic world. DM