Some thoughts on addiction

It's all there in the reportage. Drugs and alcohol. Was there ever a more commonplace tautology? You'll find it amongst the exhortations of doctors, scientists, commentators and politicians. But that nonsensical couplet says more about our collective relationship with the bottle than any properly formulated sentence, any government advertisement, any academic preachment.

It is, of course, more than just a drug. It is the drug of choice for humankind, one so ubiquitous and entwined in the social fabric that it is considered abnormal - even suspicious - to reject it. It is a drug which we advertise, flaunt, encourage, eulogize, celebrate, worship. 


We pour another glass for each other. Go on - finish it off. We tell stories with that special line - I was so drunk - always said with a naughty, knowing smile. As young people we dial it up to eleven, empyting bottles and lumpy bags in to friends' mouths, performing tricks with straws and funnels and hosepipes, all to a chorus of slurry, singsong encouragement.

We're all enablers, really, until the point where it would be unthinkable to enable any more.

At the end of this cruel week a 27-year-old singer and a 40-year-old writer are dead. Both were flooded with talent before they were flooded with booze. Both progressed assuredly and inevitably to the harder stuff, the stuff of jittery injections and burning nostrils.

Amy Winehouse and Sean Hoare continued a dismaying tradition of the premature destruction of musicians and writers - lost to the achilles heel of the creative class. 

And both, tragically, were nudged and egged toward this end by circumstances masquerading as opportunities. The cold edge of fame exacerbated, not initiated, Winehouse's afflictions as much as her hopeless and intractable love for Blake Fiedler-Civil. The already sizeable ranks of the "27 Club" tell us all we need to know about the commonality of this sad parable among creative geniuses.

Dispatched to the clubs of London and Ibiza to ingratiate himself with such types was Hoare, entertainment reporter for News of the World and before that The Sun. It was the company paycheque which secured the mountains of cocaine and the rivers of liquor, far too much and too frequent for the human body to withstand. But it was the only way - or at least the easiest way - to get the scoop. 


This tribute at The Guardian gives great insight in to the sloshy reality between the lines. The Winehouse eulogies are everywhere, perhaps none more poignantly put than Russell Brand's.


It's the sort of speech I hope I'll never have to give, thoughts I hope I'll never have to entertain. But I have the great pleasure of knowing some brilliant, complicated, troubled people who show all the haunting signs of addiction waiting in the wings. And it's a bottle that's certainly not out of my reach either.

Whitney Houston once declared herself too rich to do crack, perhaps true in the abstract but not in reality. There is no such thing as too rich for addiction, nor too smart, too grounded, too promising. Indeed it may feast upon those very attributes.

Hating Rupert Murdoch

Time, I think, for a confession. One that is both scandalous and obscene. 

And perched on a bar stool in Pyrmont, on this stormy, ominous, pensive night, perhaps it is the perfect time to finally admit it – I don't hate Rupert Murdoch.

Oh, how I've tried. I've pictured him maniacally running over kittens in a silver Range Rover. I've imagined him drinking children's blood, bathing in money, bellowing directives to the president from an underground lair.

And it's certainly not a result of my media degree, which has spent the last three-and-a-half years trying to convince me that Murdoch is – if not Satan himself – then at least the nearest thing to evil incarnate we'll ever know.

In the UK, News of the World has been naughty, incorrigible, distasteful and yes, illegal. Those directly involved have already paid a high price: their newspaper no longer exists. At News International, heads are already rolling and will continue to do so. It's all quite macabre, quite fascinating, inviting sizeable schadenfreude for journalists from other newsrooms.

And of course the whole affair has galvanised the perpetually-underlying anger and fear aimed at News Corporation: that it owns too much, that it influences too much, that it may have infected the US or Australia with similarly unscrupulous practices.

The latter remains to be seen, but has little to do with why most people hate Murdoch. In Australia, it seems to be more about our obsessive degradation of anyone deemed too successful – a tall poppy. It's not just the rich: we don't hate Ian Thorpe or Hugh Jackman. Nor do we hate Gina Reinhart or Andrew Forrest, for the most part.

It hasn't helped that he "left" us to become an American. Australians don't seem to mind exporting talent to the big smoke as long as they pay their dues and return every so often, lavishing us with platitudes about never forgetting where they came from, still calling Australia home. Kylie Minogue and Nicole Kidman can be as ostentatiously wealthy and permanently absent as they like and still be adored.

But Murdoch is not just rich – he's also deemed to be powerful. And that, in Australian society, has always been a debilitating combination. We can accept riches accumulated through feat or spectacle, but not through proficiency and cunning - especially not when the entities at play are ones we actually interact with: not rocks in the ground but our newspapers and television.

Murdoch is afforded a lot more power in the imagination of the community than he actually has. He is not sitting there in his bunker deviously line-editing The Wall Street Journal or The Daily Telegraph. He is not on the phone to two-bit reporters for The Australian or The Sun dictating how to interpret the day's events.

News Corp presides over a conservative media empire, for the most part. It's not to my taste, but if we're OK with centre-left papers such as The Guardian (which did the lion's share of investigation in to News of the World) or The Age, then we have to tolerate the corollary.

A caveat: FOX News is an abomination. A truly tacky, vile affair. But it sits within the media marketplace and commands a significant, loyal audience. It would be a problem if tens of millions of Americans watched FOX and believed it was genuinely neutral, unbiased coverage: but that seems unlikely. People watch FOX for the same reason people read The Guardian.

And let us remember that Rupert Murdoch saved newspapers. In the 1980s he bought up papers which were struggling financially and turned them in to efficient, profitable, reputable enterprises. We probably would not have The Times (of London) or The Sunday Times today otherwise. Ditto the New York Post and the Chicago Sun-Times, or indeed the Village Voice and Boston Herald American.

He may yet save newspapers again. The Daily, his iPad only newspaper, is still in its infancy and although News Corp is coy about subscriber figures, it is actively tackling the challenge of making people pay for online content.

When News Corp put The Times behind a paywall a year ago, visitors dropped somewhere between 80 and 90 per cent. But according to a Guardian report in March, over 79,000 now pay their two pounds a week to subscribe to The Times online. That's in addition to the 100,000 or so who get free access courtesy of their print subscription.

The point is that times change, and someone will have to work out a way of changing consumers' general antipathy to paying for online content. News Corp has led the way, bravely, by backing the quality of its product offering, wagering that people will pay the low asking price.

It's too early to make a call on the outcome of that experiment, but the pioneering spirit seems clear. At 80, only Murdoch is committed to pushing hard in to the new era, to make news profitable again in the 21st century.

So yes, it's all about the money. But if we're going to sneer at Murdoch's success, and pray as we crassly, habitually do for the fall of the mighty, then we should recognise the full implications.

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Originally published in ABC's The Drum, 20 July 2011

This time, it's here to stay

This blog is intended to be a repository for my published writing, as well as some unpublished compulsions and whims. 

Hopefully this time around I'll actually pursue the full potential of the technology rather than forgetting about it next week.

MK.