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