MURDOCH'S DESOLATE VIEW OF HUMAN LIFE

DENNIS POTTER

THERE is an avid, wet-mouthed downmarket slide in Britain's tabloid press that began its giddiest descent on the day marauding Rupert Murdoch acquired the Sun and dragged so many others toward the sewers where too many of his too craven employees have their natural habitat.

There are thousands of abused people who have absolutely no way of answering back those who, owning so much of our press, narrow down the options which, in any civilised, mature democracy mean multiplicity of ownership, someone not telling you every day what to think, in language that is mostly slanted. Do you think that doesn't have any effect upon the nature of our democracy? Do you think that has no effect upon the way we think about politics?

This quotidian ooze of ordure has made many fine, diligent and decent journalists ashamed of their profession. Worse, it has led to truly dangerous suggestions that Parliament should enact fresh laws to curb the excesses of our debased tabloids. This is important. Let us have nothing to do with any law which tries to define what shall and shall not be in our newspapers. Even one hesitant step down that road begins a journey that no society wishing to be free can ever safely contemplate. There are better ways to stop the rot, as I shall suggest shortly when I propose a more effective rat-trap.

Michael Medved's book, Hollywood Versus America, is a well-written and not always illiberal attack on the sordid, people-despising values of parts of the Hollywood ethos. Ironically enough, this is the same slick, money-grabbing, essentially desolate view of human life which Rupert Murdoch is trying to export around the world, financed by great puddles of debt.

Medved's attack on Hollywood as a poison factory is a double-edged scalpel in the clumsy hands of passionate free-marketeers, Thatcherites, Reaganites, and other such ignorant armies of the night slashing and sleazing towards Babylon. Yes, no question, much of Hollywood is indeed a sink of squalor. I've been there, I've struggled there, in a threnody where its easier to pull a gun than light a cigarette. In the dead of night you can hear rats voraciously nibbling at the tops of the palm trees, and in the far darker dead of day you can hear another sort of rat voraciously nibbling on the breakfast-meeting carrot cake.
Cannibalism, sadism, fetishism, Thatcherism. Endless sex, endless violence. Blown-away bodies emptied of their souls. Any or every blasphemy against the human spirit committed solely in the name of the dollar, which has "In God We Trust" written across its middle. Don't be too envious; we're busily building the same kind of society here, run by the same sort of people with the same sort of ends.

But those who believe entirely in the market - that one-eyed god now wreaking vengeance on our vandalised and desperate communities - ought to know, in the coldly implacable logic of their heretical faith, exactly what they should do about these violent and pornographic excesses; nothing, nothing whatsoever. They cannot in their shrunken ideology legitimately interfere with the freedom of the most capitalist of all capitalist businesses, showbiz, to seek the maximum return by whatever legal means it can get on its investment. The result is what you see on the top shelves of the video stores, or when you stain your soul in opening Murdoch's Sun.

There's a fat book out at the moment which I hope you will read entitled Murdoch, by William Shawcross. Detail upon detail over almost 600 pages show how Murdoch grew and grew and grew into the enormous toad who croaks at all our doorways and windows. The book demonstrates what is virtually a catalogue of deceit, broken promises, bullying, and as Ian Aitken says in The London Review of Books, "enough facts about his conduct to hang him several times over". I don't believe in capital punishment, even for those who seek to pollute the insides of our heads, so in my mercy I suggest that if Murdoch were to be strung up, he should be cut down while still alive and left to croak out expletives in something of the foul-mouthed style of Kelvin Mackenzie, the sharp little oaf who edits the Sun.

Shawcross's very readable book should be sent to every MP, in case any of them imagine themselves to be much more than pawns on someone else's board. They would then learn how such a raucously loyal Thatcherite wriggled out of the already minimal cross-ownership safeguards of Thatcher's Broadcasting Act. Talk about quid pro quo!

Even Mark Thatcher, with all his millions, could navigate himself somewhere towards the right conclusion. Murdoch was able to keep all his newspapers and yet still buffet and bamboozle his way into British television as well.

British television, according to Murdoch, and therefore according to his slanted newspapers, and therefore according to so many in the never especially upright party he's done so much to keep in power, is elitist and paternalistic. He says he is "busting the British broadcasting cartel". Be warned! It has been the public service ethos that gave us the least worst television in the world. The BBC is the one British institution that really works, and ITV - at least before the botched auction bugaboo - has always been partly defined in the same public service terms. "Paternalism" is a compromised word, of course. It used to be part of the thinking of the old Tory party that has been blown apart by the market radicals. But call it what you will, we need some barriers to delay or deter the vandals; and to insist that the dollar and the pound are not the only measures of human culture.

Let us begin by properly enforcing cross-ownership provisions so that a Murdoch or his clones either has his TV or his newspapers. But,

more: if we really want to clean up some of the things which so contaminate our democracy and our values, and so diminish our own sense of citizenship in our own government and culture, then do not enact laws about what should or should not be in our newspapers. Let us enact laws about who owns them.

First, no newspaper should own any part of any television company, and vice versa. Second, no person or group should own more than one daily, one evening and one Sunday paper. It's very simple, very hygienic, very straightforward, very just and would at one stroke immeasurably improve the validity our our democracy and its defences against those who abuse it. In short: Murdoch go home! Wherever that is.

This is a shortened version of Dennis Potter's Opinions, shown on Channel 4 last night.