I love a newspaper in addition to my deep obsessiveness about books. I am a compulsive consumer of news in all its forms. But there are a few more purely pleasurable ways to enjoy the news that on the holidays, coffee brewing papers strewn across the table, with people passing supplements and sections across to one another. There are online equivalents, but there's something about that old fashioned way of catching up with the world that remains very special. But the
business of news, we are told, is in crisis. I think it's declared dead even more often than the book is. There are challenges of advertising, challenges of revenue, and a decline in consumption and a decline in trust. It's a problem. If news dies, then our society suffers. Eric Beecher is a newsman. It's what is devoted the better part of
his life and career too. As a journalist, his work for some of the most well respected newspapers in the world, and as his career has progressed, Eric has climbed the media ladder. He's currently a media proprietor, head of Private Media, which runs the website Criche. Amongst the many achievements of Eric Beach's career in the media, there are few key moments that stand out. In nineteen eighty four, he became the youngest ever editor of the City Morning Herald. He
was just thirty three at the time. With Digribbel, he built text media into a major player, and in two thousand and seven he received a Walkley Award for Journalistic Leadership. Later he also became chair of the Wheeler Center in Melbourne when I was its director. And the thing that I've always so admired about Eric getting to work alongside him is the ways in which he's such a fierce
advocate for independent, fearless media. It's a passion that played out more recently in twenty twenty two when Lachlan Murdock leveled a high profile defamation lawsuit in his direction. While the case ended up being withdrawn, it was just the motivation Eric needed to finish the book he's been quietly
working on for years. That book was called The Men Who Killed the News, and in it, Eric reveals the distorted role of media moguls over the past two centuries, from Conrad Black and William Randolph Hurst to Rupert Murdock and Elon Musk. The book explores how these men have abused their power to increase their wealth while undermining journalism and truth at a huge cost to our politics and our society. It might sound like a book that has the potential to be dry, but Eric Beecher knows how
to spin a story. At its opening, it has the feel of one of those Russian classics, a cast of characters in the front, introducing us to the colorful moguls good and bad who are going to populate its pages. And then it pivots. It becomes a crime story as we bear witness to the ways in which the world of news is slowly deliberately being killed. It's a political thriller that asks the kind of society we want to bark long to. And it's a love story because one
thing is crystal clear. Eric Beecher loves news and loves the disappearing world of serious journalism. I'm Michael Williams, and this is Read This the show about the books we love and the stories behind them. There are many things in The Men Who Killed the News that I love. It's a fabulous bit of reading. It's a kind of sobering history and also an assessment of the kind of current state of news media and how we got here. But I wanted maybe to dig into your personal history
and relationship with journalism. When did you first get the bug? When did you first identify that journalism was a thing that you might devote your life to.
Well, I got the bug at a very early age. And I have no idea where the bug came from because no one in my family was a journalist. And I grew up in Sydney and we got the Sydney Morning Herald every morning and I saw it on the breakfast table. Whether that gave me the bug, I'm not sure, but you know, I edited my boy Scouts magazine, I edited all the school magazines. I started a national cricket magazine at the age of seventeen. I just loved it. I just fell in love with it.
So I love this story about it, not just because it reveals you're a colossal merd at every level, but there is something about the attitude of identifying a gap in the market and you know you're an avid cricket fan, you knew what you wanted to read, identifying it wasn't there, and deciding that you may as well take the responsibility to fill that gap.
It sounds like it's some kind of special instinct or intuition. Actually what it was was naivety. That's what it was.
You don't think it's the exact same naivity that has carried you through the rest of your career.
Since the naivety probably developed a little bit into something a little more advanced. But I look back and think, you know, why would I have done that. I mean, I've had so many failures in my publishing career, magazines that didn't work, and ideas that didn't work, and websites that didn't work. And I've had a couple of successes as well. And I was a newspaper editor in my early thirties at a very young age, and I don't
quite know how that happened, but it was great. And I mean one of the most important things, or the most important thing that happened to me in my life as a journalist was I was a reporter on the Melbourne Age in my twenties and that's where I started
in daily journalism. The Age then was owned by the Fairfax Company, but it had been owned by the Sime family and there was until a sign family member was the managing director Ranald MacDonald, and I got to know Ranald, and he knew because I told him many times that my interest actually was in editing, not so I could be the boss, but because I loved the craft of editing. And in those days, most newspaper editors were people who had been promoted because they were very good reporters. And
to me, they are different skills. They obviously overlap, but they are different skills. And the Age sent me away for eighteen months and put me through three very good newspapers, the Sunday Times and the Observer in London, and the Washington Post. And so I learned about editing and newspapers at that level, and newspaper editing at that level, and journalism at that level in those places. And I came back and then I started to practice it here all right, Eric, I.
Want to level a quote in your direction. Here we go. The illustry is littered with self staled purer to believe the business of media, the requirement to make a profit somehow corrupts the craft. The self anointed media elite among us believe somewhat self servingly that not only the act or process of maintenance profit is positively sinister, but also that the very desire to do so is Does that describe you, Eric Beecher? Are you a self satisfied, self anointed media elite.
I guess some people might think I am one person, in particular the person you're quoting. I remember that quote. I have been a working journalist, an editor, a publisher, and a media owner. So I'm not someone who regards profitability and commercial imperatives as being unimportant. In fact, it's so critical because if you're not viable, you don't exist.
So that goes without saying so criticism like that I think is facile at the same time, and what I've tried to do with his book is to try and look at the balance between the profit motive, the commercial motive, and the role of proper public interest journalism in a democracy and whether they can coexist. And sometimes they can, and often throughout history they haven't, and that's been I think a real tragedy for democracy.
That quote is Lachland Murdock, in that moment giving anarration at the State Library of Victoria, was actively taking issue with previous comments you've made, picking a fight with you personally, and I want to get to Lachlan and his family in a tick. But before we get there, it seems to me that when we talk about media again and again, the thing that we talk about is whether the business
model is possible or whether it's irreparably broken. Was there ever a time when the business model made sense and didn't compromise what it did?
Absolutely? I mean, I was lucky enough to start my career and live a lot of my particularly newspaper career, in what I would regard as the golden age of media, both business models and therefore journalism. And they were the days when newspapers like the Sydney Morning Herald or the Melbourne Age would produce two hundred pages of classified ads every Saturday and would make millions and millions of dollars
of profit every Saturday from those ads. And they had owners, the Fairfax family for over a century, who saw their role as yes, owners and business people, but also as participants in the civic life and the democratic life of their country, and so they were able to get that balance right. Other media moguls, through history and even up to now and especially now, in some ways don't get that balance right in my view at all. All they focus on is the profit motive.
So did that Golden age, those kind of rivers of classified advertising gold mean that it distorted our idea of what people valued when it came to the news. Did it mean that we never fully understood the relationship between a civil society and its press. Look.
I think for journalists it was a foundation stone to enable them to do their work properly and do it independently. For the consumers of news, it was a different era, not just because of that business model. In fact, the change in business model was when advertising, classified advertising and other forms of display advertising migrated from those print newspapers
to digital and then to social media. And so what that has meant is not only has the revenue that supported quality journalism almost disappeared now, but it means that the landscape for consuming news and being interested in news, and the competition for people's time that essentially didn't exist before the Internet now makes it an entirely different landscape as well.
One of the reasons that in that lecture Lachlan Murdock was having a goure is that two years prior you'd given the andro Alli lecture, and in that you'd drawn a kind of distinction between serious journalism and other journalism, and the ways in which those lofty ideals for the kind of newspaper that said is like Melbourne or Sydney should be able to sustain were compromised. And we're being consistently compromised. If it's not the business model that compromises, then what is.
It's a whole lot of things that have changed in the world, I think, not least social media. I mean social media has transformed not just the media landscape and not just the media consumption landscape, but it's transfer the way that people think about issues, and it's turned people who would otherwise have depended on a small amount of
reliable media, it's turned them into partisans. I mean everyone now has an op ed column, as it were, and so that changes entirely the way that journalism is consumed and thought about.
It never ceases to amaze me. The ways in which if you survey consumers of media and journalism, which I'm sure you've done many times in your career, they'll say, oh, these things are important to me. Now, these are what I'll read. But now in the age of the Internet, when we can track what stories they read and which ones they read to the end, the disconnect between the things that a general populace says they want from their journalism and the stuff that they engage with or consume.
There's a pretty big chasm between those two things, isn't.
The absolutely And I think that what you've really done is make another point here, which is so important for people not just in the media, but consumers of the media and people who care about the state of civic society should be aware of, is that media now has rapidly changed in the last few years and is heading in this direction so fast. Media now has become niche. It's only niche. Even the New York Times, with ten million subscribers, is actually in its marketplace, which is the
world is a niche. The old newspapers that used to sell hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies a day now sell tens of thousands of copies to day to very old people largely, and I'm old, so I can say that. But they are niches. Everything is a niche. And so if you look at what the mass market is interested in, it exists, but it largely exists on social media, and it's certainly not news journalism.
One of the things that I so fondly remember about working closely with you and our time together and getting the Wheeler Center established. Was that attitude of willingness to kind of take a risk and do something because there was a gap that needed to be filled, you know, that desire to actually make a social and cultural difference in the thing that was made. That the profitability the viability of it mattered at all times, but that the driving impulse was how do we make this space better
thanks to the work that we're doing. And I think it's interesting for someone who spent their career in journalism and in newspapers overwhelmingly that you still carry that energy that's that's what you do, because it seems at odds with so much of what we see from our media.
Yes, I guess I don't know how, when or why it was inculcated in me, but I did have that.
I mean, it wasn't quite recklessness, because I've always approached whatever the risky projects that I was involved with, including the Wheelers Center, with the view that you push the boundaries really hard creatively and commercially, but you do it understanding what would happen in the worst case scenario, So you try and put some kind of safety limit underneath it to make sure that it can't actually fall over
the cliff. And if you can get those two things right, it seems to me that that's the best mix, rather than being all bravado and just doing it and suddenly you see the cliff, or being so cautious that you never get anywhere near the cliff.
I think that relationship between the two is really important. But when you were describing your career before, you're a great pains to refer to yourself as a media owner rather than as a mogul. And I want to know, is that just a question of scale or is that a question of attitude both?
I think. I mean it's certainly a question of scale. I think media moguls, to the extent that they are defined and formally, need to have significant scale. I mean, in today's dollar terms, they need to be running organizations and empires that are billions and billions of dollars. So in the book, I actually delineate between media moguls and media magnates. And then, as some of my friends describe me, I'm a medium mongrel.
Yeah, that seems like a good slating scale. After the break, Eric reveals his favorite media moguls and why this book won't be his last. We'll be right back. Part of the central thesis of The Men Who Killed News is about the centrality, as the name would suggest, of these moguls, of the individuals who, through their application of their power, completely shaped and defined the way we understood news. Were the men who killed the news also the men who made the news.
They were, I mean, the basic thesis of this book that has struck me for I spent two years working as an editor for Rupert Murdoch in the late nineteen eighties, and then I left because my social and ethical conscience didn't allow me to stay, and I left. And ever since then, I've both observed and to some extent, participated
in what I describe as a loophole in democracy. And that loophole is that democratic countries provide significant support for a free press, in the sense that in America it's the First Amendment constitution. Most European countries have free press support in their constitutions. In Australia and England it's a
bit different, but it still exists. And so what that means is the press has a privilege position in society as it should have to hold power to account and to really make democracy the sort of vibrant force that it should be. But on the other side of the ledger, there are absolutely no regulations, laws, ethical guidelines. There's nothing to control or to regulate the way that the owners of the free press operate, and so it's entirely up to the conscience of individuals to decide how they get
that balance right. And the media moguls who decided that they were in it for money and power, not for the role of the free press, were able to achieve money and power. But the price that was paid in those democracies I think has been enormous and continues to be.
Some of the characters in the Spook, it's a strange way to kind of talk about it, but are very richly drawn, and it seems to me there's a certain amount of pleasure in on earthing their peccadillos and their monstrousness. Do you have favorites? Do you have like if you were collecting football cards or their moguls, so you'd want to kind of keep in your album.
Well, before I answer that, I should just mention that they're not all bad. There are some good moguls, and the Ox Sulzberger family who owns the New York Times, are good moguls. I think the Fairfax family in this country, who no longer have media holdings, although they have a small interest in my company, and I should declare that I think we're really good moguls. Lord Thompson, the Canadian who then went on to own the London Times, was a really good nogul. So there were good moguls as well.
The others, however, in my view, always put their own interests ahead of the public interest. Are their favorites well, I mean it depends what the crow criteria are. I mean, you couldn't invent a character like Robert Maxwell, both the way he lived and the way he died. Lord Beaverbrook was a medium Morgel from Central Casting, and the stories about him are just so entertaining. The TV series Succession tries to tap this and does, to a large extent tap it. And when people ask me what do I
think of Succession? Wasn't it a fantastic story? I say to them, well, to me, it was a documentary.
At the very top, you have a kind of list, almost like a Russian novel, of here are the key players who you need to know and how they connect. And you're very ineffably Eric Beecher dry in the way
that you sum them up. I particularly took issue with where you described Conrad Black, which made me laugh, which was Canadian publisher controlled the global quality newspapers, pompous and verbose, author, stole from his company, jailed, And it seems to me that construction said that verbosity is a product of being an author, just as being jailed as a product of stealing from your company.
Well, Conrad Black was never the biggest media mogul in history in terms of the size of his empire, although at its peak it was quite extensive. But he was certainly in the top two or three most colorful media moguls. And he's still alive. He's still writing columns in Canada. He's still a member of the House of Lords. He's discredited in his home country Canada. He's not allowed to travel to the US because he had a jail term there. I mean, you can't make these things up.
That is a great way to end your life as a media proprietors in exile but still writing columns. You get to do both things exactly. One of the things that you clearly in this book have a lot of belief in, an affection for, and I know this about you and the way you've conducted yourself in your career is the writer, the journalist, the person who's actually crafted
the story and put it out there. And it seems to me that many of the threats across decades that you run through here are threats of delivery mechanism, their threats a business model, but they're not threats to the purity of the telling the story in the first place. But what we're facing now with the rise of AI is an existential threat to writers.
Look it looks like it is. I think it's far too early to be in any way definitive about how this is going to play out, just as it was when the Internet arrived on our doorsteps, you know, twenty five years ago, or whenever it was. AI in theory and in some places in practice has the capacity and the ability to replace certain kinds of journalism. But will people trust that if it's not proved to be either accurate or incisive, or intelligent or serious, serious readers won't
trust it. The people that will be vulnerable are people who aren't serious about their consumption of news and journalism. So we just don't know yet. But I think we need to prepare for the worst, and that requires governments regulating and legislating. We need to impose copyright principles across AI. We need to do all of those things because at the end of the day, it's only humans who can create the kind of content that is going to both satisfy and enlighten other humans.
The book was more than ten years in the making, and I'm curious about whether in the writing of it there were surprises for you, or whether it confirmed things that you'd long known and suspected about the industry that you've given your life to.
There were no real surprises in the direction that I found, and most of us who follow these things know about that direction. What surprised and to some extent, alarmed me was the scale of it, the layers of it, and the way that it's become normalized and accepted. And I understand why that might be because most normal citizens, including politicians and political leaders and business leaders, feel they can't do anything about it, so they have to live with
the beast rather than tame the beast. But when you look at the cumulative effect, which is what I've done in this book, from really the late eighteen hundreds when the first big kind of newspapers started to evolve, until you know, the third decade of this century, where we have social media and we have Fox News and whatever. The cumulative effect has just been horrific, and that surprised me the scale of it.
At the end of writing this book, are you moral less optimistic about the prospect of the kind of journalism you believe in having a future.
I'm far less optimistic about it happening at scale, and indeed that's not what's happening. But I remain in some ways even more optimistic of it happening in important pockets because the business model now requires the consumers and readers and viewers of quality journalism to pay for it in a way that they didn't before. They used to pay for their newspaper, but it was subsidized heavily by the advertising.
It means that the people who end up paying for it and consuming it take it very seriously, and they can fund to a limited but a big enough degree, the resources needed to do it well. So it's a bit of both.
Now you know you've got a book on the front of the shelves of the bookshops, in the library, whatever. You have a yen to write a follow up book, books where you're going to spend the next few years.
Well, I really really enjoyed it. I mean, I've been writing journalism and editing journalism all my life, but writing a one hundred thousand word book is a different proposition.
And it's flying business class. You can stretch your legs out.
You can. It's flying first class, actually, Michael, and you can really stretch your legs out. But it was really satisfying. So I've enjoyed that. I am thinking about another project. I'm not sure what it will be.
Eric Beacher, thank you for your time.
Thanks Michael.
Eric Beach's book The Men Who Killed the News is available now. Before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've been reading this week. Melbourne author Ella Baxter's debut novel New Animals, came out a few years ago and show her to be a significant talent. Her follow up Wu Wu is out now and it is dark, weird, angry, fun It's said in the contemporary art world, and has creepy puppets, a stalker, the ghost of a multi media artist, and a whole lot more that earns it the name
Wu Wu. It's terrific. You can find it and all the other books we mentioned today at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot. Next week I read this I sit down with Turkish author Elif Shaffer to talk about her new novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, and she shares the differences between writing in her mother tongue and writing in English.
If my writing as melancholy, sorrow, longing, sadness, I find his sticks much easier to express in Turkish. But when it comes to humor, which I love, irony and sakai are much easier in English.
Read this is produced and edited by Clara Ames, mixing and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.