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Rupert Murdoch's Favorite LieAs long as he insists on telling it, I'll keep calling it out.

By Jack Shafer
Updated Thursday, April 24, 2008, at 5:17 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Murdoch abandoned this lie just a few months later, coming clean in a British Esquire (July 1994) interview. Here's how the June 14, 1994, Wall Street Journal reported it:

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., despite earlier denials by his media companies, has acknowledged months after the fact that he yanked British Broadcasting Corp. news from his satellite television service in northern Asia in hopes of soothing bad relations with China.

… Mr. Murdoch said he made the decision to pull BBC, even though "I was well aware that the freedom fighters of the world would abuse me for it."

Mr. Murdoch told author William Shawcross that cutting out the BBC was critical to Star's acceptance in China. "They hate the BBC," Mr. Murdoch said. "Critics say it's a cowardly way, but we said that in order to get in there and get accepted, we'll cut the BBC out."

Murdoch stuck with the embarrassing truth for a decent interval. "The BBC was driving [the Chinese leaders] nuts," Murdoch told Ken Auletta in a Nov. 13, 1995, New Yorker piece. "It's not worth it." He added, "We're not proud of that decision. It was the only way."

As best as I can tell, Murdoch didn't return to the corporate lie until 2007, when he told the Financial Times that the BBC's defenestration was just business. He said:

Star was losing $100m per year; we had to pay $10m per year to the BBC. I said "Let them pay it themselves", and they did. We also cancelled two other third-party channels—MTV and Prime Sports. At that stage we never ever had any request from anybody in China. Indeed, there was no discourse at all.

—Financial Times (May 24, 2007)

Newsweek isn't the only place Murdoch is trafficking his fib this month. In a Georgetown University speech, he told students and faculty that unplugging the BBC was all about commerce, saying:

The BBC has a lot more money than I; they can get their own transponder and their own satellite. And that was taken as me kowtowing to the Chinese government. And I've had that hung around my neck forever.

Murdoch lies because he has no shame. Last summer, Time's Eric Pooley asked the rotten old bastard about a few of his disgraces. What did he have to say today about having ordered three New York Post journalists to investigate a competitor back in 1984—not to write a story but to assist a Murdoch lawyer in deposing the competitor? "I don't recall it. … But if we did it, we were wrong." Or of the spiking of a memoir of the last British governor of Hong Kong, who was detested by the Chinese government Murdoch has so labored to placate? "I was probably in the wrong there too."

"It's been a long career, and I've made some mistakes along the way. We're not all virgins," Murdoch told Pooley.

Speak for yourself, Rupert.

******

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of the "Hitler Diaries" by Murdoch's London Times. (FYI: Newsweek also published from the diaries. Both it and Slate are owned by the Washington Post Co.) When Murdoch publishes his own diaries, what should he call them? The Filth and the Fury? Send your nominations to . (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

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Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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