Paper Emperors: The Rise of Australia’s Newspaper Empires
Sally Young
NewSouth Publishing: 2019
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Prior to the national election in Australia in May, Bill Shorten, the leader of the Australian Labor Party, which had been widely tipped to defeat the conservative Liberal-National coalition, refused to meet with the media mogul Rupert Murdoch — a ritual customarily performed by Australian political leaders. Murdoch’s News Corp duly campaigned ferociously against him, with the NT News (a paper from the Northern Territory usually dedicated to stories about crocodiles) alone among News Corp publications in endorsing Shorten.

On election day, the incumbent, Scott Morrison, pulled off a surprise win — and Shorten resigned.

In Paper Emperors, Sally Young tells us that Rupert Murdoch arrived into the world during a not altogether dissimilar campaign waged by his father, Sir Keith, against the Scullin Labor government.

Sir Keith, a notoriously interventionist proprietor, dominates Young’s history of Australia’s early media empires. Yet, in many ways, she presents him as exemplary rather than anomalous, in a book about how almost all the newspaper owners leveraged — or attempted to leverage — their influence into political power.

• Tags: Australia, Issue 16, Jeff Sparrow, Sally Young