Lachlan Murdoch: black-tie champion of the common man?

For evidence of Beecher’s arguments you need look no further than News Limited itself. If the Murdoch empire is so committed to quality journalism, why is it, like Fairfax and many other large corporations, casualising its workforce, a short-term cost-cutting exercise that is highly corrosive to a culture of quality journalism? How does it explain routinely passing off as legitimate news stories thinly disguised promotions for Murdoch-owned pay TV programs, lifestyle magazines and sporting events?

Murdoch’s perception of himself as a populist hero rather than a person whose position and pay packet has more in common with the divine right of kings is palpably absurd, not to mention drearily unoriginal.

Another American, Thomas Frank, the author of the best-selling critique of the "market populism" of the past decade, One Market Under God, was in Australia a week before Murdoch. Frank told less posh audiences in Sydney and Melbourne that the inversion of the language of social class was one of the defining achievements of American business cultures in the 1990s.

Market populism - the belief that the market would bring economic democracy - became an article of faith across the political spectrum: "From Dead Heads to Nobel laureates, from paleo-conservatives to New Democrats, American leaders in the 90s came to believe that markets were a popular system, a far more democratic form of organisation than democracy. In addition to being mediums of exchange, we were told markets were a medium of consent. With their mechanisms of supply and demand, poll and focus group, superstore and internet, markets expressed the popular will more articulately and meaningfully than did mere elections."

Market populism, Frank noted, proved to be an extremely useful doctrine. "As business leaders melded themselves with the common people, they discovered powerful new weapons to use against their traditional enemies, in government and in organised labour. Since it was now markets that expressed the will of the people, any criticism of business could be described as an act of elitism, arising out a despicable contempt for the common man.

"According to this view of the world, elitists are not those who, say, watch a sporting event from a skybox or spend their weekend tooling around on a yacht, or fire half their workforce and ship their work south. No, that’s not the elite in America. Elitists were always the people on the other side of the equation, the trade unionists and the Keynesians who thought that society could be organised any way other than the free-market way. Since what the market does, no matter how foolish, is the will of the people, any scheme to control it or to operate outside of it is dangerous artifice, the hubris of false expertise."

Needless to say, Frank’s speeches went largely unreported in the commercial media, while Murdoch’s pitch was dutifully reproduced in his own newspapers. That’s the power of populism for you.