I feel strange tonight (not because of my bronchial infection, which seems to be clearing up, thank you), but because James Lileks is on Hugh Hewitt’s show, at a blogging convention, joking back and forth with him and various guests, some of them fairly prominent people. And I flash back to the fact that less than a year ago I sat in a radio studio with Lileks myself, joking with him on a lower plane. It somehow doesn’t compute. Something is wrong with this picture, and it’s clearly me.
Big news in Christian publishing this week. Harper Collins, which already owns Zondervan, has acquired Thomas Nelson, creating a sudden behemoth in the world of Christian letters—or perhaps a camel we have to figure out how to maneuver through the eye of a needle.
Harper Collins is part of the vast Rupert Murdoch publishing and broadcast empire. We American conservatives tend to have a soft spot for Murdoch (though I believe his personal politics are pretty liberal) because he gave us Fox News, the one and only conservative-leaning television news network in the country.
On the other hand, Murdoch’s history as a publisher hasn’t been what you’d call inspirational. He built his fortune on sleazy tabloids, some of which contain soft-core pornography. I can’t help thinking something’s wrong when a conglomerate like that controls the bulk of American Christian book publishing.
I don’t have a solution to this problem. It is, after all, the way of the world. I don’t expect we’ll be finding pictures of topless girls in Thomas Nelson books any time soon (though I do blame Zondervan for the New NIV Bible, which offends me in other ways). Success attracts money, and money leads to mergers and acquisitions, and what can you do? We are in the world. As long as the family controls the business, they can say who they’ll get in bed with, but once the family’s gone and it’s a stockholders’ and directors’ decision, things can go in very strange directions.
One might hope that if the big guys lose their way, the faithful market will find its way to smaller publishers, like Baker and Eerdman’s (and Nordskog).
Or maybe the future is with independent authors publishing themselves in e-books, as I’m about to.
Tip: Gene Edward Veith.
Ah, yes, Murdoch.
A man who was awarded a Papal Knighthood at a time his business was negotiating with the Chinese government as to just how pornographic the TV he could stream into China could be. “Page 3 Girls” in The Sun are the very least of Murdoch’s pornography business. (To be honest, they’re more in the British tradition of the bawdy postcard than modern pornography). Murdoch also ordered Harper-Collins to delay the publication of Chris Patten’s (last British governor of Hong Kong) memoirs because he was afraid they’d compromise his negotiations with the Chinese.
The man is the epitome of the utterly amoral tycoon. He’s the worse face of hyper-capitalism. He sold the London Times at 20p an issue for several months, losing more than 15p an issue (IIRC), purely to attempt to cripple his competitors who couldn’t fund their newspapers from the rest of an empire.
And we uphold people like him as icons of success and entrepreneurship.
What’s the ownership structure of Collins? Do smaller shareholders have any significant control?
Worse than I feared, then.
On the other hand, I have to say that I have less fear of a plain, capitalist freebooter who wants nothing but money, than of a high-minded, idealistic tycoon who wants to fix the world. The first wants some of my income, and then ceases to care about me. The other wants to empower the government to interfere in every area of my life–for my own good, of course.
In a somewhat strained attempt to be fair to Mr Murdoch, I should say that in Britain he is openly despised by nearly all the British media except the considerable portion he owns plus a great many people involved in or interested in politics, in part simply because in Britain he is a Very Big Fish in a relatively small pond. Whereas in America he’s just another billionaire media tycoon.
Specifically, British politics takes some pride (to a degree justified) in being far less…I’ll be kind and say “influenced by money”, than American. But it is widely considered that Murdoch had a hotline to Downing Street throughout Blair’s premiership, and probably does now with Cameron.
Of course, the fact that he’s an Australian who took British Citizenship but runs most of his companies from the US and takes care never to spend enough time in the UK to have to pay personal taxes there doesn’t help.
I agree that utopian idealists are generally more dangerous than freebooters – C.S. Lewis’s words come to mind:
But: I think we mustn’t be complacent about the political influence of vast fortunes, because of one scary reality – tyranny can be very profitable. Several German firms did very well under the Nazis (at least until Germany was being utterly destroyed by the Allies). In return for producing material for the War Effort (and earlier for supporting the Nazis rise to power), they were given tax and regulation breaks and later, supplied with free (i.e., slave) labour and given resources from the Occupied territories. Some of the are still global industrial powers – Siemens, I G Farben. And while the economic historians can argue about the efficiency of American slavery, one can’t deny a large number of individuals became very rich from it.
I see very little evidence that most of the world’s tycoons have any great commitment to liberty, or democracy. So, they probably wouldn’t support a Hitler figure tomorrow… but is that because they have a commitment to liberal democracy, or because they think it would, this week, be unprofitable? Certainly I can see them pushing us further away from freedom if they felt that was in their economic interest.