Miller Shock of the News

Confessions of a Troublemaker
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78334-287-7
Verlag: Gibson Square
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

'[An] insider's account.' Ian Burrell, i-Paper'A bare-knuckle read.' Andrew NeilRazor-sharp and wity, Jonathan Miller pulls back the curtain on how Murdoch won and lost the media crown, and why this is important for the looming AI revolution in this rollicking memoir. Rupert Murdoch's tech guru and disruptor-in-chief, Jonathan was also the founder of UK's first news site, a war reporter in Kosovo, and commentator on the follies of both France and rural Britain. Bound to amuse and spark debate, including why wokism is not news!

Jonathan Miller has worked in the UK, Europe and US as a Rupert Murdoch tech advisor, media founder, Sunday Times leader writer and columnist, war correspondent, and contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post and MSNBC. A Macron-watcher, he currently writes for the Spectator and Daily Mail

Autoren/Hrsg.

Miller, Jonathan

Leseproben

3 The art of trouble

Did I ever use a typewriter? Mother’s milk. Upright manuals, bashed to bits. We typed ‘the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ to test that every letter was working. Cut and paste meant exactly that—1969

I arrived at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor from London in the summer of 1969, aged 17, hopelessly naive, admitted despite the absence of most of the normally required academic qualifications. They waived me in only because my father had just been appointed a professor at the medical school. He’d had enough of the NHS, even then. A place for me was a perk of his job.

I was initially reluctant to follow my family to Michigan. But I was a teenager and confused. I’d been at Bedales, a progressive coed boarding school in Hampshire, where I was noisy and a terrible student. I subscribed to the Economist on the school rate, hid in the library, wrote a few pieces for the student chronicle, sneaked off to the Good Intent public house in Petersfield, where they were not fussy about age, and tried to stay awake in lessons. I recently wrote a rude piece about the school for the Spectator and suspect I am now persona non grata there. I wasn’t interested in A-levels and didn’t get any.

London at the time was supposedly buzzing, decreed to be ‘swinging’ by Time magazine. It was true that London had a photogenic and groovy counter-culture. Jimi Hendrix played the Albert Hall, the Rolling Stones played a gig in Hyde Park. But Time’s story was what is known in the trade as a confection, bearing only an incidental relationship to the broader truth. Away from Bárbara Hulanicki’s hip Biba boutique and the anarchic bazaar of Kensington Market, later demolished, the site now a branch of PC World, England was in fact rotting. This was the tag end of Harold Wilson’s Labour government. The winter of discontent, the OPEC oil crisis and IMF bailout soon followed.

It was the height of the Vietnam War and I demonstrated outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, immersed myself in silly teenage politics, and hung out with friends at music gigs in grotty clubs in Camden Town. I was very left wing at the time (I got over it, eventually) and ran into Peter Mandelson when he was the commissar behind some demo of the day. He was extremely arch and very bossy. I didn’t like him, indeed took against him instantly. We were to meet again much later, in Brighton, in an incident I will explain later, when I provoked him into a spectacular hissy-fit.

It’s true there were girls with Union Jack mini skirts on the King’s Road in Chelsea, but outside the privileged postcodes London was also a tired city of endless grime. They were still clearing remaining bomb sites. People in Cricklewood were living in prefabs.5 There’s a documentary on YouTube, a tour of North London with the suave actor James Mason,6 disabusing the Swinging London narrative. He talked to bums, showed us the miserable offerings of the market traders, filmed navvies huddled around their braziers.

Withnail and I,7 which began in squalid Camden Town, was another accurate portrayal of the zeitgeist. But the narrative was Swinging London. The ‘easy listening’ song England Swings8 by Roger Miller, was a hit in 1965 in both Britain and the US, and I knew it wasn’t true.

None of what was happening in London suggested I could make a living there. University would have been the alternative but I had no qualifications, having become perfectly alienated from school. My economic prospects in Britain were zero. I thought I wanted to be a journalist but didn’t have a clue what I had to do to become one.

So I made the move to America. It was like being promoted to Club Class, from grotty, steerage England. Eventually I got a chance to return to Britain, during the government of Margaret Thatcher, when you didn’t have to put your watch back 20 years when you landed at Heathrow. But the move to America was the great escape.

I said goodbye to London friends, all heading to universities, and left Britain. I took the BOAC bus from the Victoria Coach Station and flew firstly to Bermuda to visit a school friend whose family had grown wealthy selling rum on Front Street. Then, via La Guardia, on to Detroit airport and then Ann Arbor where the sky was blue and it was blazing hot.

The young and ambitious state of Michigan had implanted in Ann Arbor a university with the mission of becoming the Athens of the Midwest, and it had succeeded. The University of Michigan, founded in 1817, had become one of the best in the world—still is, 18th in the 2025 reputation ranking of The Times Higher Education Supplement. President Kennedy launched the Peace Corps from the steps of the Michigan Union.

The university was especially strong in engineering, medicine, science and literature, profited from a generous alumni and boasted the nation’s best college football team. Also, and this was my personal nirvana, there was the Michigan Daily student newspaper. Here is where I transformed from a directionless exile, vaguely but inconclusively drawn towards journalism, into a cadet journalist. It was like winning the lottery.

Ann Arbor, known by the locals as ‘A2,’ was nothing like grimy London. It was a shady, prosperous bubble in Midwestern America, the enormous university and its hospital at the centre, surrounded by concentric circles of student housing, the smarter neighbourhoods where the professors lived, and the ranches on the outskirts, petering out to rural Michigan to the north and west, and blending into industrial Ypsilanti, the two big airports to the east, the giant Ford plant where they’d built Liberator Bombers, and then farther still, Detroit and the Canadian border. The University of Michigan dominated the city with 40,000 graduate and undergraduate students.

In its academic cocoon, Ann Arbor was (and still is) one of the most affluent and privileged places on earth but it was also (and still is) a hotbed of extreme politics, ultra-left at the time, now radical identitarian, all about pronouns, Palestinianism and critical race theory.

The year 1969 was the end of the Age of Aquarius, the theme song of the rock musical Hair. The Ann Arbor police had a special radio code—605—as a shorthand description of a hippie. I grew my hair over my shoulders and wore bell-bottom jeans. We must have looked ridiculous.

After London, buses and tubes, Ann Arbor was another world. Kids had cars. They would lend them to you, just like that. Insurance? No problem. Everything seemed enormous, even the food portions in restaurants. The girls were gorgeous. But riot police with shotguns were protecting the administration building.

The horrors of Vietnam and the draft permeated everything. More than 200 American soldiers a week were being killed. Campus politics were passionate and revolutionary and so was the music. Iggy Pop and the MC5 were the town bands in Ann Arbor. The MC5 didn’t get a lot of airplay with their hit song, ‘Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker.’ The sound was angrier than it had been in London.

Ann Arbor was the birthplace of the radical-left Students for a Democratic Society, which was to morph into the terrorist Weather Underground. Just before I showed up, the local recruiting office of the Central Intelligence Agency had been bombed. It wasn’t a huge bomb. Nobody was hurt. It was more of a fuck-you bomb.

The prime suspect was Pun Plamondon, a prominent member of John Sinclair’s White Panther Party, although he was never charged. Plamondon died in 2023, Sinclair in 2024,9 self-exiled in Amsterdam. The White Panther Party used the rainbow flag as its battle standard, not yet a symbol of gay liberation, and campaigned for dope, sex and rock and roll, all abundant in Ann Arbor at the time. It wasn’t clear what they would choose, if you offered them two out of three. The White Panther Party no longer exists. Its radicalism has been replaced on American campuses by wokism.

I suppose I never attended more than a couple of dozen lectures in my four years in Ann Arbor and don’t recall taking a single exam but many of my professors gave me passing grades anyway and the university never got around to throwing me out. Instead of going to class I immersed myself in the Daily. The student newspaper was a pillar of campus life with a reputation as a greenhouse for aspiring journalists. This was the deus ex machina for me. The Daily was my miracle. I was lost, then saved. For the next four years, I spent practically every day in its newsroom or out doing stories. Nobody taught me journalism. I learned by doing it.

The Daily was owned by the university but written and independently edited by students. It had no connection to the journalism department. It was independent also of the student government, unlike captive student publications in Britain. Nothing resembling at all the American college press has ever existed in Britain. We published six days a week and had news, opinion, arts and sports pages. A student business team sold classified and display advertising. The paper cost a dime and we sold thousands a day. Editors were paid $50 a...