The long reign of the Sun king, Rupert Murdoch, is approaching its end in a rising blaze of scandal and disgrace, writes former News Corp executive Rodney E. Lever.
During Christmas, I finished reading ABC Media Watch host Paul Barry’s book: Breaking News: Sex, Lies and the Murdoch succession.
From the myriad of books that have been written about Rupert Murdoch over the past sixty years, this one it is by far the most comprehensive study of a living emperor who is still manages to seem to stride the world wearing no clothes, believing himself to be some kind of hero still challenging the establishment like a reborn Don Quixote.
For Australians, particularly, this is a book that sets it all out — the whole sordid story of Murdoch’s disgrace, brought upon the noble profession of journalism, the humiliation that his late mother suffered in the years before her death and the family he produced from the second wife before discarding her. Two of the family, Elisabeth and Lachlan, have managed to make lives of their own, while the last, James, will spend the rest of his life wearing the shame brought upon himself by his own father.
I am not a fan of book reviews. What I am writing now is not a review of the book, but a recommendation that every Australian who is interested in the progress and politics of this country should understand what is about to follow in the last years of Rupert’s reign.
The fact that in three consecutive annual shareholders meetings, Rupert Murdoch blandly lied to his executives and to his shareholders and to the customers who have financed his dreadful depredations.
Forgetting about his early years, when Murdoch seemed to be a national hero who was going to bring new life into newspapers and to lead the way in new technology, Paul Barry has chosen to cover the sordid latter years — from the time Rupert became the major producer and distributor of news in the United Kingdom to the present time, when he has been surely been exposed as someone who may not only face criminal charges but will very likely be driven out of his own media world altogether in shameful disgrace.
For the record, Rupert Murdoch did, in the 1970s, set out to bring down the British royal family and to change the governance of the whole United Kingdom, such was the level of his megalomania. I sat with him at innumerable lunches and dinners and listened to him drivel along about how Queen Elizabeth had once snubbed his own mother, Elisabeth Murdoch, when the Queen came to open the new Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, which owed its very existence to Dame Elisabeth and her enormous charitable efforts over a lifetime.
This is one of the shadows over his career that many would not know about, but it was put into practice the moment he acquired the ownership of the News of the World. But his real enemy in England was the “establishment” — meaning not just a few dukes and duchesses, but the Houses of Lords and Commons as well.
The UK is about to have its revenge. That is the theme that emerges from Paul Barry’s detailed account in his book. Murdoch has even managed to soil the reputations of the English police service, from the highest ranking officer down to the lowly bobby walking the street.
The more serious revenge will come when the senior management of News International and 21st Century Fox and Fox News start to take a hand. It may to be until the completion of the British trials, nor the next shareholders meeting, but perhaps the one after.
As Paul Barry makes clear, enough has already happened to prove that Murdoch is not only not a fit person to own newspapers, but equally unfit to control the internet, the movies or television. But the matter is so charged with a succession of inevitable events that the ending will be long and drawn out indeed — as well as extremely painful for the Murdoch family.
Breaking News: Sex, Lies and the Murdoch succession (ISBN 9781741759785) is published by Allen & Unwin; hard cover, 480 pages, RRP $39.99.
The originals of John Graham's art, featured in this piece as well as elsewhere on IA, are available for purchase by contacting managing editor David Donovan at editor@independentaustralia.net.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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