From Murdoch to Musk: Hacking the State

An Unexpected ‘Hello’

We can blame Steve Jobs. The founder of Apple gave Rupert Murdoch an iPad around Christmas 2011, and Murdoch thought it was a game-changer. He installed one of its most popular apps. “Hello @twitter!” Murdoch wrote:

“First tweet. Thanks to all my followers. Hope this is a good way to keep in touch with interesting people and ideas.”

Within two days, a Twitter user purporting to be his then‑still estranged but un-divorced wife, Wendi Deng, piped up: “You okay, hun?” The fake account was so convincing it was verified and then banned. But Rupert persisted.

One of the most iconic media figures was finally available to the public, without a phalanx of lawyers and handlers to inhibit him. It was a PR disaster.

Murdoch fell into every cliché. Extolling red meat, rebuking renewable energy, gunning for then‑Prime Minister David Cameron or President Barack Obama (“out to lunch!”), pushing for Scottish independence – his outbursts were like an embarrassing grandfather at Christmas dinner.

“Maybe most Moslems [are] peaceful, but until they recognise and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible”, he thundered. Then mused: “Why is the Jewish‑owned press so consistently anti‑Israel in every crisis?”

Forget the equal opportunity bigotry. Arguably the most powerful media mogul of his generation – the publisher of more than a hundred newspapers from The Times of London to The Sun, the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal – the holder of the megaphone of Fox News and various Sky networks, somehow still seemed to feel he didn’t have a voice.

But was social media the place to find it?

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Holding the Spotlight

Murdoch straddles an entire century of major media transformation. Brought up in the Citizen Kane world of press barons, commanding and controlling assembly lines of workers of hand and brain, he then transitioned through the post‑war world of pop culture and mass media, and bang into the networked Information Age.

The old industrial power of print was instilled in Murdoch’s blood like ink.

His father was an influential newspaperman who played an important role in the Gallipoli scandal of Churchill’s failed Turkish campaign in the First World War. Such was the sway of newspaper barons in the early part of the 20th Century that two of them – Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Northcliffe – became part of Lloyd George’s Cabinet. Keith Murdoch was so highly rated that, as an Australian, he was dubbed ‘Lord Southcliffe’.

The power of print – as Rupert later said – ‘to do great good or evil’ was therefore grimed under the son’s fingernails.

After Oxford University, where he tried to rise in the Labour Party and kept a bust of Lenin in his college rooms, Murdoch learned his trade on the backbenches of the Daily Express in its 1950s heyday. He went back to Australia to start up a populist tabloid with its own Page 3 glamour girls, as well as a high‑end broadsheet.

In 1969, he returned to the UK to buy the News of the World title, and a few years later took over and transformed the Labour‑leaning The Sun to become a demotic daily, blending 60s permissive culture with a sexist, bigoted bent.

The red tops were tabloid hits. But it was the takeover of the establishment Times and Sunday Times during the early 80s that proved Murdoch’s astute ability to parlay media influence into political clout.

As a stalwart supporter of Margaret Thatcher’s free market agenda, he was allowed to bypass competition law and become the dominant force in Fleet Street.

By the time of the Wapping dispute in 1985, Murdoch had Thatcher’s backing to break the print unions, with the heavy‑handed presence of the Metropolitan Police. The conflicts were as violent as the miners’ strike, and Murdoch’s victory was perhaps just as important for Britain’s post‑industrial future.

His impact renders redundant the perennial question of whether he is a businessman interested in money or a politician manqué obsessed with power. In the era of Thatcher‑Reagan deregulation, de‑unionisation, and international finance, economics and politics were inseparable.

The monopoly cash from Fortress Wapping (Murdoch had 40% of the circulation of Fleet Street but 50% of the profits) provided the funding for his US launch pad.

He wanted to buy a network of channels that would become the basis for Fox News. But, under stricter American media ownership laws, he had to be a US citizen – fast. President Ronald Reagan obliged. So did Margaret Thatcher (again) allowing him to broadcast his Sky satellite network from Europe, though his rival BSB had won the franchise. Murdoch eventually merged with BSB to have a controlling interest in BSkyB.

For all the favours from politicians and regulators, Murdoch couldn’t buck the market when it came to technology.

By the turn of the millennium, the dot-com boom threatened both the print empire and satellite businesses. People were increasingly replacing aerial dishes with internet connections. The Murdochs – especially James Murdoch – tried to get into the new digital domain and bought the popular early social media site, MySpace.

That was a flop, and MySpace became a ghost town as it was quickly vacated by people favouring the bright new Facebook. So James came up with a new gambit: buy up the whole of BSkyB and turn it into a digital hub for all their content.

Cue the courtship and endorsement of the new Conservative Party leadership, David Cameron and George Osborne, and the appointment of senior Murdoch Editor Andy Coulson as Downing Street’s head of communications.

When, boosted by Murdoch’s papers, Coulson and Cameron entered No 10 in 2010, the strategic takeover of BSkyB was unexpectedly stalled by anti‑monopoly regulators and the administration’s Liberal Democrat coalition partners. It was eventually derailed by the Guardian and investigative journalist Nick Davies’ revelations of the phone‑hacking scandal.

Murdoch went to Parliament to apologise – the “humblest day of my life” – and was grilled by lawyers at the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics, practices, and culture.

That was the moment Murdoch decided to join Twitter.

Though he understood the importance of social media, it was obviously painful for him to be in the spotlight rather than controlling it – he had preferred quiet conclaves with powerful people and back‑door meetings with prime ministers. According to Tony Blair’s director of communications, Lance Price, Murdoch was secretly the 24th member of the Cabinet.

Secrecy was key.

The glare of negative publicity, police investigations, lengthy trials, and the Leveson recommendations for press regulation all seem to have aggravated and radicalised Murdoch.

His conservatism shifted away from traditional values around the rule of law and convention to a libertarian extreme where all regulation is considered a form of ‘state control’ and lawyers are ‘activists’. He beat a track that Elon Musk would soon follow; from a demand for ‘small government’ to zero government – from liberty to lawlessness.

Even the police he usually praised were there to be defied: in the case of Murdoch’s executives, deleting 20,000 million emails when asked by the Met to preserve them.

In the end, under the barrage of scandal, Murdoch admitted he found the directness of social media too much (I had a brief spat about the New York Times with him but he was very polite). When, in 2016, he married his last wife but one, Jerry Hall, he tweeted:

“No more tweets for 10 days or ever! Feel like the luckiest AND happiest man in the world.”

Then someone quietly removed the iPad.

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‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei’

A decade of civil litigation later, court filings suggest that there are more than 5,000 victims of unlawful information gathering at Murdoch’