Maureen Dowd's Striking Look At The Murdochs

Murdoch said The News of the World had not lived up to the standards of his father and mother.

Now he was talking sentimentally to British members of Parliament investigating the hacking and Scotland Yard bribery scandal about how his father had seen newspapers as a force for good.

“I just wanted to say that I was brought up by a father who was not rich but was a great journalist,” the 80-year-old Murdoch said. “And he, just before he died, bought a small paper specifically saying in his will it had given him the chance to do good. And I remember what he did and what he was most proud of and for which he was hated by many people in this country for many, many years, which was expose the scandal in Gallipoli, which I remain very, very proud of.”

The late Keith Murdoch, the grandson of two Scottish ministers, was a media baron in Australia who wielded the power to make and break prime ministers, just as his son later would.

And like Rupert, Keith’s heart, or as one Australian writer put it, “what he would have called his heart,” was drawn to brash tabloids.

As a young journalist during World War I, Keith Murdoch became famous when he visited the Gallipoli campaign and broke censorship rules barring any criticism of the conduct of war or tally of casualty figures. He wrote home to the Australian prime minister, a family friend, and he sneaked off to London to blow the whistle there — in a jingoistic, exaggerated way his son would appreciate — about the incompetence of the British command in charge of the decimation in Turkey, where 120,000 soldiers died, including 8,500 Australian infantry and light horsemen.

Old posters for the brilliant 1981 movie “Gallipoli” give Rupert Murdoch a producing credit. He financed half the movie to show the world why his father had been right.

Rupert wanted to avenge his father with the British establishment, and what sweeter way to do it than to take over the British press, including its most prestigious broadsheet, The Times of London, and help decide who runs Britain.
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His most revealing moment was when he volunteered his admiration of Singapore, calling it the most “open and clear society in the world.” Its leaders are so lavishly paid, he said, that “there’s no temptation, and it is the cleanest society you’d find anywhere.”

It was instructive that Murdoch chose to praise a polished, deeply authoritarian police state. Maybe that’s how corporations would live if they didn’t have to believe in people.