There is a great deal of comment and not a little anger in the UK about the News of the World’s phone hacking. Though there has never been a shortage of politicians eager for Rupert Murdoch’s friendship in the past, and even now, because of his ability to write positive or negative things about them in newspapers and on TV news programmes around the world.
Such a degree of power is of course reprehensible but he is no different from Ford in his day. His thoughts are not about society but his place in it and what he can own. Murdoch inherited a million from his father and has done well with it, risking all in high stakes games to own the world’s media and influence power politics. His love affair with Thatcherism, his use of nudity to make money are all well known. None of these things speaks well of the man.
The saddest part of these men’s lives is that they make hay out of liberality but they are near enough all right wing and democratic values are not safe in their hands. That is because their reason for living is the power and money they make, not the benefits to society as a whole from what they do…or rather could do.
I am thinking his son is no different though one of his sons walked away from it all. At least we know from that that this behaviour is not genetic.