The Murdoch empire’s darkest secret

One way or another, we’re almost all ‘content creators’ these days, humble social-media serfs toiling away in the Silicon Valley vineyards of the ‘likes’. That’s why dinosaur billionaire media owners – the old kings of content – have taken on mythic qualities even as their empires collapse. It’s why everybody loves the TV show Succession. 

The Murdochs, the Maxwells, the Bloombergs, who not so long ago were potent figures of vulgar fun, suddenly possess the sort of nostalgic glamour once attached to the landed gentry or the Great Industrialists. 

As the highest aristocrats of the now disrupted information age, they excite a new kind of snobbery – almost a romantic yearning for the good old days when powerful people knew how to mislead us, the bovine public, and we didn’t have to lie to ourselves quite so much.  

The Murdochs, about whom Succession is loosely based, are figures of particular intrigue, as this