Murdoch and the Queen are both smiling in the black-and-white print, but not at each other. Instead, they are focused on a man, seated with his back to the camera, who fans the air with his hand as he makes a point or tells a story. Whatever the unidentified man is saying, the Queen of England and the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation are highly amused.

At first glance, the image appears to be a candid moment between a monarch and a man whom his British foes once labelled the Dirty Digger, but the moment is anything but candid. There are at least five other people in the room, the Queen is visiting The Times as part of her official duties, and meanwhile Murdoch’s other London daily, the Sun, profits from its intrusions into the private lives of the royal family. The image, in other words, is not a portrait of queen and subject, but predator and prey.

Not only are the Queen and Murdoch adversaries, they are contemporaries. They were born five years apart (the Queen turns eighty-six next month, Murdoch eighty-one this month); both of their mothers lived past one hundred (the Queen Mother lived to be 101, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch turned 103 in February); both of their fathers died in 1952; both were crowned as heads of their respective family businesses in 1953; both have tirelessly pursued their duties around the world over the past sixty years; and both have suffered serious reversals in their public standing.

The Queen’s great crisis – following the annus horribilis of 1992 – arrived in 1997 when, following the death of Princess Diana, the royal family stayed at Balmoral while thousands of Londoners left flowers outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, and Murdoch’s Sun ran front-page headlines such as ‘Do You Care?’. As former Prime Minister Tony Blair recounts in his autobiography, Tony Blair: A Journey (2010):

I knew that swings in sentiment can come and go … But this was a unique case. As the days passed, the crowds grew. Three books of condolence at St James’s Palace became four, became fifteen, became forty-three. The outpouring of grief was turning into a mass movement for change. It was a moment of supreme national articulation, and it was menacing for the royal family. I don’t know what would have happened if they had just kept going as before.

The Queen survived that unprecedented swing in sentiment, and has stayed on the throne long enough for Diana’s elder son to win back public affection for The Firm. Now, like the House of Windsor fifteen years ago, the House of Murdoch is in major trouble. Only time will tell whether Murdoch is able to pull off a similar escape for the inheritors of his family business.

What began in 2005 as a complaint about a News of the World story on Prince William’s injured knee has grown into an all-consuming crisis for Murdoch’s European arm, News International. Following the revelation in July 2011 that the News of the World had hacked the voicemail messages of murdered London schoolgirl Milly Dowler, Murdoch closed the first paper he ever acquired in the United Kingdom; then he withdrew his bid for full ownership of satellite broadcaster BSkyB; then he accepted the resignation of two confidants, Dow Jones chief executive Les Hinton and News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks (Brooks was subsequently arrested on suspicion of phone hacking); then he and his son James were grilled by a parliamentary select committee over the phone hacking scandal (James was called back to answer more questions); and then he saw shareholders revolt against the re-election of James and Lachlan Murdoch to the board, with almost thirty-five per cent voting against James and thirty-four per cent voting against Lachlan (considering the fact that the Murdochs control forty per cent of the shares, this is a significant protest from the majority of non-Murdoch shareholders). Meanwhile, the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practice, and ethics of the British press, together with police investigations into phone hacking, drag on. Ominously, arrests have now expanded from people associated with the News of the World to senior past and present staff from the Sun.

Has the phone hacking scandal – like the death of Diana – created a mass movement for change at News Corporation? Is this the beginning of the end for Rupert Murdoch? The tabloid answer (full disclosure: my journalistic training was at Murdoch’s Sun News-Pictorial in the 1980s) would be ‘yes’ in bold capitals at 72-point font, but the truth is that it is too early to say what will come of the intersecting inquiries and investigations, and too dangerous to underestimate the staying power of Murdoch.

This is a point that former Fairfax journalist David McKnight is at pains to make at the conclusion of his new book, Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation of Political Power:

There is no sign of Rupert Murdoch genuinely stepping aside. Indeed, the opposite is the case … Rupert Murdoch is likely to remain a powerful figure capable of influencing world politics for a considerable time to come.

What McKnight sets out to do, then, is reverse engineer Murdoch’s modus operandi: going back through his wheeling and dealing in Australia, the United Kingdom, and United States to uncover how he, his executives, and his editors go about turning a dollar and turning opinions. Although at times florid (‘The rebel child of theMelbourne establishment was becoming the dragon slayer of the liberal elites world wide’), the book is a decent analysis of the neo-conservative ideologies and contrarian instincts that shape the views of News Corporation editors, such as – despite Murdoch’s 2007 comment that climate change posed a ‘clear, catastrophic threat’ – The Australian’s sceptical debunking of the science of global warming.

None of it is new, but that is not the point. McKnight is set on proving ‘that the arrogance and contempt for rules on display in the hacking scandal arise from a wider culture within News Corporation’. McKnight’s implicit intent is clear: Murdoch created a culture that allowed phone hacking to flourish, therefore Murdoch is guilty. I don’t think he makes his case.

For starters, no evidence of wrongdoing has been found against News Corporation’s operations in the United States or Australia. If News Corporation did have a criminal culture, surely it would manifest itself in other parts of the Murdoch empire, not just the United Kingdom. On the face of it, the phone hacking scandal is a British phenomenon that says as much about Fleet Street as it does about News Corporation.

That being said, there is no doubt that Murdoch has, over the decades, created a unique culture within the news operations of his company. Steve Jobs, an acquaintance of Murdoch’s, mentioned this to his biographer Walter Isaacson: ‘I used to believe that a really big company couldn’t have a clear corporate culture. But I now believe it can be done. Murdoch’s done it. I think I’ve done it at Apple.’ Another Murdoch biographer, Michael Wolff, defines the culture in The Man Who Owns the News (2008): ‘[Murdoch’s] penuriousness, his aversion to pretense, his disdain for grandness or affectation or – his worst, most damning word – elitism, is the DNA of the company.’ Having worked in a Murdoch newsroom for five years, I would add the following descriptors to Wolff’s definition: blokey, anti-intellectual, arrogant, cult-like.

News Corporation’s news outlets are bullies. They do pick winners and losers in political battles. Their editors – such as Chris Mitchell at The Australian – can, and do, as Robert Manne said in his laudable Quarterly Essay, Bad News: Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation (2011), act as enforcers of ‘those values that lie at the heart of the Murdoch empire: market fundamentalism and the beneficence of American global hegemony’ (interestingly, Manne recycles that line in his Foreword to McKnight’s book). However, as crude as Murdoch’s papers can be in Australia, as partisan as Fox News is in the United States, as guilty as his newsrooms often are of going outside the bounds of journalistic integrity, it does not necessarily follow that it is accepted practice for them to operate outside the law. Murdoch himself, in a Twitter micro-blog that he started on New Year’s Day, stated on 23 January: ‘No excuses for phone hacking. No argument.’

The problem with News Corporation is bigger than the illegal activities of reporters and editors on one or two or even three newspapers. Those journalists are accountable for their own conduct – unless Rupert Murdoch directed those illegal activities, he is not. What is of greater concern, for me, is how much power Murdoch is able to legally wield in the United Kingdom, where he owns forty per cent of the newspaper business; in Australia, where he owns seventy per cent; and in the United States, where Fox News defines and dominates populist Republican politics. Such a concentration of power gives New Corporation enormous clout if its publications make a collective decision to, say, prosecute the case for an invasion of Iraq.

Of all Murdoch’s campaigns, one should never be forgotten: the dismissal of the Whitlam government. It is often overlooked that Murdoch strongly backed Whitlam’s election in 1972. Blanche d’Alpuget’s biography Robert J. Hawke (1982) recounts how, during the 1972 federal campaign, Hawke told Whitlam, ‘You’re going to regret the day you got into bed with Rupert.’ Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs (2010), by Malcolm Fraser and Margaret Simons, proves Hawke’s point. Fraser – who has known Murdoch since they were both boys and who went fishing with young Rupert and Keith Murdoch on Western-port Bay – wrote that he asked Murdoch for his support against Whitlam:

He asked, ‘Will your Senate stick?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the Senate will stick.’
And he said, ‘I’ll stay with you as long as they do.’

According to Fraser, Murdoch was also called on to keep another media magnate, Kerry Packer, from backing out of a similar commitment to the Senate blockade that ultimately led to Governor-General John Kerr’s dismissal of the Whitlam government:

Kerry would ring up the office and have wobbly knees. He’d say, ‘You’ve got to change; you’ve got to give in.’ And the way we dealt with that was to get [Fraser’s chief of staff, Tony] Eggleton to ring up Rupert, and get Rupert to talk to Packer, and tell him to straighten up. And that worked.

Fraser said that Murdoch did not ask for anything in return for his support, but Packer ‘came looking for favours’.

Is it any wonder that Hawke as prime minister capitulated to both Murdoch and Packer in 1986 – allowing News Corporation to secure seventy per cent of the nation’s newspapers by purchasing the Herald & Weekly Times and, through the aggregation of local television services, by giving Packer the control he wanted over regional television stations? As one of Hawke’s ministers, the late John Button, recounted in his memoir, As It Happened (1998): ‘[Hawke’s] prime concern seemed to be accommodating the media tycoons Packer and Murdoch. In Cabinet discussions on media issues those two were like Banquo’s ghost loitering behind the prime minister’s chair.’ Button also recalled a conversation with the then-communications minister, Michael Duffy, in which Duffy said of Murdoch and Packer: ‘No government has stood up to these people. Not one since the advent of television.’

And that is why Rupert Murdoch is so dangerous.