One of the truly astonishing accounts to emerge in Munster’s account concerns another US president, John F. Kennedy, whose press secretary, Pierre Salinger, forged a cable in Murdoch’s name to kill a Murdoch report of an off-the-record talk he had with the president. The cable, sent through State Department channels, was signed ‘Murdoch’. What is more, Salinger arranged for Dean Rusk to sign a cable to the US Embassy in Canberra saying that the president directed the ambassador to contact the prime minister if necessary to stop publication. At the Sunday Mirror in Sydney, the embassy was told that a picture was received but no story. The picture of Kennedy, Murdoch, and Murdoch’s New York correspondent ran. This tidbit is sourced to the Kennedy Library in Boston, the presidential papers, national security files, Box 8. Munster says Murdoch later told friends that Kennedy was a boring man.

The reception for George Munster’s portrayal of Murdoch has been suitably heart-warming. Indeed it is as thorough and meticulous as critics have found, and only a nark would point out that it was a South African Rugby Union team, not a league side, that toured Australia arid led to the bizarre state of emergency in Queensland. None of this is as annoying, however, as having to see the nonsense that has come out of Fleet Street masquerading as books on Murdoch. The first, by a hack from the News of the World, made me think that the Pervs of the World deserved to be taken over by Murdoch, if this was its standard.

What should be recognised in Murdoch, and is not in the Munster account, is his singular ability to cheapen anything he brushes. The collapse of the formidable Insight reporting team on the London Sunday Times is one example. This newspaper has hit its lowest circulation in twenty-one years recently as its talented staff seek less-polluted pastures. The patchy Times of London now has an editor whose reporting achievements included an exclusive interview with a soccer star who had his leg cut off after an accident. He was proud of this scoop and how he had paid a pound to get past a nurse and break the news to the star.

Having vented the predictable spleen on Murdoch, one cannot but admire the cool way that Munster went about tracing the rise and rise of Rupert from a young owner of the Adelaide News to the head of a filmmaking, television, video, newspapers, magazines and books corporation, with his newspapers selling 3,000 million a year and company profits up 2,000 fold since 1952.

The young Murdoch was a battler. As the future American citizen was to tell the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal six years ago during the almost farcical hearings on his acquisition of the Ten Network.

My life has been spent fighting them, starting with a very small newspaper, standing up to attempts to push me out of business at the age of 23 in Adelaide. A previous conservative government brought in a special law to protect those monopolies and to make certain that outsiders like myself could never get as much. Who in this room can say that I am not a good Australian or a patriotic one? Who else chooses to be battered and bruised ten months a year in being an Australian when it would be easier not to be one?

In coming to grips with Murdoch, Munster finds that the bubble and eager gossip that marked the younger media baron has been replaced by one who expects to be sized up, listens carefully and seeks· bearings rather than offering them. He casts the posts, but with vague outlines. Thus one will be seen as a circulation-booster for a sick paper, that one as a political contact. To move outside these limits, as journalists do more than others, or to fall short of the chief’s expectations, is to be the victim of a sharp personal deterioration in relations with him. Hence the horror stories of sackings, usually handled by others in the manner that the Melbourne lawyer and now News Corp’s chairman, Richard Searby, took care of Harold Evans, once his usefulness was outworn as editor of the Times, Searby, a former fellow debater of Murdoch’s at Geelong Grammar, was presented in London as a future chief justice of Australia.

George Munster did not live long enough to see this book published. It is a tribute to his assiduous research and clear writing. His book ends with Murdoch expanding in northern Queensland but being shut out of Warners. Since then there has been the takeover of Twentieth-Century Fox, the wrangle over his ownership of the Tell Network and his successful staving off for two years of his compulsory shedding of two big American papers.

Murdoch’s cultivation of powerful politicians such as Jack McEwen make fascinating reading. More hilarious is his failure to strike any rapport with Gough Whitlam; indeed, he had much more success with Bob Hawke. But it was Murdoch who finished up being courted by the powerful. English royalty even turned out for a pageant to celebrate the birthday of the Times.

The Dirty Digger who left England because the establishment loathed him and his newspapers snooping on titled leaders has evolved into King Kong, taking on New York, and, with smart political, footwork, taking off. From battler baron, Murdoch has transformed the concept of a media conglomerate. After all, why buy M*A*S*H for your television stations, when you can own the outfit that makes it?