Matthew Rickardson

He wants the prestige, he wants the power and he wants the audiences.

If you look at Rupert's career, he's always had the popular newspaper that could address, you know, the masses.

but you also have an elite newspaper, so you're speaking to the insiders, but you're also speaking to the mass of the people.

That's what gives him his influence, that he can pull the strings at both levels, if you like.

When Margaret Thatcher and her government launched the war in the Falklands, Murdoch's newspapers give a lot of editorial support for that.

Gotcha!

This was central to cementing the relationship between Murdoch and Thatcher.

If you were asked to name the two key people who reshaped Britain in this more neoliberal vein in the 1980s, it'd be hard to think of two other people than Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch.

That is a good summary.

And you can see the fruits of this, if you like, the bitter fruits of this decades later in the form of

the phone hacking scandal in the United Kingdom in the mid-2000s.

The newspapers were declining in revenues and readership.

So that forced them to be even more

Militant in looking for sensation.

Newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, that is mostly the sun and the news of the world, hacked into the phones of members of the royal family, celebrities, but also, and this is crucial, also ordinary people, not famous people.

discovered that they've hacked the phone of this dead teenage girl, Millie Dowler.

And I apologised and I have nothing further to say.

People are revolted.

It creates a huge public reaction.

You know, the Murdochs could not control the revulsion.