After quitting Question Time and
BBC election coverage the 81-year-old shows no sign of slowing down. He’s made a podcast about Rupert Murdoch, whose career in some ways parallels his own...
Every once in a while, something chances along that illuminates our baffling world with sudden clarity. One such something is The Sun King, a six-part podcast by David Dimbleby about the long career of Rupert Murdoch. I listened to it all through once and then again and I recommend that you do, too. In telling the story of the rise of the most powerful media tycoon the world has known, it serves among other things to explain the fertile germ of populism in
Britain and the US, a byproduct of the corrosive tone of Murdoch’s tabloids, and outlines the threat to democracy presented by a US president who was a creation of Fox News.
The series gains its authority in the voice of Dimbleby, never less than wry and reasonable, whose career has covered a similar span to Murdoch’s. The pair first met in 1968 when Dimbleby interviewed the
Australian – and his second wife Anna (“I don’t like him being called a tycoon”) – after Murdoch arrived in Britain having bought the News of the World. The two men had a few things in common, Dimbleby felt: both had lost their famous fathers in their 20s and both had inherited a newspaper business to run; Murdoch in Melbourne and Adelaide, and Dimbleby, on a smaller scale, in the local papers of south-west London. In the decades since, those journalistic legacies have been exploited in markedly different ways, like some parable of the media talents. Dimbleby has followed in his father’s footsteps to become the most trusted and avuncular of the BBC’s voices over 50 years; Murdoch continues to reshape partisan journalism to suit his own cynical billionaire ends.