In 1979, Rupert Murdoch made a speech entitled “Free Markets and Free Minds.” He delivered it a day after Margaret Thatcher’s Comprehensive Spending Review that was to complete her unfinished business of reducing the size of government and unleashing the private sector.
He was something of a parvenu, Murdoch said. At each step of the way, he had taken on vested interests – whether trade unions or other “institutions hungry for power at the expense of ordinary citizens.” He argued that technological change was leading to a new “democracy…from the bottom up.” A free society, he said, “required an independent press: turbulent, inquiring, bustling and free. That’s why our journalism is hard-driving and questioning of authority. And so are our journalists.”
On another occasion, Rupert Murdoch began his inaugural Margaret Thatcher Lecture with these words:
“This evening we have come here to celebrate a great leader who championed a profound idea. That idea was freedom. At home and abroad, she expanded the boundaries of freedom – and sculpted a legacy that spans generations and crosses party lines.”
Fifteen years later, Dennis Potter, the author of The Singing Detective and many other successful television serials, learned he had pancreatic cancer. In his final television interview, on April 5, 1994, he said he had named his cancer “Rupert,” after Rupert Murdoch, who represented to him so much of what he found despicable about British mass media. As he sipped on a morphine cocktail, he told a visibly moved Melvyn Bragg that he had two works to finish (Cold Lazarus and Karaoke) before his impending death. “My only regret is if I die four pages too soon.”
On June 7, he died, his work complete.
You can see the interview on YouTube.
Eric Koch’s new book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
