My flirtation with Murdoch only lasted two years before my moral compass became too dysfunctional

This following is an edited extract from the just released book The Men Who Killed the News by Eric Beecher (Scribner Australia).

When Rupert Murdoch lured me away from my job as editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, then arguably the best newspaper in Australia, I was 36 and loved being a serious journalist.

It was 1987. Murdoch wasn’t the international ogre he later became (this was pre-phone-hacking, pre-Fox News), but like many journalists in the Anglosphere, I felt apprehensive about his editorial values, his voracious commerciality, and the methods he used to dispense power. I decided to accept his offer to become editor in chief of his Melbourne newspaper group because it was an exquisite challenge, or so I told myself, and because I didn’t lack ambition.