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The World’s Most Dangerous Man
How Rupert Murdoch has poisoned us all
Keith Rupert Murdoch was born on 11th March 1931 in Melbourne, Australia. His father was a journalist who became a senior executive of one of Australia’s major newspaper companies. In 1952 Murdoch created out of the bankrupt company his father bequeathed him News Limited, the entity that would eventually become the behemoth known today as News Corporation.
By the turn of the century, Murdoch’s organization owned over 800 different companies in more than fifty countries. While other news-oriented organizations were struggling with the arrival of the Internet, Murdoch’s publications continued to thrive. Even massive mistakes like the acquisition of Myspace for $580 million, all but $35 million of which was subsequently written off, weren’t enough to dent Murdoch’s profits and relentless growth. Today Murdoch stands unrivalled as the mightiest media baron on Earth, able to shape and sustain the opinions of hundreds of millions of people for decades and thus wielding far more power than any transient politician or political Party.
Murdoch is where he is today because he understood from an early age that we’re not all equal. Intelligence, however you care to measure it, has a Gaussian distribution (the so-called bell curve). As the average is defined as the midway point, this means half the world’s…
