The Fall of the House of Murdoch: Fourteen Days That Ended a Media Dynasty

Peter Jukes is a British writer and journalist. Through his TV appearances and regular columns on the Daily Beast website and in Newsweek he has become one of the UK's most authoritative commentators on the News International phone-hacking scandal and the Leveson Inquiry. He writes regularly for New Statesman, Prospect magazine and the Independent on the links between culture and politics and is a high-profile contributor to the US political blogs Daily Kos and Motley Moose. Jukes is also a dramatist for radio and television, whose credits include In Deep, Bad Faith, Waking the Dead and Sea of Souls. He lives in London.

Structured around the fourteen days in 2011, from the moment the News of the World's hacking of the phone of a murdered 13-year-old schoolgirl was exposed, The Fall of the House of Murdoch is a riveting account of the scandal that closed the world's best-selling English-language newspaper, forced one of the most powerful families in the world to appear before Parliament and finally prompted Murdoch's departure from the UK newspaper world he dominated for three decades. But the book covers more than just Hackgate. It is a forensic expose of News Corp's culture, through the early days in Australian media, the purchase of the News of the World, the Sun and the Times group, the Wapping move to the move into satellite broadcasting and the creation of the Fox Network. Exhaustively researched and fully sourced, The Fall of the House of Murdoch is a morality tale for our times, a family drama played out on a world stage and required reading for anyone seeking to understand the hidden connections that bind politics, business and culture together.