It’s hard to know exactly when Rupert Murdoch’s alliance with the conservative right began. In his early days, his politics were eclectic. As a student at Oxford, he even flirted with socialism. But January 1974 is as good a moment as any to situate his rightward turn. It was then that he turned against Gough Whitlam’s reforming Labor government in Australia. A classified diplomatic cable sent by the US consul general reported to Washington that Murdoch was instructing “the editors of the newspapers he controls” to “kill Whitlam.” Whitlam was forced to resign later that year, and from then on Murdoch would side with the winners, and the winners were overwhelmingly on the Right.

If anyone alive personifies the destruction of the postwar social and economic compromise, it is Murdoch. Such was the contempt in which he was held by the cultural elite in my own country, the UK, that the television writer Dennis Potter named the tumor that would kill him “Rupert.” But for all Murdoch’s significance, we still don’t fully understand what his long career tells us about politics and the media in our contemporary era, and the relationship between the two. As he turns ninety, it is time we turn to that task in earnest.