Having worked in a bewildering variety of media; TV, theatre, journalism, radio, publishing (and indeed a brief stint working for Murdoch designing interactive dramas in the 90s) I know that this is book I'm destined to write because Murdoch has touched so many of the professional areas of my life. My drama credits are diverse - from a West End Musical to award winning mainstream TV shows such as Waking the Dead and Sea of Souls; an arcane but still academically popular book about cities A Shout in the Street, to two recent darkly comic radio series starring Lenny Henry as a Police Chaplain who has lost his faith. Confused? I'm not. It's exciting. It's a mess. But if there is one unifying thread, it's this link between culture and politics which The Fall of the House of Murdoch so vividly demonstrates.
This fusion of culture and politics also underpins my non-fiction journalistic career, writing for The Independent, New Statesman or Prospect magazine for themes as diverse as nationalism, art in the computer age, or apocalyptic religion. It was this connection which, in the 90s, led me to be involved in the investigations around the cash for questions scandal and become a speechwriter for Gordon Brown on the issue of British Identity. In the last five years this has led me online where I'm a regular blogger on US political sites like Daily Kos, Motley Moose and MyDD, where I documented the 2008 Obama primary wars for Prospect Magazine.
Back in the early 90s, I wrote that computers and the internet will electrify the word, and turn passive consumers into active producers of culture and meaning. More than ever, with crowd-sourced citizen journalism and online activism and now crowd funded projects like this, I believe its time has come.
The book will be richly illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Eric Lewis who I met as one of the fellow campaigners online in the US.
