Of the great names in 20th century media, most are no more. The Graham family no longer owns The Washington Post. The Fairfaxes lost The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review. The great-grandchildren of the first modern media mogul, Joseph Pulitzer, finally sold their ancestor’s company in 2005. Time Inc, the staggeringly powerful magazine publisher built by Henry Luce for Time, Life and Fortune, no longer exists. The Packers have no hand in Nine, the owner of this masthead.

But it is not the latter generations of these families or their managers that Eric Beecher, a former Murdoch editor-turned mini independent media mogul, blames for the demise of the media in his new book The Men Who Killed the News (Scribner). Rather, his ire is directed at the men who built the news in the first place, especially the industry’s great survivor, Rupert Murdoch.