Shock of the News

In a razor-sharp witty memoir Jonathan Miller pulls back the curtain on Murdoch, media, tech and the news in a way that is bound to provoke debate. The young Jonathan Miller had an innate talent to annoy authority as a pupil at Bedales school. When he discovered that the news can be like a hand grenade, he had found his calling.

In pursuit of creating a stir, he ended up in many different places, from Rupert Murdoch’s tech adviser and disruptor-in-chief, to war reporting in Kosovo, the UK’s first news site, Piers Morgan’s Uncensored and bare-knuckle reporting on the follies of rural Britain.

These spiky confessions trace through the Murdoch empire’s secrets, the tech revolution that preceded the web, Bart Simpson, Margaret Thatcher, the doomed fate of wokeness, and trouble in an era flattened by AI. Tech and the media world will never look the same...