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The End of the Street

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When the Australian media magnate, Rupert Murdoch, acquired the English Sun, News of the World, Times and Sunday Times newspapers through his News International organization he became the most powerful newspaper baron of his generation. His ambition stretched beyond the newspaper industry, however, and in 1985 he became an American citizen and borrowed £670 millon from New York's Citicorp to pay for 6 Metromedia television stations which formed the basis of the Fox Network. He could barely afford the loan and needed cash. His English newspapers provided the most obvious opportunity to generate the revenue required to service the huge debts he had amassed to build a media empire in the USA, but only with greater production efficiency and reliability.

Murdoch loathed the restrictive working practices and the challenges to his editorial control from the workforce in his UK newspapers. Linda Melvern quotes him as characterising Fleet Street as "three times the number of jobs at five times the level of wages" compared to other countries' print industries. In a plot of near military precision and secrecy he engineered an audacious campaign to change the face of a nation's industrial landscape, spilling Britain into one of the most controversial industrial disputes of the time, the Wapping Dispute, and causing the demise of one of Britain's most famous institutions, Fleet Street.

Linda Melvern writes with journalistic flair an exhaustively researched history of the events leading up to the 1986 News International strike in London, England. The book was written even before the dispute was resolved, but this does not diminish the quality of analysis nor the sense of perspective Ms Melvern so capably displays on every page. Suellen Littleton's "Wapping Dispute" more comprehensively catalogues the conduct of the strike, but nobody does a better job of charting its origins.