Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, unloads on Rupert Murdoch in his new memoir, saying he has long believed that conservative media mogul is “evil.”
“Of course, I didn’t care for Murdoch’s politics, which were just to the right of the Taliban’s,” Harry writes in “Spare.” “And I didn’t like the harm he did each and every day to the truth, his wanton desecration of objective facts.”
Murdoch is arguably the the most prominent media mogul in the world, with influence and ownership over billions of dollars in media and entertainment companies that span from a major Australian newspaper to Fox News in the United States.
“Once you’ve been chased by someone’s henchmen through the streets of a busy modern city you lose all doubt about where they stand on the Great Moral Continuum,” Harry writes. “All my life I’d heard jokes about the links between royal misbehavior and centuries of inbreeding, but it was then that I realized: Lack of genetic diversity was nothing compared to press gaslighting. Marrying your cousin is far less dicey than becoming a profit center for Murdoch Inc.”
The prince, in his memoir, is sharply critical of paparazzi and top editors at tabloids owned by the Australian-born Murdoch for what he said was profiting of photos and salacious stories about the royal family.
“Indeed, I couldn’t think of a single human being who in the 300,000-year history of the species who’d done more collective damage to our sense of reality,” he writes of Murdoch. “But what really sickened a frightened me in 2012 was Murdoch’s ever-expanding circle of flunkies: young, broken desperate men willing to do whatever was necessary to earn one of his Grinchy smiles.”
The Hill has reached out to Murdoch’s News Corp for comment.
Harry has had a long and at times acrimonious relationship with the press.
In February, he filed a libel lawsuit against The Daily Mail in response to an article that included claims about the intentions behind Harry’s recent legal interactions with the U.K. government.
His wife Meghan won a lawsuit against the Mail around the same time, which she filed in response to the paper’s 2018 release of sections of a private letter she had written to her estranged father.
Harry has been doing a series of media appearances and interviews in recent days has he promotes his new book. He told “60 Minutes” this week he for “many years” he believed that his mother, Princess Diana, who was herself relentlessly hounded by the media, had faked her own death.