THE juiciest press story of the year was broken by The New York Times, which discovered that three of the Murdoch children are suing their father, Rupert, and their brother, Lachlan, in a Nevada court because Rupert wants to vary the terms of his will. To quote the paper: “Mr Murdoch, 93, set the drama in motion late last year, when he made a surprise move to change the terms of the Murdochs’ irrevocable family trust to ensure that his eldest son and chosen successor, Lachlan, would remain in charge of his vast collection of television networks and newspapers.

“The trust currently hands control of the family business to the four oldest children when Mr. Murdoch dies. But he is arguing in court that only by empowering Lachlan to run the company without interference from his more politically moderate siblings can he preserve its conservative editorial bent, and thus protect its commercial value for all his heirs.”

Our natural, liberal instinct is to suppose that this is motivated by politics, and that the money is a smokescreen. I’m not so sure. There is a glorious scene in Succession (no relation) in which the patriarch rounds on his mildly left-wing daughter and shouts that she knows nothing about the working class. He knows them, because he’s been selling them what they want all his life. A version of Fox News that did not sell comforting, coherent, and broadly plausible lies would certainly not be watched for its breaking news.

SO, WHAT is it that the working class wants and Murdoch supplies? One chilling answer comes from Prospect magazine, in which Alan Rusbridger interviewed a pub landlord who was once “Mucky” Paul McMullan, who worked alongside Rebekah Brooks in the features department of The News of the World.

“In the 90s we were brutal and horrible to people — we destroyed them, you know, we turned everybody over,” McMullan says. “We’d offer people huge amounts of money, get their life stories and then not pay them — just told them to fuck off.”

He tells the story of an actress — the daughter of a more famous actor — who had been fingered as a heroin addict by one of the paper’s paid informants in the police force.

“Yeah, I really went too far — she was begging because she had a heroin addiction. And that was enough, but I had to offer 50 quid for a shag. No, I think I changed it to 20 quid and she accepted that — got all this on tape.

“So not only do I expose her as a beggar and a heroin addict, I now expose her as a bloody prostitute, which she wasn’t, you know.

“She was found hanging a few years later in Ibiza. She hanged herself, committed suicide. And I thought, you know, I went too far on that one.”

If nothing else, the story shows how the tabloids once did what X is now blamed for doing: they took up the wisps of millions of readers’ idle curiosity and braided them into a whip, which delivered the enjoyable public floggings we’d none of us want as individuals.

ANTHONY LANE, in The New Yorker, had a wonderful piece from the Republican National Convention: “In one minor respect, the resurrection of Trump diverged from Holy Scripture. Whereas Jesus spoke to Mary Magdalene outside the empty tomb, Trump spoke to Bret Baier, of Fox News, on the phone.” You couldn’t get that into an English paper, because none could assume that its readers would catch the allusion.

But the most illuminating Trump coverage came from The Atlantic, which had analysed all the prayers said at the start of Trump rallies in this campaign: “The premise of all of these prayers is that America’s covenant can be re-established, and its special place in God’s kingdom restored, if the nation repents and turns back to him. . . These ideas have long percolated on the religious right. What’s new is how many Christians now seem convinced that God has anointed a specific leader who, like those prophets of old, is prepared to defeat the forces of evil and redeem the country. And that leader is running for president.

“With Trump’s goodness presumed, the criminal charges against him are cast not as evidence of potential wrongdoing but as a sign of victimhood. . .

“At a February campaign event in North Charleston, South Carolina, Mark Burns, a televangelist in a three-piece suit, squeezed his eyes shut and lifted his right hand toward heaven. ‘Let us pray, because we’re fighting a demonic force,’ he shouted. ‘We’re fighting the real enemy that comes from the gates of hell, led by one of its leaders called Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.’”

OF THE final, formal, Evangelical schism in the Church of England, there has not been a peep in the national press.