Wolff: The tweets of Rupert Murdoch

The ultimate media satire may still be Paddy Chayefsky's Network, in which Peter Finch as the anchorman Howard Beale, in the throes of his mad-as-hell breakdown, goes off the reservation and starts using his television perch to say whatever he pleases.

In some sense, of course, this is what the Internet has become: Now everybody gets a demented opportunity to vent. And yet, the other point about the Internet is that these venters are nobodies — they may have a voice, but they don't have individual stature (or much of it). Important people use social media in as calculated, filtered and PR-specific way as they use traditional media. Every word is strategic and, largely, banal.

Except for Rupert Murdoch, who although he owns more media outlets and consumes more newsprint than any other human being, uses Twitter to express himself. The last week has seen a particularly colorful outpouring of insults, thinking aloud, and cultural turnabouts. All unfiltered, meaningful, and perplexing.

First, he debated Scottish independence with himself, professing a split between his heart and his own Scottish roots, on the one hand, and his brain, which understands the complexities of the division. But, in the end, he was clearly leaning toward the way of his heart and an official, and powerful, endorsement of the yes vote.

Then he slapped one of his former editors, protégés and most loyal supporters, the former CNN host Piers Morgan: "Piers Morgan seems unemployed after failing to attract any audience in US. Seemed out of place. Once talented, now safe to ignore." (Can you be more publicly dismissed?)

Then he invited debate on the bare-breasted girls on Page 3 of the Sun, Britain's most popular newspaper and the paper that fueled and paid for much of Murdoch's rise. Perhaps Page 3 girls were anachronistic, he averred, finally and, likely, painfully for a man who does not change, or liberalize, his views easily or generously.

It is obviously useful, as well as voyeuristic, for the rest of us to know what's on the mind of one of the world's most powerful people. But a reasonable question is, why would he want us to? And also, what does it say about the nature of traditional media if the man who owns the largest amount of it, indeed who has feudal lord or Sun God powers to command it, is now bypassing it. It seems worth wondering, too, if it is a positive thing for powerful people to make disruptive utterances at will and off the cuff.

Murdoch, judging from his tweets, seems clearly restless, if not stomping around in pent-up frustration. His marriage came abruptly tumbling down and he is now alone. He endured and miraculously survived concerted legal assault and public opprobrium in the hacking scandal in Britain, and still suffers for it — George Clooney has announced that he will star in a movie about phone hacking, which, obviously, will be a triumphal anti-Murdoch view. And he just was rebuffed in his effort to spend $80 billion to buy Time Warner and double his empire. There is likely little quiet in his soul.

Then, too, the reason Murdoch is in the media business — quite differently from most modern media executives — is to be heard, and not corporately heard, but individually. The virtue or horror of his papers is that the voice you hear is his.

It is this aspect that makes his tweets seem plaintive as well as curmudgeonly, and perhaps the ultimate symbol of the demise of newspapers. He tweets because he has outlived his medium and his time.

His embrace of technology is as uncomfortable as it is enthusiastic. Along with his guileless adoption of Twitter, there was the unexpected sight of Murdoch last week at Apple's new product launch, looking like an over-excited kid.

He is, after all, an 83-year-old. What distinguishes him in his technological awkwardness is not a resistance to the new, but a poignant sense of the loss of the old. It is, of course, hard to pity a man who continues to have the wherewithal to determine, at the very least, the near- and medium-term future of media. But at the same time, it is good to remember that his central motivation — a motivation that tends to affect nations — may be to keep his own voice alive. However anachronistic an opinionated press lord might be (quite as anachronistic as his Page 3 girls), however humbling it is for him to have to take to Twitter like everyone else, he is not going away.

The Clooney film is to be based on the book Hack Attack by Guardian reporter Nick Davies, a first person account of how Davies and the Guardian heroically uncovered the phone hacking scandal along with Murdoch's world of subterfuge and conspiracy. A curious aspect of this view is that Murdoch isn't really hidden at all. More than any other media organization, and perhaps any other modern corporation, Murdoch and his business are what they seem to be and say what they mean, however unpalatable. Ultimately, Murdoch's defense in the hacking scandal, and his continuing resentment over his vilification in Britain, is that his papers hardly pretended they were doing otherwise.

Murdoch's critique of media, or rather of other-people-owned media, is that his competitors are phonies, self-serving and sanctimonious, a disconnect that, he believes, has helped kill the newspaper business. He, however, is, with some evidence, real. And stands alone, unbowed, if sometimes a little kooky, a resurgent and quite unlikely sort of Howard Beale.