In 2002, Glenn Mulcaire, a journalist working for Britain’s News of the World, hacked into the mobile phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, intercepting and deleting messages left by relatives and giving false hope to parents and police that she was alive. The paper’s editor was Rupert Murdoch protegee Rebekah Brooks who went on to edit The Sun, the media mogul’s flagship tabloid, a rag founded, if one believes James Graham’s gripping and entertaining 2017 play Ink, on similarly despicable journalistic practices.

Robert Stanton, David Wilson Barnes, Bill Buell, Tara Summers, Eden Marryshow, Andrew Durand and Jonny Lee Miller in Ink. Photo © Joan Marcus

Love him (and presumably some do) or hate him, Murdoch has dominated international media since his 1969 takeover and turnaround of The Sun, then a failing leftish broadsheet in the stable of the overextended International Publication Corporation. IPC were keen to ditch a two million pound a year loser with a circulation of 800,000 and focus on the Daily Mirror, the company’s long-time golden goose and a paper that regularly shifted five million copies a day. The remarkable rise...