A sensational criminal court case, allegations of political interference, police and the justice system under siege, public opinion divided by the fierce rivalry of competing media outlets - no, it's not the Higgins-Luhrmann-Drumgold affair.
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It's the case of Rupert Max Stuart, an Aboriginal man condemned to hang for the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl in Ceduna, South Australia, in 1958.
When Adelaide newspaper The News, alerted by a priest to the possibility of injustice, asks provocative questions about Stuart's conviction, entrenched state premier Tom Playford - a conservative leader unaccustomed to press scrutiny - is forced to order a retrial and later a royal commission.
The circumstances of the case and the consequences for the young publisher of The News, Rupert Murdoch, and the first editor who ever worked for him, provide a compelling centrepiece for Young Rupert, Adelaide author Walter Marsh's absorbing account of the making of the Murdoch media empire.
Marsh begins with the history of the inheritance that journalist-turned-press baron Sir Keith Murdoch built and battled to bequeath to his only son: a comparatively minor company called News Limited and its sole newspaper, The News.
Sir Keith's wish was made clear in his will: "I desire that my said son Keith Rupert Murdoch should have the great opportunity of spending a useful and altruistic life in newspaper and broadcasting activities".
Then 22, the junior Murdoch lands in Adelaide from Oxford in 1953 to begin an apprenticeship of sorts with the editor-in-chief of The News, Rohan Rivett.
A revered journalist who'd survived the Burma Railway as a prisoner of war, Rivett had been appointed by Sir Keith to strengthen his upstart afternoon paper's editorial clout and grow its readership in competition with the city's paper of record, The Advertiser.
Marsh recounts in impressive detail how Rivett and and his brash "Boy Publisher" - as Murdoch is soon disparagingly dubbed - drive the tabloid hard up against the establishment, with occasionally sensational news coverage that shakes the cosy political dynamics of the state government, the staid morning broadsheet and the power brokers of the Adelaide Club.
The almost familial relationship between Rivett, with his dedication to news, and Murdoch, with his dedication to influence and profit, is at the heart of the book and Marsh traces its inevitable arc with narrative flair.
Drawing on historical records, unpublished archival materials and new interviews, the author puts us inside the newsrooms, boardrooms and courtrooms with at times gripping immediacy and intimacy.
Rivett is the most vivid character - certainly more than his boss, which is to be expected given that Murdoch didn't cooperate with Young Rupert's writing while Rivett's family provided generous access to the late newspaperman's personal archive with all of its intriguing and often poignant insights.
Chapters detour into Murdoch's initially unconvincing attempts to gain a toehold in television and a fracas with the Packers over control of a printing press in Sydney as he acquired the Daily Mirror. But the Stuart case is a central thread as The News, having campaigned vigorously while Stuart faced the gallows, leaps into the firing line of the government and the judges presiding over the royal commission in 1959.
Handwritten notes on the hearings by lawyer and future Supreme Court judge Charles Bright (sealed in an envelope marked "Not be opened before 1985 and are then not to be used unless all persons concerned are dead") describe how intense public interest in the case was "stoked in the afternoons by The News and downplayed each morning by The Advertiser".
Sharply worded cage posters, basic but essential marketing for an afternoon newspaper trying to grab the attention of commuters, put The News and Rivett in the dock facing the archaic charge of "seditious libel", with serious jail time a very real risk. "Attempted trial by newspaper is a dangerous and a malignant thing," the royal commission heard, and Playford was determined to censure a hostile press.
How it all unravels for Rivett but rolls on for the deal-making Murdoch is skilfully teased out by Marsh. Again, it's largely from the viewpoint of Rivett, but it's a fascinating perspective. The author wisely leaves readers to judge Murdoch's actions and decisions. The contemporary relevance hardly needs calling out, but Marsh brings insightful context to the history.
"If he hadn't been forced to start with the second-best paper in Australia's fourth-best city," he writes, "would he have become that incendiary blend of outsider and insider - unafraid of challenging orthodoxies and good taste, but still equipped with all the tools and privileges of a press lord's heir?"
- Author Walter Marsh appears at Muse Canberra on August 27.
