Imagine, for a moment, that we are back in July 2009, before the full gravity of the phone-hacking scandal became apparent, largely as a result of the efforts of the Guardian's Nick Davies. At that time Tom Watson's boss, Gordon Brown, was still on reasonably good terms with the media magnate. The Sun still supported the Labour Party, if with less enthusiasm than it had shown in the Blair years. For the most part the Left had learned to live with Murdoch. What, in those actually not very distant days, might a fair-minded and reasonable person have said about the man? 

I would have said that his "Page Three" girls had slightly coarsened British life — no longer a very fashionable view, I know. I would have grumbled — and often did grumble in various columns — that he had allowed The Times to dumb down under a succession of editors. I would have complained — and did complain — that before, during and after the invasion of Iraq The Times and the Sun got into the habit of downplaying or even suppressing news that might have undermined the Anglo-American cause. And I can certainly recall criticising Murdoch for trying the kill off the Independent through predatory pricing — slashing the cover price of the loss-making Times — and largely succeeding.

But I would also have pointed out, and did so, that Murdoch has probably sunk more than £100 million into The Times since acquiring it in 1981, and that, when all is said and done, it remains a pretty good newspaper. I would have admitted that his other titles publish interesting articles and break important stories. Above all, perhaps, I would have praised BSkyB, for which Murdoch bet the farm, and almost lost his company, in the early 1990s. Who can dispute that it offers excellent sports coverage, some good drama and increasingly fine arts programming? Sky News produces reliable and independent round-the-clock news, and the Murdoch empire, owner of 39 per cent of BSkyB, bears its share of the annual £25 million losses.

Back in the early summer of 2009 many in the Labour Party would probably have agreed with much of this analysis, including possibly Gordon Brown himself. No longer. Opprobrium for Murdoch on the Left seems universal. The other day I bumped into a professor of journalism (one of a species, by the way, that is pretty uniformly rooting for statutory control of the press) and was told that Murdoch could not be praised for having created BSkyB because its programming does not have enough home-grown, British content. What kind of argument is that?

Needless to say, Watson and Hickman do not even consider the possibility that in his long career the 81-year-old Murdoch might have done even one or two good things. Their blow-by-blow account of the phone-hacking affair (the most detailed so far published, though necessarily incomplete because events move on apace) cannot find a single achievement to lay at Murdoch's door. Naturally it does not occur to them to praise Sky News for its admirably even-handed coverage of the affair. The Times, admittedly after a slow start, no longer pulls its punches whenever more evidence of bad behaviour at the News of the World (or News International) emerges.