He was soon bellowing on the phone to me, telling me not to run any more articles on the matter. He never once indicated that we were hurting his business interests—he simply claimed we were "boring" readers, which was a bit strange since the story was the talk of the town—but I was never in any doubt that this was the real reason for his anger. Within weeks he had flown to London to suggest, rather strongly, that I step down as editor and help him launch a new Fox newsmagazine in New York. Since I wanted out anyway (11 years is long enough to be a Murdoch editor), I obliged. As I had always anticipated, the newsmagazine never happened.

Not long after my departure, I learned what had actually took place. In the autumn of 1995, a British government minister whom I knew well dined with a senior British diplomat in Kuala Lumpur. He asked what had really happened. "The Malaysian prime minister made it clear that Murdoch would never do business in this country," the diplomat told the minister, who later told me, "as long as Andrew Neil was editor of the Sunday Times. Neil had to go; Murdoch obliged."

Then, as I was told, at a huge Murdoch corporate bash in Australia a few months later, the deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia turned up as Murdoch's guest of honour.

Murdoch's suppression of the press isn't limited to his newspaper holdings, however. And sometimes he'll even suppress some of his own views in order to keep business humming along.

The anti-Communist cold-war warrior of the 1980s, who once opined to me that Margaret Thatcher should never give Hong Kong back and even wanted the British prime minister to threaten to nuke Beijing should the Chinese try to take it by force, had by the 1990s become a serial kowtower to the Communist dictatorship in Beijing. Why? Not because he’d become soft on communism, but because by the 1990s he owned the Star satellite TV system, which was trying to make inroads into China.

In 1993, I helped draft a speech Murdoch gave in London in which he proudly proclaimed that satellite TV was "an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere." We had been influenced by the manner in which all the paraphernalia of the early information age—satellite TV, fax machines, mobile phones—had helped bring down Soviet communism and thought it might have the same beneficial effect on Chinese communism. But within months of Murdoch's "brave new world" speech, the Chinese government had moved to restrict the sale of satellite dishes within its borders. Murdoch was appalled and promptly dumped BBC World, the British Broadcasting Corporation's international news channel, from Star TV because its coverage of China offended Beijing's ruling clique. He sold the independent-minded South China Morning Post because it regularly crossed swords with Beijing, then forbade HarperCollins, his book publishing arm, from publishing the memoirs of Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, which contained (according to an internal Harper memo) too many "negative aspects" about China.

Murdoch and his apologists have dubious explanations for each of these acts designed to refute the claim that they were done to protect or further his business interests. But the charge sheet against Murdoch in this regard is so long that his excuses don't carry water. The Times of London avoided Murdoch's ire over China simply by slashing its coverage from Beijing and Hong Kong. Six years ago, his second son, James (who has been involved in negotiations with the Bancrofts over the Journal), voiced strong support for Beijing's crackdown on the Falun Gong, a Buddhist sect, and attacked the Western media for portraying a "falsely negative" view of China.