The month’s mix of short working hours, hot, hungry afternoons and long post-breakfast evenings creates a captive audience of millions, too listless to do much but flip channels.

Murdoch was reading a New York Post in the breakfast nook, having just chased his wife, Wendi, and their two daughters out the door for a ballet lesson.

He entered the kitchen at nine o 'clock, annoyed to find that neither his post nor the daily newspapers had been delivered, and that a power failure prevented him from preparing his breakfast.