Cecil King ran the Daily Mirror group into the 1960s as one of the most powerful men in British media, convinced the country needed him to intervene in its politics. Adam Curtis traces King's plot to unseat Prime Minister Harold Wilson, including his approach to Lord Mountbatten to front an alternative government, and the swift, humiliating collapse of that scheme once it became public. Curtis cuts this archival story against Rupert Murdoch's News International decades later, caught in 2011 in the phone-hacking scandal that forced the closure of the News of the World and hauled Murdoch before Parliament. Built from news footage, interviews, and Curtis's own narration rather than new filming, the piece treats King and Murdoch as two data points in the same pattern: a press baron who mistakes editorial power for political power, and the public reckoning that follows. The film's case is that media empires keep making this same mistake, decades apart, for the same reason.