Last night, Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch tweeted the following:

Now, “Po” could refer to a lot of things: a river in Italy, the chemical element Polonium, the red Teletubby, and so on. Or the two letters could be exactly what they look like: The gibberish result of Murdoch tweeting while intoxicated. Shortly after he tapped “tweet,” another Twitter user publicly aired circumstantial though fairly convincing evidence that the 83-year-old regularly tweets under the influence of alcohol.

That Twitter user, Anthony Rooney, responded to Murdoch’s “Po” tweet with: “There’s [a] person I know in a senior position at News UK”—a Murdoch subsidiary—“who tells me they know RM is often drunk when he tweets”:

Five minutes later, Rooney tweeted at the Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan, “The wife of the Sun editor is on my quiz team, She says RM’s often shitfaced pissed when tweeting and the editorial staff worry...”:

To the untrained eye, @rooneypoos’ tweets might look suspicious, and hardly worth pursuing further. But there is reason to give them a closer look. Before he deactivated his 6-year-old account sometime in the past eight hours, Rooney was following—and communicating with—an account that appears to belong to the wife of a prominent Sun editor.

Here it is worth highlighting three key points:

  1. The editor in question appears to be David Dinsmore, the London-based editor of The Sun, News UK’s marquee tabloid. He is the only Sun staff member @rooneypoos followed on Twitter.
  2. According to an online biography, Dinsmore is married to a woman named Jill.
  3. On Twitter, Dinsmore’s verified profile follows a person named “Jill Dinsmore” (@tartanbigbird) who follows Dinsmore back.

This is where things get interesting. A brief Twitter search indicates that Jill Dinsmore has used the site to coordinate after-work gatherings with a regular group of people, one of whom is Anthony Rooney. Their preferred venue appears to be the Prospect of Whitby, a 495-year-old pub in the East London district of Wapping which hosts quiz competitions. Both Jill Dinsmore and Anthony Rooney have referred to the pub on Twitter. Finally, several other third-party tweets indicate Dinsmore and Rooney have patronized the pub with the same group of people, at the same time:

All of this supports three conclusions:

  1. Whoever owned the @rooneypoos account frequently associated offline with whoever owns the @tartanbigbird (Jill Dinsmore) account.
  2. Going by the fact that David Dinsmore’s official account follows her, @tartanbigbird certainly appears to be Jill Dinsmore.
  3. Anthony Rooney, a.k.a. @rooneypoos, did indeed have contact, either directly or indirectly (through a spouse), with someone in a “senior position at News UK”: David Dinsmore.

Of course, this is not enough to prove that Murdoch tweets while intoxicated, or that Jill Dinsmore ever claimed this. Anthony Rooney may have misrepresented or exaggerated what he’d heard. But Rooney is connected enough, and his claim explicit enough, to make both worth noting.

And this is to say nothing of Murdoch’s other tweets suggesting intoxication:

Update — 1:25 p.m.

Murdoch responds on Twitter (without actually denying that he tweets while drunk):

Update — 2:15 p.m.

Former Fox News producer Joe Muto, a.k.a. The Fox Mole, weighs in:

For what it’s worth, he was pretty well known around Fox as a lush. During 2008 election he invited a bunch of senior staff to watch Democratic primary returns with him in a private suite in the Newscorp building. (I wasn’t invited, but a couple of higher-ups on the O’Reilly staff were reluctantly roped into it.)

Rupert ignored everyone and pounded red wine while staring at the TV all night. As the night went on he got drunker and drunker and started grumbling under his breath incoherently about Obama and Hillary.

Know more? Please get in touch.

Email: trotter@gawker.com · Photo credit: AP · H/T Alex