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As American business has become more and more media savvy, its leaders have appeared in media less and less often. Business reporters have to work their way past conversations on background with underlings, written statements that state nothing and that increasingly hardy perennial: “No comment.”

The modern chief executive lives behind a wall of communications operatives who ladle out slop crafted to obscure rather than reveal. But Twitter has the potential to cut past all that clutter. Given its ubiquity, there’s a chance to get a glimpse into the thinking of otherwise unapproachable executives, and sometimes even have a real dialogue with them. No one can be forced to use Twitter, but some people, even captains of industry, cannot resist.

That number now includes Rupert Murdoch, the 80-year-old chief executive of News Corp. When Murdoch began posting to Twitter at the end of last year, it seemed too good to be true: Rupert unbound. A nightmare, perhaps, from a public relations perspective: a highly opinionated executive pushing the button, no minders or layers involved, whenever he felt like it. But for the rest of us, it has been a rare look beyond the spectral image. It’s almost cute.

Has Murdoch, who reportedly does not use personal computers, become a cautionary tale about the perils of social media engagement?

Not so far. Murdoch has a reputation — give or take his appearance before the British Parliament in the hacking investigation — for saying what is on his mind, and Twitter has been no exception. He has gone on a rant about pirated content, excoriated both Google and President Barack Obama for not supporting anti-piracy efforts and let his political preferences — take that, Andrew Cuomo — show in unalloyed ways. (He also nicely predicted Rick Santorum’s strong showing in Iowa.)

Of course, he has gotten knocked around for being a bore and prone to gaffes and, most oddly, has been accused of not being the person behind the account, which has been marked as “verified” by Twitter. “It’s obvious that Rupert Murdoch is not actually behind these tweets,” sniffed a writer for PC Magazine.

It is even more obvious to anyone who has covered Murdoch that he is indeed the one putting his thumbs to an iPad and posting to the world. His posts are devoid of nuance, partisan in the extreme and often cranky, all consistent with the Rupert Murdoch we have come to know.

In the middle of January, when it became clear that the ill-conceived legislation to prevent piracy was going nowhere, his anguish and anger squirted out in 140-character bursts, day after day, leaving little doubt about whose ox was being gored.

He took on the president: “So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery.”

He took on Google: “Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.”

And he took on movie stars: “On SOPA, where are all big film stars with many millions to lose?”

He even responded to pushback from users who suggested that people who run companies that hack phones should not give lectures about piracy:

“No excuses for phone hacking. No argument. No excuses either for copyright stealing, but plenty of ignorant argument!”

These posts have ignored the huge wave of protests from consumers, reductively defined the debate as about the morality of theft and attempted to intimidate both enemies and timid allies.

He has other pet causes, and in that vein, he recently did a drive-by on Cuomo, New York’s governor. On the day of New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s State of the City address, Murdoch praised the mayor’s “bold teacher proposals” then asked, “How will chicken Cuomo respond?” This is not what you’d expect from a man who runs a company with a market capitalization of almost $50 billion, but it is in line with the run-and-gun spirit of Twitter.

Murdoch is enormously successful, has a compliant board and runs a company with the kind of profits that allow him to live a life beyond consequence. Who is going to tell him that expressing his views on Twitter is not a good idea? Besides, it is a fine opportunity for the rest of us to hear what’s on the mind of a man who controls vast swaths of the global conversation.

Murdoch may not know anything about computers, but he has an intuitive understanding of how Twitter is supposed to work. By mixing personal and political, propaganda and rants, he is serving his interests and the interests of his company. It will be interesting to see if Murdoch does some Twitter spinning the next time News Corp. hits a rough patch in the hacking scandal.

After a month of reading the occasional post from Murdoch, I have to say there’s something refreshing about the directness of the medium and, yes, the man using it.

Of course, Twitter is a megaphone that goes both ways, so Murdoch has been described as old, stupid and in other terms that can’t be rendered here. A man of notoriously thick skin, he has still seemed surprised by some of the vitriol.

“Why can’t we have sensible tweets,” he wrote. “You’re mainly just crazy and fun to read. No loss of sleep here.”

Murdoch’s desire to be seen as a paragon of civility in any media realm, old or new, is rich. But give him credit for engaging in the world we all live in and for not losing sleep over what pops out.

David Carr is a New York Times columnist.