Leslie Frank Hinton (born 19 February 1944) is a British-American journalist, writer and business executive whose career with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation spanned more than fifty years. Hinton worked in newspapers, magazines and television as a reporter, editor and executive in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States and became an American citizen in 1986. He was appointed CEO of Dow Jones & Company in December 2007, after its acquisition by News Corp. Hinton has variously been described as Murdoch's "hitman"; one of his "most trusted lieutenants"; and an "astute political operator". He left the company in 2011. His memoir, The Bootle Boy, was published in the UK in May 2018, and in the US under the title An Untidy Life in October of the same year. His first fiction book, Dying Days, a thriller set against the backdrop of the transAtlanic newspaper industry, was published by Whitefox in November 2025.

Hinton, the son of a British Army chef and a seamstress, was born in the docklands of Bootle, a working-class area of Lancashire, now Merseyside. He travelled with his family as his father was posted around the world, attending Army schools in Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, Germany, and Singapore, as well as Liverpool. He had little formal education after failing his Eleven-plus, and left his Liverpool school in 1959, aged 15. In the same year, he emigrated to Adelaide, Australia.

Except for a few years in London in the 1960s, Hinton spent his entire career with Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation. He began work as a copy boy in 1959 at the Adelaide News in South Australia, where 28-year-old Murdoch was managing director. One of his first tasks was to bring Murdoch his lunchtime sandwiches. After finishing his training as a journalist, Hinton moved to London, where he worked as a reporter at United Press International, and the then-broadsheet newspaper The Sun, before Murdoch acquired it in 1969. As a reporter, Hinton was injured while covering the Northern Ireland conflict and in 1976 he was appointed foreign correspondent for the group's newspapers and moved to New York. Hinton later worked as associate editor of the Boston Herald and editor-in-chief of Star.

In 1990, Hinton became president of Murdoch Magazines and then president and chief executive officer of News America Publishing, responsible for the company's US publishing operations. In 1993, he was appointed chairman and CEO of Fox Television Stations.

He returned to London in 1995 as executive chairman of News Corp subsidiary News International, publisher of The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Times Literary Supplement, The Times Educational Supplement and the now defunct titles Today and The News of the World where he stayed for eleven years.

In 2007, Hinton returned to the United States to become CEO of Dow Jones & Company and publisher of The Wall Street Journal. In 2009, in a speech to the World Association of Newspapers in Hyderabad, Hinton criticized Google and the "false gospel" of the Internet, and called for the newspaper industry to charge for digital content: "Free costs too much. News is a business and we should not be afraid to say it. These digital visionaries...talk about the wonders of the interconnected world, about the democratization of journalism...Well, I think all of us need to beware of geeks bearing gifts."

Hinton later admitted in an interview with London's Daily Telegraph that some Journal staff were wary when News Corp bought the newspaper, but said: "If you believed everything you read about the attitude towards us that was alleged to exist, you would have been expected to wear a damn flak-jacket when you came in to the building."

In an article for British Journalism Review in 2015, Hinton described Murdoch as: "a driven businessman with heavy boots who has bruised a lot of people in the last half century." He went on to say: "As a boss, he can be hands-off or autocratic, charming or irascible, forgiving or fierce, and sometimes just a comprehensive pain."