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Murdoch, Rupert

(1931-)
The News Corporation

Overview

Rupert Murdoch has been credited with single-handedly creating the concept of a modern media empire. With his chain of newspapers, a television network, holdings in book and magazine publishing, part-ownership of 20th Century-Fox, and expansion into satellite television services around the world, Murdoch has mastery over an enormous array of information providers. He created The News Corporation from a few small newspapers inherited from his father, and by the late-1990s his 30 percent share of the company was estimated at $3.9 billion, making him one of the world's richest private citizens. Politically conservative, Murdoch has been accused of wielding his power unfairly. He has been compared to the lead character in the 1930s Orson Welles film Citizen Kane, which, in turn, was loosely based on the career of William Randolph Hearst, considered by many as the founder of tabloid-style journalism.

Personal Life

Rupert Murdoch was born Keith Rupert Murdoch in 1931 in Melbourne, Australia. He was named for his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, an Australian newspaper magnate who had been a well–known war reporter during World War I. His mother, Elisabeth, was later honored with the title Dame of the British Empire for her welfare activism. Murdoch and his three sisters were raised in a suburb of Melbourne in a prosperous home and also spent time on the family's sheep ranch in the country. When he was 10 years old, Murdoch was enrolled in boarding school, and as a young adult traveled to England to earn his college degree.

At Worcester College of Oxford University, Murdoch studied economics and political science and earned an Masters of Arts in 1953, the year after his father died. He married and had a daughter, Prudence, but by 1967 the marriage was over, and he wed Anna Torv, a Sydney newspaper reporter with whom he would have three children. The couple separated in 1998 and divorced the following year. Murdoch then married Wendi Deng, a former TV executive, in 1999. In May 2001 the two announced that they were expecting their first child.

Two of Murdoch's three adult children work for him; his second son is involved in the record industry. In 1999 Murdoch commented that the arrival of additional children would not change the succession plans for his media empire. He had described his elder son Lachlan "first among equals" among his children.

For recreation, Murdoch swims, plays tennis, and skis, and also travels frequently to keep tabs on his global empire. When not traveling, he lives in New York City and Beverly Hills and is a generous contributor to the Republican Party. Though considered one of the world's wealthiest private citizens, Murdoch shuns a lavish lifestyle in certain respects. He is known to prefer taxicabs to limousines and did not purchase a Gulfstream jet for his private use until the late 1980s. Among his luxuries, however, is a 155–foot yacht, the Morning Glory.

Career Details

Murdoch took his first job in journalism while still in England, when he was hired as a reporter for a newspaper in Birmingham. He then spent time at London's famed Daily Express, where he served under the tutelage of its equally newsworthy owner, Lord Beaverbrook, a friend of Sir Keith Murdoch. After his father's death, Murdoch inherited his holdings, including the Adelaide News. But when he returned to Australia in 1954, he realized that his father's empire was far smaller than the family had realized, and inheritance taxes had taken a large share. Murdoch set out to revive the Adelaide News as its owner and publisher, and he implemented circulation-boosting tactics that he had learned at the Daily Express. He is credited with bringing London's "Fleet Street" style to Australia and was known in these early days for writing some of the paper's colorful headlines himself.

In 1956 Murdoch purchased an Australian paper in Perth, and four years later he entered Australia's largest market when he acquired two lackluster Sydney papers, the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror. Critics of Murdoch, mostly his more conservative competitors in the field of journalism, expected him to fail. Instead, circulation rose dramatically, due in part to his operation's particularly racy style. He continued to receive criticism, but it became evident that crime and sex stories did indeed sell papers, as did such attention–grabbing headlines as "Queen Eats a Rat." In 1964 Murdoch lured some of the country's top editors and reporters away from competitors' papers to launch The Australian, a serious paper with an esteemed reputation.

Murdoch set his sights on England as his next conquest. In 1969, he bought the weekly News of the World, the best-selling newspaper in the English language, and later that year he acquired another Fleet Street staple, the Daily Sun. Murdoch more than doubled Sun's circulation in the first year by featuring a photograph of a topless woman every day on page three. Such enticing tactics aside, the paper's characteristic melodramatic tone and excerpts from tell-all books made it the best-selling paper in Murdoch's empire. Over the next decade, the politically conservative Murdoch would use his editorial power to make this and his other papers platforms of support for the Tory Party (conservative) politics in England.

Murdoch entered the U.S. market in 1973 with the purchase of the San Antonio Express in Texas. The next year he launched the supermarket tabloid Star as a competitor for the National Enquirer. His most famous acquisition, however, occurred in November 1976, when he bought the New York Post, a bastion of liberal politics and the city's oldest newspaper, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton. This purchase rocked the journalism circles.

Murdoch introduced into the New York Post many of the same tabloid-esque tactics that had been so successful overseas. Perhaps most famously, the paper once featured the headline "Headless Body in Topless Bar" for a 1983 crime story. Murdoch also wanted to bring his page-three pin-up concept to American readers, but his wife Anna was adamantly against it. She feared that their three children, who were living in New York City by then, would see the paper on their way to school. For a time, Murdoch himself was somewhat of an outcast in New York, and the children were even refused admission to a certain elite private school.

Murdoch's empire gained further notoriety in 1977, when he bought in a somewhat underhanded manner the New York Magazine Corporation, publisher of the Village Voice and the well-regarded weekly New York, from a onetime friend. A court case ensued, and New York magazine writers went on strike to protest the possibility of having Murdoch as their boss; 20 of them later quit when the deal was settled.

By this time, Murdoch's fortune and clout were enough to enable him to become owner of one of Britain's most venerable papers, the London Times, along with its weekly edition, the Sunday Times. Although Murdoch shifted the paper's focus to a more conservative slant, he allowed editors there to run stories unfavorable to the conservative government of prime minister Margaret Thatcher. On one occasion, the owner of Harrod's department store, Mohamed al Fayed, objected to a story in the Times about one of his homes, the former Paris abode of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. As former editor Andrew Neil recounted in his book about the Murdoch empire, Full Disclosure, al Fayed threatened to cancel his advertising with the paper unless a retraction was printed. Instead, Neil rejected all further advertising from Harrod's, the paper's biggest account. Murdoch gave his blessing to the decision, citing his displeasure that al Fayed would assume that he could "be bought for 3 million pounds [Sterling]."

During the 1980s, Murdoch began focusing more energy on electronic media, and in 1983 he invested in the European satellite television market. His primary goal, however, was to launch a fourth network in the United States, and to meet one of the legal requirements to do so, he became a naturalized citizen in 1985. After purchasing a large share of the movie and television behemoth 20th Century-Fox and several local affiliate television stations, Murdoch launched the Fox Network in 1986, the first competitor to the broadcast giants ABC, NBC, and CBS since the 1950s. A decade later, Fox TV was a serious presence in broadcast television, with a string of highly–rated shows that catered to young viewers. A major coup was its successful bid to the broadcast rights for National Football League (NFL) games, including the ratings plum of the Superbowl. Making its mark on the motion picture industry as well, the company's Fox Entertainment branch boasted six of the top 10 grossing films ever made through 1999.

In 1988 Murdoch cut a $3 billion deal with media mogul Walter Annenberg to purchase several publications, including TV Guide, the best-selling magazine in the United States. By this point, The News Corporation had already acquired several other dailies in the nation's major markets, including the Boston Herald and Chicago Sun-Times. In the late 1980s Murdoch expanded into book publishing by becoming chairman of the HarperCollins empire. Meanwhile, acquisitions of satellite broadcast services around the globe continued, and a decade later Murdoch added Asia–based Star TV and India's ZeeTV to his holdings. In 1995 he financed the launch of the conservative American magazine The Weekly Standard.

Murdoch flexed more media muscle in Europe in the 1990s when he acquired broadcast rights for Champions League soccer games, among the largest sports events on the continent. In 1998 he paid __BODY__ billion for Manchester United, the most popular soccer team in Britain. Fans and former players protested by threatening to withdraw support for the team.

By the end of the 1990s, Murdoch controlled a global empire that sold media content worth more than $12 billion annually. Still, he had missed some big opportunities. Earlier in the 1990s, for example, he decided against investing in America Online. Since then, however, he has concentrated on capturing his share of cyberspace business. In Australia, News Corporation launched online career and auction sites, and in the United Kingdom it established a free Internet service provider, CurrantBun. In 1999 Murdoch paid __BODY__ billion to acquire an American health-oriented website, Healtheon/WebMD. At the same time, the media tycoon divested himself of many of his print publications. When he sold TV Guide to Gemstar International Group in 1999, the deal left The Weekly Standard as his sole remaining magazine.

Social and Economic Impact

Rubert Murdoch's wealth has enabled him to exert influence in politics around the world. An outspoken libertarian, Murdoch has never been shy about flexing his media muscle to promote his friends and wound his foes. He once commented about a liberal administration in power in Australia, "I elected them. And incidentally I'm not too happy with them. I may remove them."

Over the years, Murdoch has faced much criticism for his competitive business practices and political conservatism and has been accused of "dumbing down" print and broadcast journalism in general. Even so, some competitors have adopted his tabloid style in order to compete with his empire.

America writer Terry Golway described Murdoch as a "media baron who is destined one day to employ a third of the world's journalists, actors, authors, editors, and scriptwriters." Some have asserted that such control in the hands of one private citizen is unfair and in the end stifles the spirit of the printed word.

During the 1980s Murdoch was an enthusiastic supporter of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her Tory government. One aspect of Thatcher's regime was to dismantle many of the country's socialist policies—including the weakening of Britain's powerful trade unions. The Murdoch chain became embroiled in a union squabble when a strike from 1986 to 1987 hit the printing presses at the Times. A decade later the hightech printing plant was non-union, saving Murdoch's company huge labor costs.

In 1997, with the scheduled return of the British colony of Hong Kong to the Chinese government, Murdoch—hitherto a staunch anticommunist—faced criticism for giving in to the Communist leaders in Beijing. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) newscasts, which reflected unfavorably on the Chinese government, were taken off Murdoch's Star TV satellite network. The following year, the News Corporation entered a deal with the People's Daily, China's national, party-controlled newspaper, to create an information-technology partnership that would include online services. Murdoch defended the deal as a victory for freedom. "Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere," a BBC report quoted him as saying.

Yet freedom of speech seemed less important to Murdoch when HarperCollins canceled its deal to publish the memoir of former Hong Kong colonial governor Christopher Patten. Critics charged that Murdoch canceled the book because Patten's accounts of his dealings with Communist leaders over the years were too critical of mainland China. The book was later published by a competitor, and the incident was considered by some to have damaged HarperCollins's credibility in the book publishing world.

In addition to his media holdings, Murdoch has also invested heavily in the sports industry. He triumphed over long-term business rival Ted Turner in 1997 when he purchased the Los Angeles Dodgers professional baseball team. Murdoch has also bought a partial interest in the New York Knicks, the New York Rangers, and Madison Square Garden. In Australia he owns an entire rugby league and in England a professional soccer team. Still energetically pursuing business at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Murdoch is poised to exploit new technologies that will expand his empire ever further.

By the latter part of 2000, there was speculation that Murdoch was hoping to use sports offerings to tempt millions of cable TV viewers to switch to satellite dishes. The News Corporation had its sights on a controlling stake in Hughes Electronics' DirecTV, the largest satellite television provider in the United States. Murdoch had already been successful in similar schemes in parts of Europe, Asia, and Latin America. But the challenge in the United States was slightly different because most customers there were already tied into the cable infrastructure. However, the number of U. S. satellite-equipped homes was expected to increase from 14.5 million in 2001 to 25 million by 2005, and DirecTV already controlled a 66-percent share of the market in 2001.

In 2001 Murdoch suffered a setback when his bid to merge Sky Global, the holding company for his digital business, with Hughes Electronics, parent company of DirecTV, failed. Such a merger would have produced a $70 billion global satellite network that could pose stiff competition to cable TV in the United States.

By 2001 Murdoch's $30 billion media empire circled the globe and included vast sections of U.S. interests, including the Fox Network, 23 TV stations, the cable networks Fox News Channel, Fox Sports Net and FX, the 20th Century Fox film studio, the New York Post, and book publisher HarperCollins. If completed, the DirecTV acquisition would make Murdoch the most powerful media mogul in the world.

Sources of Information

Contact at: The News Corporation
1211 Avenue of the Americas, 3rd Fl.
New York, NY 10036
Business Phone: (212)852-7000
URL: http://www.newscorp.com

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