RUPERT MURDOCH
- MEDIA MAGNATE -
G'day folks,
Welcome to some background on a man who has wielded some considerable power for many decades as a media magnate.Media magnate Rupert Murdoch is the founder and head of
News Corporation, a global media conglomerate. He created Fox Broadcasting
Company in 1986.
Who Is Rupert
Murdoch?
Rupert
Murdoch was born on March 11, 1931, in Melbourne, Australia. His father was a
famous war correspondent and newspaper publisher. Murdoch inherited his
father's papers, the Sunday Mail and the News, and continued to
purchase other media outlets over the years. In the 1970s, he started buying
American newspapers. Murdoch branched out into entertainment with the purchase
of 20th Century Fox Film Corp. in 1985, and later sparked transformation of the
cable TV landscape by introducing Fox News. Four years after restructuring his
empire into two divisions, 21st Century Fox Inc. and News Corp., Murdoch
in 2017 sold much of 21st Century Fox to the Walt Disney Company.
Early Life and
Career
Keith
Rupert Murdoch was born on March 11, 1931, on a small farm about 30 miles south
of Melbourne, Australia. Since birth, Murdoch has gone by his middle name,
Rupert, the name of his maternal grandfather. His father, Keith Murdoch, was a
well-known Australian journalist who owned a number of local and regional
newspapers: the Herald in Melbourne, the Courier-Mail in Brisbane
and the News and Sunday Mail.
The
family farm was named Cruden Farm, after the Scottish village from which both
of Murdoch's parents had emigrated. The house at Cruden Farm was a stone building
with colonial pillars, adorned with original paintings, a grand piano and a
library of books, situated amongst green expanses of farmland and bordered by
Ghost Gum trees. Murdoch's favorite childhood pastime was horseback riding. His
mother later described her son's childhood: "I think it was a very normal
childhood, not in any way elaborate or an overindulged one. I suppose he was
lucky to be brought up in attractive—you could say
aesthetic—surroundings."
Murdoch graduated from Geelong Grammar, a prestigious Australian boarding school, in 1949 before crossing the ocean to attend Worcester College at Oxford University in England. According to one of his early biographers, Murdoch was a "a normal, red-blooded college student who had many friends, chased girls, went on the usual drinking binges, engaged in slapdash horseplay, tried at sports and never had enough money, no doubt due to his gambling."
Murdoch's fun-loving youthful ways came to an abrupt end when his father suddenly passed away in 1952, leaving his son the owner of his Adelaide newspapers, the News and the Sunday Mail. After preparing himself with a brief apprenticeship under Lord Beaverbrook at the Daily Express in London, in 1953, a 22-year-old Murdoch returned to Australia to take up the reins of his father's papers.
Newspaper
Mogul
Immediately
upon assuming control of the Sunday Mail and the News, Murdoch
immersed himself in all aspects of the papers' daily operations. He wrote
headlines, redesigned page layouts and labored in the typesetting and printing
rooms. He quickly converted the News into a chronicle of crime, sex and
scandal, and while these changes were controversial, the paper's circulation
soared.
In the fall of 1968, 37 years old and owner of an Australian news empire valued at $50 million, Murdoch moved to London and purchased the enormously popular Sunday tabloid The News of the World. One year later, he purchased another struggling daily tabloid, the Sun, and again oversaw a successful transformation with his formula of reporting heavily on sex, sports and crime. The Sun also attracted readers by including pictures of topless women in its infamous "Page 3" feature.
Murdoch next expanded his news empire to the United States, with the 1973 acquisition of a Texas-based tabloid, the San Antonio News. As he had done in Australia and England, Murdoch quickly set out to expand across the country, founding a national tabloid, the Star, in 1974 and purchasing the New York Post in 1976. In 1979, Murdoch founded News Corporation, commonly referred to as News Corp., as a holding company for his various media properties.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Murdoch acquired news outlets around the globe at a dizzying pace. In the United States, he bought up the Chicago Sun-Times, the Village Voice and New York magazine. In England, he acquired the eminently respectable Times and Sunday Times of London.
Emergence of Fox
It was
also during these years that Murdoch began expanding his media empire into
television and entertainment. In 1985, he purchased 20th Century Fox Film
Corporation as well as several independent television stations and consolidated
these companies into Fox, Inc.—which has since become a major American
television network.
In 1990,
he founded Star TV, a Hong Kong-based television broadcasting company.
Additionally, after purchasing several prestigious American and British
academic and literary publishing companies throughout the late 1980s, he
consolidated them into HarperCollins in 1990. Murdoch has also invested in
sports; he is a part owner of the Los Angeles Kings NHL franchise, the Los
Angeles Lakers NBA franchise and the Staples Center, as well as Fox Sports 1
and the Fox Sports website.
Media Empire
With the
dawn of the new century, Murdoch continued to expand News Corp's holdings to
control more and more of the media people view on a daily basis. In 2005, he
purchased Intermix Media, the owner of the popular social networking site
MySpace.com. Two years later, in 2007, the longtime newspaper mogul made
headlines himself with the purchase of Dow Jones, the owner of the Wall
Street Journal.
Murdoch
has drawn wide criticism for monopolizing control over international media
outlets as well as for his conservative political views, which are often
reflected in the reporting of Murdoch-controlled outlets such as Fox News. In
the 2010 American midterm elections, News Corp donated $1 million each to the
Republican Governors Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a group
supporting Republican candidates. Critics argued that the owner of major news
sources covering the election should not contribute directly to the political
campaigns involved.
Murdoch's empire,
however, was dealt a significant blow in 2011. His London tabloid, The News
of the World, was caught up in a phone hacking scandal. Several editors and
journalists were brought up on charges for illegally accessing the voicemails
of some of Britain's leading figures. Rupert himself was called to testify that
same year, and he shut down The News of the World.
News Corp later paid
damages to some of individuals who were hacked.
Despite
this scandal, News Corp retains a significant share of virtually all forms of
media across the globe. Murdoch owns many of the books and newspapers people
read, the television shows and films they watch, the radio stations they listen
to, the websites they visit, and the blogs and social networks they create.
In
2013, he announced a significant restructuring of his empire. Murdoch decided
to divide his business into two companies—21st Century Fox Inc. and News Corp.
This move separated his entertainment holdings from his publishing interests.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Murdoch explained that "Both
companies will be uniquely positioned to execute on their respective strategic
objectives and to lead their industries forward."
Although
he never could have imagined the power he would one day wield, this kind
of influence was exactly what Murdoch sought as a young publisher building his
empire. "I sensed the excitement and the power," he recalls.
"Not raw power, but the ability to influence at least the agenda of what
was going on." And after six decades working in the media, Murdoch has
said that he could not imagine his life any other way. "If you're in the
media, particularly newspapers, you are in the thick of all the interesting
things that are going on in a community, and I can't imagine any other life
that one would want to dedicate oneself to," he said.
New Leadership
and Sale to Disney
In June
2015, news broke that Murdoch would be handing over the leadership of 21st
Century Fox to his son James. Murdoch would remain with the organization as
executive co-chairman, sharing the role with his oldest son, Lachlan.
In July
2016, Roger Ailes,
chairman and CEO of Fox News and the Fox Television Stations Group, resigned
due to a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by Fox television host Gretchen
Carlson. Murdoch announced he would assume Ailes's role temporarily.
Amid the
restructuring of 21st Century Fox, the company engaged in talks with Walt
Disney over the sale of its properties. While discussions were said to have
ended by November 2017, they reportedly renewed within a few weeks, with
Fox considering offers for its movie and cable networks and
international divisions.
In
mid-December, terms of an agreement were reached in which Disney would purchase
most of 21st Century Fox in an all-stock transaction valued at around
$52.4 billion. Murdoch, who retained control of Fox News, the Fox
broadcast network and the FS1 sports cable channel, said he would spin those assets
into a newly listed company.
In
February 2018, a Wired cover story revealed details of an ongoing feud
between Murdoch and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The feud reportedly dated back to at least 2007, with accusations that
Murdoch's News Corp. had tried to ignite a scandal involving the presence of
sexual predators on Facebook. Later, in a 2016 meeting, Murdoch took Zuckerberg
to task for changing Facebook's news feed algorithm, giving the social platform
the power to dramatically affect traffic for other sites. News Corp. reportedly
threatened to retaliate via lobbying efforts and by launching an anti-Facebook
campaign through its many outlets.
Personal Life
Rupert
Murdoch married Patricia Booker in 1956. They had a daughter, Prudence, before
divorcing in 1965. He married Anna Torv in 1967, and they had four children
before eventually divorcing in 1999. Only 17 days after his second divorce,
Murdoch married his third wife, Wendi Deng. They have two children.
Murdoch
filed for divorce from Deng in June 2013, citing that the "relationship
between husband and wife had broken down irretrievably" in court papers.
The news of the split came as a surprise to some, but there were some rumors of
trouble in the marriage in recent years. The divorce became final in 2014.
In
January 2016, Murdoch became engaged to Mick Jagger's
ex, Jerry Hall. The
couple reportedly began seeing each other the previous summer. They tied the
knot on March 4, 2016, in London.
Clancy's comment: He is a man who is no doubt smart, but there have been times when he didn't impress me. Imagine the alimony he has paid over the years?
I'm ...
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