Rupert Murdoch
Rupert Murdoch was born in Melbourne, Australia on March 11, 1931. In 1937 he moved to Britain where he was raised and eventually attended Oxford University. He is a major shareholder and managing director of News Corporation, one of the world’s largest and most influential media corporations, and owner of some of Australia, America and Britain’s most popular media and news publications.
His father Sir Keith Murdoch became Australia’s most influential newspaper executive, directing the Melbourne-based Herald and Weekly Times Ltd. After his father’s death in 1952, Rupert returned to Australia to take over the running of his business and to inherit a considerable fortune but was left with a relatively modest inheritance.
During the next few years he established himself in the media arena while expanding his holdings acquiring newspapers including the Sydney afternoon paper, The Daily Mirror and also a small Sydney based recording company called Festival Records. In 1964 Murdoch started The Australian, Australia’s first national daily newspaper, which renewed Murdoch’s name as a quality newspaper publisher.
Murdoch moved to Britain in the mid 1960s and soon turned himself into a major media force after acquiring the News of the World, The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times. At this time Murdoch was also able to acquire leading newspapers and magazines in London and New York, as well as many other media holdings.
In 1972 he acquired the Sydney Daily Telegraph making him one of the big three Australian newspaper proprietors. In 1987 he bought The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd in Australia, the very company his father once managed. By 1991 News Corporation had amassed huge debts which resulted in Murdoch selling many of his American magazines.
In 1995 News Corporation with the backing of Telstra launched the Foxtel pay TV network in Australia, and then a year later Foxtel launched the Fox News Channel, a 24 hour news channel which reflected Murdoch’s conservative views. Fox News has consistently taken ratings from CNN and is now considered the most watched cable news channel.
In 1999 Murdoch extended his music interests in Australia by acquiring Mushroom Records which he merged with his Festival Records company as Festival Mushroom Records (FMR). In recent years Rupert Murdoch’s son Lachlan Murdoch has started to take over management of News Corporation and will eventually take over his father’s role.
Murdoch’s personal life has suffered 2 failed marriages with his first marriage ending after only a few years. His second marriage was to journalist Anna Murdoch one of his employee’s to whom he had 3 children. However they were divorced in 1998 after Murdoch had an affair with another employee, Wendi Deng who was 40 years his junior, they married soon afterwards. Rupert Murdoch’s net worth is estimated at 6.9 billion.
studies :
Murdoch-watching has become a minor industry. Among the more entertaining products are the batch from News executives, including Full Disclosure (London: Macmillan 1996) by former Economist and Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil; Good Times, Bad Times (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1983) by former editor Harold Evans and the less splenetic Sundry Times (London: John Murray 1986) by former editor Harold Giles.
There is a more positive account in Dennis Hamilton’s Editor-in-Chief: Fleet Street Memoirs (London: Hamish Hamilton 1989), Chance Governs All (London: Macmillan 2001) by Marmaduke Hussey and The Pearl of Days: An Intimate Memoir of The Sunday Times 1822-1972 (London: Hamish Hamilton 1972) by Harold Hobson, Phillip Knightley & Leonard Russell.
Among journalistic bios we have read but don’t recommend Thomas Kiernan’s bracing Citizen Murdoch (New York: Dodd Mead 1986), the superficial Murdoch (London: Piatkus 1989) by Jerome Tuccille and the doom-&-gloom Murdoch: The Decline of An Empire (London: Macdonald 1991) by Richard Belfield, Christopher Hird & Sharon Kelly: the show isn’t over until the fat lady (or corporate receiver) sings.
Barefaced Cheek: Rupert Murdoch (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1983) is a glib effort by Michael Leapman, better known for his more interesting Treachery: The Power Struggle at TV AM (Unwin Hyman, London 1989), an account of gameplaying by David Frost, Murdoch, Bruce Gyngell and others. Rupert Murdoch: A Business Biography (London: Angus & Robertson 1976) by Simon Regan has an in-house flavour midway through Murdoch’s colonisation of the UK.
Tabloid Baby: An Uncensored Account of Revolution That Gave Birth to 21st Century Television News Broadcasting (New York: Celebrity Books 1999) by Burt Kearns is a tabloid-flavoured expose of the birth of the Fox television network, now the fourth member of the ‘Big Three’ national networks in the US.
It replaces Alex Block’s Outfoxed: Marvin Davis, Rupert Murdoch, Joan Rivers & the Inside Story of America’s 4th Television Network (New York: St Martins 1990). That was news but is now heading, like most tabloids, to fish & chip wrapper status. Matthew Horsman’s Sky High (London: Orion 1998) is a more positive account of BSkyB, the Murdoch-dominated satellite broadcaster, than Dished! The Rise and Fall of the British Satellite Broadcasting (London: Simon & Schuster 1991) by Peter Chippindale & Suzanne Franks.
Stuart Crainer’s Business the Rupert Murdoch Way: 10 Secrets of the World’s Greatest Dealmaker (Oxford: Capstone 1999) is disappointing, consistent with others in the series such as Business the Bill Gates Way (one secret of Bill = “Be True To Yourself”).
Save your money and buy Jock Given’s The Death of Broadcasting (Sydney: Uni of NSW Press 1999). Trevor Barr’s thoughtful Newmedia.com.au: The Changing Face of Australia’s Media and Communications (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 2000) is essential reading in understanding the interaction between politicians, bureaucrats, business, consumers and technology.
AFR journalist Mark Westfield offers a blow by blow account of Foxtel and News’ local pay television adventures in The Gatekeepers: The Global Media Battle to control Australia’s Pay TV (Annandale: Pluto Press 2000). There’s a dry account of Foxtel in Cento Veljanovski’s 72 page IPA paper (PDF) on Pay TV in Australia: Markets & Mergers. Both should be read in conjunction with Vertical Integration in Cable Television (Cambridge: MIT Press 1997) by David Waterman & Andrew Weiss.
Murdoch will remain of significance as the catalyst for restructuring Fleet Street (with just a little help from his friends Margaret Thatcher and the electricians union). As a starting point consult Timothy Marjoribank’s News Corporation, Technology & the Workplace: Global Strategies, Local Change (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2000).
Charles Wintour’s The Rise & Fall of Fleet Street (Hutchinson: London 1989) and The Market For Glory (London: Faber 1986) by Simon Jenkins offer perspectives on ‘old media’ in the UK, further explored in the Fleet Street page.
For the Sun see Stick It Up Your Punter: The Uncut Story of the Sun Newspaper (London: Simon & Schuster 1999) by Peter Chippindale & Chris Horrie. There is an elegant account of the TLS in Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement (New York: HarperCollins 2001) by Derwent May. For the New York Post (‘headless body in topless bar’), the Star and trash-tv show Hard Copy see Jeannette Walls’ Dish: How Gossip became the News and the News became just another Show (New York: Perennial 2000), discussed here.
Andrew Harris’ Selling Hitler (London: Faber 1987), about the ‘Hitler Diaries’ fiasco, is a romp. All in all, Murdoch comes out of that hoax looking quite astute, which is more than can be said for patricians and experts such as Hugh Trevor-Roper and William Rees-Mogg.
For HarperCollins see Eugene Exman’s The Brothers Harper: a unique publishing partnership and its impact upon the cultural life of America from 1817 to 1853 (New York: Harper & Row 1965), David Keir’s The House of Collins (London: Collins 1952) and works such as John Tebbel’s four volume A History of Book Publishing In America (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1972-81) or Thomas Whiteside’s The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business & Book Publishing (Middletown: Wesleyan Uni Press 1981).
For Ansett see Ansett: The Collapse (South Melbourne: Lothian 2002) by Geoff Easdown & Peter Wilms. Media Mayhem: Playing with the Big Boys in Media (Melbourne: Brolga 2005) by former H&WT chief executive John D’Arcy offers insights on the Herald & Weekly Times takeover.
from investingvalue.com, ketupa.net