Rupert Murdoch

From Freepedia


Keith Rupert Murdoch (born March 11, 1931), is an Australian-born American media proprietor who is the majority shareholder and managing director of News Corporation, one of the world's largest and most influential media corporations. He is one of the few chief executives of any multinational media corporation who (through his family company) has a controlling ownership share in the companies he runs. Beginning with newspapers, magazines and television stations in his native Australia, Murdoch expanded into British and American media, and in recent years has become a powerful force in satellite television, the film industry and other forms of media.

Murdoch is generally regarded as the single most politically influential media proprietor in the world, and is regularly courted by politicians in the United States, Britain and Australia.

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Murdoch was born in Melbourne, Australia. His father was Sir Keith Murdoch, a stern and somewhat distant figure who was the son of a Presbyterian minister from Scotland. The elder Murdoch worked as a journalist and adviser to Billy Hughes, the Prime Minister of Australia during World War I, and became Australia's most influential newspaper executive, directing the Melbourne-based Herald and Weekly Times Ltd. He was reportedly often frustrated by young Murdoch's early progress and despaired of his son being able to take over from him. Rupert Murdoch was deeply influenced by his father, and although he clearly wished to emulate him, he often rebelled.

Murdoch's mother is Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, born Elisabeth Greene, who was the daughter of an Irish Protestant father and a mother who came from an upper-class family of English descent. (It is sometimes asserted, usually by anti-Semitic groups, that she is of Jewish origin: this is untrue). Dame Elisabeth, at 96, remains a strong influence on Rupert, usually in the direction of moderation.

The young Murdoch was educated at Geelong Grammar School and later at Worcester College at the University of Oxford. After his father's sudden death in 1952, Rupert returned to Australia to take over the running of his father's business. Although he had expected to inherit a considerable fortune and a prominent position,he was left with a relatively modest inheritance—after death duties and taxes, the main legacy was ownership of the Adelaide News (which gave its name to his company).

Over the next few years, Murdoch gradually established himself as one of most dynamic media proprietors in the country, quickly expanding his holdings by acquiring a string of daily and suburban newspapers in most capital cities, including the Sydney afternoon paper, The Daily Mirror, as well as a small Sydney-based recording company, Festival Records. His acquisition of the Mirror proved crucial to his success, allowing him to challenge the dominance of his two main rivals in the Sydney market, the Fairfax Newspapers group, which published the hugely profitable Sydney Morning Herald, and the Consolidated Press group, owned by Sir Frank Packer, which published the city's leading tabloid paper, the Daily Telegraph.

In 1964, Murdoch made his next important advance when he established The Australian, Australia's first national daily newspaper, based first in Canberra and later in Sydney. The Australian, a broadsheet, gave Murdoch a new respectability as a "quality" newspaper publisher, and also greater political influence since The Australian has always had an elite readership, if not always a large circulation.

In 1972, Murdoch acquired the Sydney-based Daily Telegraph from Sir Frank Packer, making him one of the "big three" newspaper proprietors in Australia, along with Sir Warwick Fairfax in Sydney and his father's old Herald and Weekly Times Ltd in Melbourne. In the 1972 elections, Murdoch swung his newspapers' support behind Gough Whitlam and the leftist Australian Labor Party, but by 1975 he had turned against Labor, and since then has almost always supported the rightist Liberal Party.

Over the next ten years, as his press empire grew, Murdoch established a hugely lucrative financial base, and these profits were routinely used to subsidize further acquisitions. In his early years of newspaper ownership Murdoch was an aggressive, micromanaging entrepreneur. His standard tactic was to buy loss-making Australian newspapers and turn them around by introducing radical management and editorial changes and fighting no-holds-barred circulation wars with his competitors. By the 1970s, this power base was so strong that Murdoch was able to acquire leading newspapers and magazines in both London and New York, as well as many other media holdings.

Murdoch's desire for dominant cross-media ownership manifested early—in 1961 he bought an ailing Australian record label, Festival Records, and within a few years it had become the leading local recording company. He also bought a television station in Wollongong, New South Wales, hoping to use it to break into the Sydney television market, but found himself frustrated by Australia's cross-media ownership laws, which prevented him from owning both a major newspaper and television station in the same city. Since then he has consistently lobbied, both personally and through his papers, to have these laws changed in his favor.

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Acquisitions in Britain

Murdoch moved to Britain in the mid 1960s and rapidly became a major force there after his acquisitions of the News of the World, The Sun and later The Times and The Sunday Times, which he bought in 1981 from the Thomson family, who had bought it from the Astor family in 1966. Both takeovers further reinforced his growing reputation as a ruthless and cunning business operator. His takeover of The Times aroused great hostility among traditionalists, who feared he would take it "downmarket." This led directly to the founding of The Independent in 1986 as an alternative quality daily.

Murdoch has a particular genius for tabloid newspapers. The Sun in London, The Post in New York, The Herald Sun in Melbourne and The Daily Telegraph in Sydney are among the most successful, profitable and influential tabloids in the world. Despite his personal conservatism, he allowed his editors (particularly in Britain) to exploit the selling power of soft-core erotica in the form of topless page three girls (such as Samantha Fox) to increase circulation. As a result, Auberon Waugh of Private Eye dubbed him The Dirty Digger, a name that has endured.

In 1986 and 1987, Murdoch moved to adjust the production process of his British newspapers, over which the printing unions had long maintained a highly restrictive grip. This led to a confrontation with the printing unions NGA and SOGAT. The move of News International's London operation to Wapping in the East End resulted in nightly battles outside the new plant. Delivery vans and depots were frequently and violently attacked. Ultimately the unions capitulated and other media companies soon followed Murdoch's lead.

Before the Wapping dispute, most British newspapers were chronically unprofitable, partly (though not entirely) because of inefficient and restrictive work practices imposed by the printing unions. These included overstaffing, inheritance of jobs by family members and most importantly resistance to the introduction of new printing technology which would have caused both job losses and the reduction in the power of the unions. The high-tech Wapping plant—the first newspaper office in the world to be totally computerized—was planned and built in strict secrecy, and its very existence was kept hidden from the unions until it was ready to go into operation. Murdoch and the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher collaborated during this affair and the Thatcher government provided heavy police protection for the new plant—dubbed "Fortress Wapping" by its detractors—during the sometimes violent demonstrations at the area.

Moving into the United States

Murdoch made his first acquisition in the United States in 1973, when he purchased the San Antonio News. Soon afterwards he founded the National Star, a supermarket tabloid, and in 1976 he purchased the New York Post. On September 4, 1985, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen to satisfy the legal requirement that only United States citizens could own American television stations. In 1987 he bought The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd in Australia, the company that his father had once managed. By 1991, his Australian-based News Corp. had amassed huge debts, which forced Murdoch to sell many of the American magazine interests he had acquired in the mid-1980s. Much of this debt came from his British-based Sky Television satellite network, which incurred massive losses in its early years of operation, which (like many of his business interests) was heavily subsidized with profits from his other holdings until he was able to force rival satellite operator British Satellite Broadcasting to accept a merger on his terms in 1990. (The merged company, BSkyB has dominated the British pay-TV market since).

In 1995, Murdoch's Fox Network became the object of scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) when it was alleged that News Ltd.'s Australian base made Murdoch's ownership of Fox illegal. The FCC, however, ruled in Murdoch's favor, stating that his ownership of Fox was in the public's best interests. In the same year Murdoch announced a deal with MCI Communications to develop a major news website as well as funding a right-wing magazine, The Weekly Standard. In the same year, News Corp. launched the Foxtel pay television network in Australia in a partnership with Telstra.

In 1996, Fox established the Fox News Channel, a 24-hour cable news station. Since its launch it has consistently eroded CNN's market share, and it now bills itself as "the most-watched cable news channel." This is due in part to recent ratings studies, released in the fourth quarter of 2004, showing that the network had nine of the top ten programs in the "Cable News" category. However, FNC's cable-news dominance has in recent years been challenged by the growth of MSNBC.

In 1999, Murdoch significantly expanded his music holdings in Australia by acquiring the controlling share in a leading Australian independent label, Michael Gudinski's Mushroom Records; he merged the two as Festival Mushroom Records (FMR). Both Festival and FMR were managed by Murdoch's son James Murdoch for several years.

Personal life

Murdoch has been married three times. His first marriage in 1956 was to Patricia Booker, with whom he had one child, Prudence Murdoch. They were divorced in 1960. In 1967 he married an employee, journalist Anna Torv, and they had three children: Elisabeth Murdoch (now prominent in British media businesses), Lachlan Murdoch and James Murdoch. Anna and Rupert divorced acrimoniously in 1998, with a settlement of some reported 1.7 billion USD in assets. It was revealed that Murdoch had been conducting a long-running affair with Wendi Deng, a junior executive in News Corporation's Asian operations and almost 40 years his junior; they married soon afterwards (in 1999). Murdoch has two children with Wendi Deng: Grace (born 2001) and Chloe (born 2003).

Murdoch's eldest son Lachlan, formerly the deputy chief operating officer at the News Corporation and the publisher of the New York Post, was Murdoch's heir apparent prior to resigning from his executive posts at the global media company at the end of July 2005. Lachlan's surprise departure left James, the chief executive of the satellite television service British Sky Broadcasting since November 2003, as the only Murdoch child still directly involved with the company's operations, though Lachlan has agreed to remain on the News Corporation's board.

There is reported to be tension between Murdoch and the children of his first two marriages over the terms of a trust holding the family's 28.5 percent stake in News Corporation, estimated in 2005 to be worth about $6.1 billion. Under the trust his children by Wendi Deng share in the proceeds of the stock but have no voting privileges or control of the stock. Voting rights in the stock are divided 50/50 between Murdoch on the one side and his children by prior marriages. This was a compromise agreed to by his former wife Anna in lieu of a large cash settlement at the time of their divorce. Murdoch's voting privileges are not transferrable but will expire upon his death and the stock will then be controlled solely by his children from the prior marriages, although their half-siblings will continue to derive their share of income from it.

It is Murdoch's stated desire to have his children by Wendi Deng given a measure of control over the stock proportional to their financial interest in it. However it does not appear that he has any strong legal grounds to contest the present arrangement and his four children by Anna Torv and Patricia Booker are said to be unwilling to make any such change. [1]

Rupert Murdoch was diagnosed with prostate cancer some years ago and treated with apparent success.

Recent activities

In 1999, The Economist reported that Murdoch had made £1.4 billion ($2.1 billion) in profits over the previous 11 years but had paid no net corporation tax. It further reported, after an examination of what was available of the accounts, that Murdoch would normally have expected to pay a corporate tax of approximately $350 million. The article explained that the corporation's complex structure, international scope and use of offshore havens allowed News Corporation to avoid tax. [2] [3]

In late 2003, Murdoch acquired a 34 percent stake in Hughes Electronics, operator of the largest American satellite TV system, DirecTV, from General Motors for $6 billion (USD). Among his properties around the world are UK's The Times and the New York Post, the latter of which he turned from New York City's most liberal newspaper into one of the most conservative in the USA.

In 2004, Murdoch announced that he was moving News Corp.'s base of operation from Australia to the United States. This was widely seen as a reaction to the inability of John Howard's Liberal Party of Australia to alter Australia's media cross-ownership rules, which Murdoch is known to have wanted changed for decades, and which have prevented him from acquiring more newspapers and TV stations in Australian cities. In December of 2004, Murdoch purchased a penthouse apartment in New York for $44 million (USD). At the time this was the highest price ever paid for a residence in New York.

On July 20, 2005, News Corp. bought Intermix Media Inc., which held MySpace.com and other popular social networking-themed websites. On September 11, 2005, News Corp announced that it would buy IGN Entertainment for $650 million (USD). [4]

Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner have been competitors for quite some time. However, it became worse when Murdoch launched the Fox News Channel to compete against Turner's CNN, ultimately dethroning CNN, with FNC the most popular news network on cable television.

In September 2005 the subject of Murdoch's alleged anti-competitive business practices resurfaced when Australasian media proprietor Kerry Stokes, owner of the Seven Network, instituted legal action against News Corporation and the PBL organisation, headed by Kerry Packer. The suit stems from the 2002 collapse of Stokes' planned cable TV network C7, which would have been a direct competitor to the other major Australian cable provider, Foxtel, in which News and PBL have major stakes.

Stokes claims that News Corp. and PBL (along with several other media organsiations) colluded to force C7 out of business by using undue influence to prevent C7 from gaining vital broadcast rights to major sporting events. In evidence given to the court on 26 September, Stokes alleged that PBL executive James Packer came to his home in December 2000 and warned him that PBL and News Limited were "getting together" to prevent the AFL rights being granted to C7.

Murdoch and politics

Murdoch is a political conservative, despite the fact that he has been a strong supporter of British Prime Minister Tony Blair of the Labour Party. In the early 1970s he supported the Australian Labor Party, but since 1975 he has generally supported the conservative parties in Australia. In the United States he usually supports Republicans.

While at Oxford Murdoch was active in the Labour Club, and he actively supported the Australian Labor Party for some years. Since 1975, however, he has generally supported the Liberal Party of Australia (which, despite its name, is a center-right party). In Britain, he formed a close alliance with Margaret Thatcher, and The Sun was widely credited with helping John Major win an unexpected election victory in the 1992 general election. In the 1997 general election, however, Murdoch's papers were either neutral or supported Labour under Tony Blair. In the US he has been a long-time supporter of the Republican Party and was a friend of Ronald Reagan. Regarding Pat Robertson's 1988 presidential bid, he said, "He's right on all the issues." [5] Murdoch's papers strongly supported George W. Bush in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.

Murdoch is often accused of running partisan media coverage for political parties that promote policies and decisions which favour his commercial interests. For example, it is believed that Murdoch tried to suppress publication of the memoirs of Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, in an attempt to curry favour with China. Patten's book was critical of the Chinese government. Whatever the motives, the book was dropped from publication by Murdoch's HarperCollins publishing company. It was only because of Patten's political influence that the story came to light and the book was published by another firm. It is speculated that Murdoch wanted to please the Chinese government because it happened around the time he was attempting to get a foothold in the Chinese market with the launch of Star TV.

In a speech in New York Rupert Murdoch said that the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said the BBC coverage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster was full of hatred of America. Mr Murdoch is a strong critic of the BBC, who he belives has a liberal bias.

Murdoch's British media outlets generally support eurosceptic positions, and generally show contempt for the European Union. Murdoch publications worldwide tend to adopt Francophobic, pro-Israeli and pro-American views. During the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, all 175 Murdoch-owned newspapers worldwide editorialized in favour of the war. [6] Murdoch also served on the board of directors of the Cato Institute.

External links

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