Rupert Murdoch

Australian-born American media mogul

• Born: March 11, 1931
• Place of Birth: Melbourne, Victoria

Beginning with two Australian newspapers inherited from his father, Murdoch built a global media empire and transformed both the content and the distribution of news and entertainment around the world. The far-reaching influence of his company, News Corporation, on popular culture, media, and business has garnered both fierce condemnation as well as accolades.

Early Life

Rupert Murdoch was raised in the socially prominent family of Lady (later Dame) Elisabeth Greene Murdoch and Australian newspaperman Sir Keith Arthur Murdoch. The young Murdoch was educated at private schools and at Oxford University in England, and he served briefly as an intern at the London Daily Express, owned by Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook. It has been suggested that this apprenticeship at a sensationalist, tabloid-style newspaper, as Dean Alger has noted, “was a key influence in Murdoch’s development; he began to embrace the idea that ‘newspapers were meant to entertain, not educate.’”

In 1953, after his father’s death, Murdoch returned to Australia to run the Adelaide News and the Sunday Mail. His hands-on commitment and sensationalist approach improved circulation, and he soon was able to add the Perth Sunday Times and additional newspapers in Sydney under his tutelage. In 1964, he launched the country’s first national newspaper, the Australian. He moved into the British market in 1969 with News of the World and the London Sun, enjoying enormous circulation numbers and popularizing the so-called page-three girl.

In 1973, Murdoch moved into the American newspaper market with the acquisition of the San Antonio Express. Rebuffed in his attempts to purchase the National Enquirer, whose renovation under American publisher Gene Pope had been in part inspired by the success of News of the World, Murdoch created a rival tabloid in 1974, the National Star (later the Star; sold in 1989). In 1977, he bought several New York publications, including the New York Post (sold in 1988, repurchased in 1993) and the Village Voice (sold in 1985). He later acquired The Times of London and Sunday Times (1981), the Boston Herald (1982), the Chicago Sun-Times (bought in 1983, sold in 1986), and many others.

Life’s Work

In 1980, Murdoch formed News Corporation (better known as News Corp) and began to expand his empire into electronic media. By 1987, News Corp was the world’s largest newspaper publisher, and it continued to absorb or control hundreds of mostly media-related corporations.

In Great Britain in 1983, he launched Sky, the first satellite-television channel, and merged after an extended period of heavy losses with Sky’s competitor, British Satellite Broadcasting, to form the highly successful BSkyB. In the United States in 1985, Murdoch acquired 20th Century Fox film studio and seven television stations from Metromedia. The following year he launched Fox Broadcasting, which became the first TV network to successfully challenge the long-time dominance of networks NBC, CBS, and ABC.

The Fox network changed television standards in both entertainment and journalism, and not without controversy. In particular, its news division, Fox News, was criticized as lacking journalistic integrity because of conflicts of interest with Murdoch’s business and political commitments. Its promotion of right-wing conspiracy theories during the first decades of the twenty-first century also drew widespread criticism while also attracting high viewership. On the other hand, Fox was undeniably innovative in its choice of programs, and a number of these programs (such as The Simpsons and The X-Files) received critical recognition and became classics. Critic Paul A. Cantor suggested that “the rise of Fox in the 1980s and 1990s was one of the central events in . . . the globalization of television,” as the Fox network “was instrumental in undermining the centrality of the traditional national networks in American culture.” The hugely popular Fox TV show American Idol, which debuted in 2002, consistently rated as a top viewer choice in subsequent decades and helped spawn an entire genre of music competition programs.

In 1992, with sports a vital component of broadcasting success, Murdoch paid huge sums to purchase broadcast rights for an Australian rugby league and for the National Football League (NFL) in the United States. (In 1997 he bought a professional baseball team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, but sold the team in 2004.) By paying such a large sum for the NFL broadcast rights, he also bought Fox quick acceptance by the American TV audience but also contributed to the negative effect of big money on professional sports.

Overall, Murdoch’s success has come from shrewd judgment, a willingness to gamble and bend rules, and an ability to win economic and political concessions through charm, pragmatism, and sharp business practice. To conquer the vast realm of American broadcasting, he adopted US citizenship without necessarily relinquishing the convenience of Australian accounting standards. To finance his American media ventures, he had to overcome traditional (and somewhat dysfunctional) union rules in his UK newspaper operations as well as engage in creative financing, including using so-called junk bonds popularized by financier Michael Milken. Eventually, a 1990 debt crisis, sometimes considered the defining moment in Murdoch’s life, led him to restructure or sell off a number of publications. However, he emerged from the crisis triumphant.

Though often regarded as an arch-conservative supporter of politicians such as Mitt Romney, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, Murdoch rarely allowed his political sympathies to trump his business interests for most of the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. In fact, he repeatedly showed adroitness in making whatever changes were required for media expansion. He persuaded the Australian government to change media ownership laws in 1979 to allow him to expand into television in Melbourne, and he persuaded regulators in the United States in 1985 to interpret restrictions on foreign ownership of US media in ways beneficial to his corporate goals.

Murdoch has supported liberal politicians, such as Hillary Clinton during her Senate reelection run in 2006 and Barack Obama in the democratic primaries leading up to the 2008 election, but only when it suited him, and was willing to play apologist for the Chinese Communist government. For example, in 1993 he took control of STAR (Satellite Television Asian Region) TV, and on more than one occasion he has shown a deep interest in developing the growing Chinese TV market. To support this market he dropped from STAR broadcasts programs of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that were critical of China. He also refused to publish a memoir by the last British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, which was critical of the Chinese government.

In 2005 Murdoch surprised many by purchasing MySpace, a popular social networking site. With control of MySpace, the company assured a strong foothold in the vastly expanding realm of cyberspace, where, according to one critic, it can “host the cultural conversation.” In 2007, Murdoch purchased Dow Jones & Company, giving him control of the venerable Wall Street Journal and sparking further debate over the morality and ethics of Murdoch’s kind of cultural “hospitality.”

In 2007, an editor and private investigator working for News of the World, a News International publication and part of Murdoch’s News Corp, were convicted of illegally hacking into phones belonging to the royal family and other high profile public figures. In 2011 British investigators found evidence that phone hacking was practiced on a large scale at News of the World in addition to police bribery. The discovery and subsequent public outrage led to the paper’s closure; arrests of about fifty of the paper’s employees, including Rebekah Brooks, the ex-chief executive of News International; and a lawsuit by News Corps shareholders. In 2012 Murdoch himself resigned as director of several News Corps subsidiaries that controlled UK publications including the Sun, the Times, and the Sunday Times.

In June 2013 News Corporation split into two separate companies—both headed by Murdoch—as part of its response to the scandal: News Corp, the besieged publishing division, and 21st Century Fox, the more profitable entertainment division. In July 2013, an employee of the Sun leaked a secret recording of an internal staff meeting, during which Murdoch allegedly said that the practice of papers bribing officials for news tips was part of the long-standing culture of Fleet Street, and that he would give his "total support" to employees, even those who were convicted. He also allegedly criticized the police investigation of such payments as incompetent, though he later said that he had misspoken. The tape’s release prompted detectives in the United Kingdom to investigate Murdoch’s taped comments.

Murdoch’s companies seemed to have weathered the phone hacking crisis. In March 2014, Murdoch’s son Lachlan Murdoch joined him as executive cochairman of both News Corp and of 21st Century Fox, while his other son, James, was named as CEO of the latter, thus securing Murdoch’s legacy. In February 2015, News Corp stated that the US Department of Justice, having completed its investigation of phone-hacking charges, would not prosecute either company.

In the summer of 2016, Fox News came under fire following a number of accusations of sexual harassment leveled against the channel's longtime chairman and CEO, Roger Ailes (reports have been mixed about Murdoch's perception of Ailes as a businessman). Former Fox & Friends anchor Gretchen Carlson brought the first lawsuit directly against Ailes in July, and within the subsequent months, several other women came forward with complaints, including Megyn Kelly, who was then a rising star at the network. As the media began raising concerns over the questionable culture that had been allowed to develop under Ailes's reign at Fox News, Murdoch's sons convinced him to hire an outside law firm to internally investigate the claims. Within days, the decision was made that Ailes had to leave his post, and it was reported that 21st Century Fox paid $20 million to settle Carlson's lawsuit. Following Ailes's resignation, Murdoch became acting CEO and chair of Fox News. In the aftermath, questions were raised about how the Murdochs would go about replacing Ailes and maintaining the financial momentum of the company without perpetuating the unethical culture that he had supported. It was not until 2018 that the decision was made to have programming president Suzanne Scott step in as the CEO of Fox News.

The next year, the majority of 21st Century Fox's film and television studios were sold to Disney while its remaining assets (including Fox News, Fox Broadcasting, and Fox Sports) were combined under the new umbrella company Fox Corporation; while his son Lachlan served as CEO, Murdoch became a chairman in addition to remaining an executive chairman of News Corp. At the same time, while Fox News remained one of the most popular news channels, it also continued to attract negative press and criticism, particularly regarding accusations that anchors on the channel had contributed to spreading disinformation about the 2020 US presidential election; in particular, some Fox pundits were accused of promoting conspiracy theories that widespread voter fraud had occurred—despite extensive evidence to the contrary, including evidence collected by Fox itself—and that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, had been the true winner of the election.

During the early 2020s, Murdoch oversaw Fox as the company navigate a number of other crises and controversies. In March 2021, Dominion Voting Systems, the company which manufactured some of the voting hardware and software used in the election, sued Fox News for defamation; later, this lawsuit was consolidated with a separate lawsuit Dominion filed against Fox Corporation. In April 2023 Fox News agreed to pay a settlement of $787 million to Dominion. As a result of the settlement, the case did not go to trial, which saved Murdoch and other Fox executives from possibly having to testify. April 2023 saw further upheaval at Fox News when Murdoch fired Tucker Carlson, the provocative conservative television host who by that point had become one of the most popular political commentators in the United States. In the months after Carlson's firing Fox News suffered a loss in its viewership.

In September 2023, Murdoch announced his plans to step down as board chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp and cede both positions to his son Lachlan. Murdoch took on the role of chairman emeritus at Fox and News.

Personal Life

Murdoch was married and divorced several times. In 1956 he married flight attendant Patricia Booker, with whom he had a daughter, Prudence (b. 1958). They divorced in 1967, the same year Murdoch married Scottish journalist and novelist Anna Torv. Murdoch and Torv had three children: Elisabeth (b. 1968), Lachlan (b. 1971), and James (b. 1972). They divorced in 1999, and Murdoch again remarried the same year, this time to Wendi Deng (b. 1969), a former executive at STAR, who served as a strategist for Murdoch’s initiatives to expand News Corp’s reach online. With Deng, Murdoch had two daughters, Grace (b. 2001) and Chloe (b. 2003). They divorced in 2013. In March 2016 Murdoch married his fourth wife, former model Jerry Hall. Murdoch and Hall divorced in 2022. The following year Murdoch was briefly engaged to Ann Lesley Smith, a former radio host, although Murdoch called off the engagement in April 2023. In June 2024, after a brief engagement, Murdoch married retired Russian molecular biologist Elena Zhukova.

Significance

Murdoch’s half-century construction of a worldwide media empire produced a large personal fortune and gave him immense influence over the information tens of millions of people consumed every day. He was ranked number thirty-three on Forbes magazine’s 2007 list of the four hundred richest Americans and ranked seventy-third on its list of the world’s 946 billionaires; in 2022 the magazine ranked him thirty-first on the former list. His estimated net worth in 2023 was $17.3 billion.

During the twenty-first century Murdoch's media holdings remained popular while also attracting intense criticism for some of the ideas promoted on outlets such as Fox News. Even Murdoch’s critics, however, conceded that he made many important, perhaps even valuable, transformations of the media industry. However, these critics also blamed his predilection for sensational infotainment and relentless pursuit of profit for increasing vulgarity in entertainment and dishonesty in news; they also alleged that some of Murdoch's media holdings were responsible for spreading misinformation and stoking prejudice.

Some media critics argued that Murdoch defined what the public wanted simply by producing one type of content over another. To his supporters, however, Murdoch put a human (if sometimes ruthless) face on the otherwise impersonal, perhaps inexorable, processes of media change and consolidation in an era of globalization and simply told viewers and readers what they wanted to hear.

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