Keith Rupert Murdoch , AC (born 11 March 1931), usually known as Rupert Murdoch , is an Australian-born American global media mogul. He owns media outlets and is a major shareholder, chairman and managing director of News Corporation (News Corp).
Beginning with one newspaper in Adelaide, Murdoch acquired and started other publications in his native Australia before expanding News Corp into the United Kingdom, United States and Asian media markets. Although it was in Australia in the late 1950s that he first dabbled in television, he later sold these assets, and News Corp's Australian current media interests (still mainly in print) are restricted by cross-media ownership rules. Murdoch's first permanent foray into TV was in the UK, where he created Sky Television in 1989. In the 2000s he became a leading investor in satellite television, the film industry and the Internet.
According to the 2009 Forbes 400, Murdoch is the 132nd-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $4 billion.
Beginning
Start in business
Rupert Murdoch returned from Oxford to become managing director of News Limited in 1953. He began to direct his attention to acquisition and expansion. He bought the Sunday Times in Perth, Western Australia and, using the tabloid techniques of his father's mentor Lord Northcliffe, made it a success.
Over the next few years, Murdoch established himself in Australia as a dynamic business operator, expanding his holdings by acquiring suburban and provincial newspapers in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and the Northern Territory, including the Sydney afternoon tabloid, The Daily Mirror , as well as a small Sydney-based recording company, Festival Records. His acquisition of the Daily Mirror allowed him to challenge two powerful rivals in Australia's biggest city and to outmaneuver his afternoon rival in a lengthy circulation war.
His first foray outside Australia involved the purchase of a controlling interest in the New Zealand daily The Dominion . In January 1964, while touring New Zealand with friends in a rented Morris Minor after sailing across the Tasman, Murdoch read of a takeover bid for the sleepy Wellington paper by the British-based Canadian newspaper magnate, Lord Thomson of Fleet. On the spur of the moment, he launched a counterbid. A four-way battle for control ensued in which the 32-year-old Murdoch outwitted his rivals. He took an active interest in the paper, at least until distracted by bigger undertakings, and remained the dominant shareholder in New Zealand's Independent Newspapers Limited - the nationwide media group that ultimately developed from his takeover of The Dominion - until 2003.
Later in 1964, Murdoch launched The Australian , Australia's first national daily newspaper, which was based first in Canberra and later in Sydney. The Australian , a broadsheet, was intended to give Murdoch new respectability as a 'quality' newspaper publisher, as well as greater political influence. The paper had a rocky start that was marked by publishing difficulties and a rapid succession of editors who found it impossible to cope with Murdoch's persistent interference. Touted as a serious journal that was devoted to covering the affairs of the nation, the paper actually veered between tabloid sensationalism and intellectual mediocrity until Murdoch found a compliant editor who was able to tolerate his frequently unpredictable whims.
In 1972, Murdoch acquired the Sydney morning tabloid The Daily Telegraph from Australian media mogul Sir Frank Packer, who later admitted regretting selling it to him. In that year's election, Murdoch threw his growing power behind the Australian Labor Party under the leadership of Gough Whitlam and duly saw it elected. As the Whitlam government began to lose public support following its re-election in 1974, Murdoch turned against Whitlam and supported the Governor-General's dismissal of the Prime Minister.
During this period, Murdoch turned his attention to Britain. His business success in Australia and his fastidious policy of making prompt periodic repayments of his borrowings had placed him in good standing with the Commonwealth Bank, which provided him with finance for his biggest venture yet, the takeover of the family company that owned The News of the World , the Sunday newspaper with the biggest circulation in Britain.
Building the Empire
Acquisitions in Britain
When the daily newspaper The Sun entered the market in 1969, Murdoch acquired it and turned it into a tabloid format; by 2006 it was selling three million copies per day.
Murdoch acquired The Times (and The Sunday Times ), the paper Lord Northcliffe had once owned, in 1981. The distinction of owning The Times came to him through his careful cultivation of its owner, who had grown tired of losing money on it.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Murdoch's publications were generally supportive of the UK's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. At the end of the Thatcher/Major era, Murdoch switched his support to the Labour Party and the party's leader Tony Blair. The closeness of his relationship with Blair and their secret meetings to discuss national policies was to become a political issue in Britain. Though this has recently started to change, with The Sun publicly renouncing the ruling Labour government and seemingly lending it's support to David Cameron's Conservative Party.
In 1986, Murdoch introduced electronic production processes to his newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States. The greater degree of automation led to significant reductions in the number of employees involved in the printing process. In England, the move roused the anger of the print unions, resulting in a long and often violent dispute that played out in Wapping, one of London's docklands areas, where Murdoch had installed the very latest electronic newspaper publishing facility in an old warehouse. The unions had been led to assume that Murdoch intended to launch a new London evening newspaper from those premises, but he had kept secret his intention to relocate all the News titles there. The bitter dispute at Fortress Wapping started with the dismissal of 6000 employees who had gone on strike and resulted in street battles, demonstrations and a great deal of bad publicity for Murdoch. Many suspected that the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher had colluded in the Wapping affair as a way of damaging the British trade union movement. Once the Wapping battle had ended, union opposition in Australia followed suit.
In response to print media's decline and the increasing influence of online journalism Murdoch proclaimed his support of the micropayments model for obtaining online revenue, although this has largely been criticised by thinkers on the subject.
News Corporation has subsidiaries in the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the Channel Islands and the Virgin Islands. From 1986, News Corporation's annual tax bill averaged around seven per cent of its profits.
Moving into the United States
Murdoch made his first acquisition in the United States in 1973, when he purchased the San Antonio Express-News . Soon afterwards, he founded Star , a supermarket tabloid, and in 1976, he purchased the New York Post . On September 4, 1985, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen in order to satisfy the legal requirement that only US citizens were permitted to own American television stations. In 1987, in Australia he bought The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd, the company that his father had once managed. By 1991, his Australian-based News Corp. had worked up huge debts, forcing 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 satellite network Sky Television, which incurred massive losses in its early years of operation. As many of his other business interests had been, Sky was heavily subsidized by the profits generated by his other holdings, but eventually 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 ever 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. However, the FCC ruled in Murdoch's favor, stating that his ownership of Fox was in the best interests of the public. In the same year, Murdoch announced a deal with MCI Communications to develop a major news website and magazine, The Weekly Standard . In the same year, News Corp. launched the Foxtel pay television network in Australia in partnership with Telstra.
In 1996, Murdoch decided to enter the cable news market with the Fox News Channel, a 24-hour cable news station. Following its launch, the heavily-funded Fox News consistently eroded CNN's market share and eventually proclaimed itself as "the most-watched cable news channel." Ratings studies released in the fourth quarter of 2004 showed that the network was responsible for nine of the top ten programs in the "Cable News" category at that time.
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 that with Festival Records, and the result was Festival Mushroom Records (FMR). Both Festival and FMR were managed by Murdoch's son
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