Words: Tom Ward
“I’m a bit optimistic. I’ve got about another 175,000 hours to go,” a then 70 year-old Rupert Murdoch opined at a media event in 2001. “Maybe I can spend 75,000 productively at work…I’ve got to see that each one of those hours is well spent.”
As the Financial Review points, out, the newspaper magnate’s figurings weren’t quite on the money. According to Murdoch’s own calculations, he should have been out of circulation for good sometime in February 2021. Instead, we’re poised on the precipice of his 90th birthday, on March 11th.
Still holding on to his role as executive chairman of News Corp and co-chairman of Fox Corporation, Murdoch is soon to become one of an elite and small club of nonagenarians still operating at the head of their games.
Few approaching 90 wield such power as the figure Ted Turner, founder of CNN, once dubbed “The most dangerous man in the world.”
With an empire including newspaper and television outlets across the globe, powerful political friends and the ability to influence the outcome of everything from Brexit to immigration policy and electoral outcomes, Turner’s estimation of Murdoch may not be far off. If not the most dangerous man in the world, he’s certainly one of the most powerful.
As possibly the most divisive media baron of all time, Murdoch’s exceptional innings won’t be good news to all. But it does beg the question: with his 75,000 work hours now expired and his working life approaching an inevitable and natural end game, what happens to the Murdoch media empire now?
Ted Turner once dubbed Murdoch “the most dangerous man in the world”
Much like Succession, the black comedy drama in which a family is wrested apart by a vicious power struggle over the ailing patriarch’s media empire, the Murdoch clan has long been at odds. In fact, so notorious is its very public machinations that the HBO show is said to be based on the real life headlines. But where did it all start? And what comes next?
Keith Rupert Murdoch was born in Melbourne in 1931, the son of Sir Keith Murdoch and Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. His father had been a war correspondent before building a local newspaper and radio empire in Australia.
Surprisingly giving his later political mien, at Oxford, Murdoch Jr was a member of the Oxford University Labour Party, reportedly kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms, and was known as ‘Red Rupert’.
Campus politics fell by the wayside when Murdoch’s father died, prompting Murdoch Jr to return to Australia after completing his degree, and take a hands-on approach in the business at the age of 21. He quickly became known for giving the people what they want: notably, sports stories, eye-catching headlines and scandal heaped upon scandal.
With his father’s empire growing exponentially in his native Australia, Murdoch expanded his operations to the UK in 1968, purchasing the News of the World, and the following year, The Sun which he successfully reconfigured into the tabloid format.
A young Murdoch with his fledgling Daily Mirror
“I want a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it,” then editor Albert ‘Larry’ Lamb recalls Murdoch telling him at the time.
With The Sun attracting 10 million daily readers, Murdoch went on to acquire The Times and The Sunday Times in 1981.
By the early 2000s, Murdoch’s empire had expanded to include over 800 companies in 50 countries, with a total net worth of $5 billion.
Today, through his company News Corp, Murdoch owns local, national and international outlets numbering in the hundreds, including Australia’s Herald Sun and the US’s The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, as well as publisher Harper Collins and TV channels Sky News Australia and Fox News. Until 2019, when it was sold to Disney for $71 billion, Murdoch also owned 21st Century Fox.
“I want a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it," Murdoch said of the Sun
Notably, many of Murdoch’s newspapers and television channels (including Fox News, The Sun, and The New York Post) have been accused of promoting biased and misleading stories to promote his business interests and political agenda.
As recently as October 2020, Twitter and Facebook banned links to a New York Post story critical of Joe Biden, claiming the information contained therein could not be verified.
“As long as Rupert Murdoch has owned it, the ‘New York Post’ has been defined by its shamelessness and total lack of interest in taking responsibility for its worst errors and poor judgment,” wrote Alex Pareene a writer and the former editor of Gawker.
The Leveson Inquiry did particular damage to the Murdoch brand
The Sun, meanwhile, revels in causing controversy with its headlines. In 2016, for example, it was forced to apologise after running with the erroneous, xenophobic, and extremely damaging headline “1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis.”
“You can debate when the conservative movement became a racket – I nominate 1996, the year Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes created Fox News Channel to monetize [sic] right-wing outrage – but there is no doubt it has long since passed that point,” writes, a writer and former editor for The Wall Street Journal.
Despite backing the British Labour Party under Tony Blair, Murdoch had also been an avid supporter of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government and recently called the Brexit result, “wonderful”, likening Britain’s decision to leave the EU to a “prison break”.
Of course, the phone hacking scandal of 2011 was the largest blow to Murdoch, with his paper News of the World forced to shut down for good while, the subject of police and governmental investigations into bribery and corruption, Murdoch himself resigned as director of News International in 2012.
Despite public apologies in his newspapers – particularly over the hacking of the voicemail of then-missing school girl Milly Dowler – Murdoch was later secretly recorded saying the phone hacking inquest was “the biggest inquiry ever, over next to nothing.”
Still, Murdoch endured. Now, nine years later, he’s poised on the precipice of his final act.
The patriarch flanked by sons Lachlan and James Murdoch — who he says he regrets not spending more time with
When Murdoch sold most of Fox to Disney in 2019, some saw it as cashing out. Admitting the ride was over, and now was the time to sit back and count the spoils. His children may have thought so; each of the six received a gift of roughly $2 billion.
However, what remains still amounts to a formidable stable of some of the most recognisable media outlets in the world: The Sun, the New York Post, the Fox News group (worth $20 billion alone), more than half of Australia’s print market and a number of sports networks.
Enough, then, for Murdoch’s successors to fight over.
His eldest son, Lachlan Murdoch is the obvious choice to take over. At 49, Lachlan is chief executive of Fox News. He has appointed Viet Dinh, a Harvard-trained lawyer, to tun the day to day operations at Fox News. That Viet Dinh is not his father’s appointment speaks to Lachlan’s influence within the company, and surely, on his father.
"When Murdoch sold Fox to Disney, each of his six children received a gift of $2 billion..."
Competition comes from Lachlan’s younger brother James Murdoch who resigned from News Corp in 2020 over disagreements around editorial content, said to be the denial of climate change in certain Australian outlets. After a year in which the burning antipodean continent could be seen from space, James’ resignation seems like an understandable moral stand.
James also criticised the US media for encouraging “insidious forces” that led to the US Capitol attack, with many reading between the lines to draw the conclusion that James was attacking his father’s own Fox News.
According to the Financial Times, insiders in the Murdoch camp report that James hopes to work with his sisters Elisabeth and Prudence to refocus the priorities for Fox News and the Australian news division. If necessary, they say, he plans to override Lachlan.
Insiders also claim Lachlan had looked into the possibility of buying out James after the Disney deal. This, however, proved overly expensive and has not yet come to pass.
Whoever is eventually handed the reigns, and when that might be, one thing is certain: the Murdoch empire is not what it once was. As the FT points out, regardless of Fox’s sale to Disney, the political climate, with the Democratic Part back in power in the US, there have been repercussions for Fox News.
The channel and some of its hosts are currently facing a $2.7 billion lawsuit after allegedly spreading the theory that the recent US election was rigged. Meanwhile, ratings have fallen with conservative audiences drawn by channels such as Newsmax.
“He is not really in control the way he was,” Andrew Neil, the former editor of the Sunday Times told the FT. “He doesn’t bang heads together any more. It is a much diminished empire.”
Still, even diminished empires can still retain extraordinary power, and in the case of Murdoch’s remaining holdings, that is certainly the case.
“[News Corp]… has a global presence that’s involved in TV production, in movies, in publishing, in newspapers, digital media, et cetera. So for a company like that to function, clearly it does not depend only on Rupert Murdoch or James Murdoch,” Al Waleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, a Saudi Arabian businessman, member of the Saudi royal family and philanthropist has said.
The implication is clear. Even in its diminished state, News Corp is a powerful tool, and one that has taken on a life of its own. Remove the head, and the snake will continue to thrive.
Read next: The Return of Neil Woodford
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