Rupert Murdoch Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Keith Rupert Murdoch (born March 11, 1931) is a successful media mogul, major shareholder and managing director of the News Corporation. He is one of the only chief executives in any multinational media corporation who (through his family company) has a controlling ownership share in the companies he runs.Rupert Murdoch is generally regarded as the single most politically influential media proprietor in the world, and is regularly courted by politicians, especially current and past British and Australian Prime Ministers, who attempt to persuade him to run favourable coverage. His politics are generally right-wing and pro-American. He is an ardent republican and is said to have refused a peerage from Queen Elizabeth II.
Murdoch was born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and educated at Oxford University (Worcester College), United Kingdom and became a United States citizen in 1985. His father was Sir Keith Murdoch, a reporter and adviser to Billy Hughes (prime minister of Australia during World War I) who became Australia's most influential newspaper executive, directing the Melbourne-based Herald and Weekly Times group. Murdoch was deeply influenced by his father, and although he clearly wished to emulate him, he often rebelled against him. Keith Murdoch was a stern and somewhat distant figure who was reportedly often frustrated by his son's early progress and despaired of him being able to take over from him.
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.
After his father's sudden death, Murdoch had expected to inherit a considerable fortune and a prominent position. In the event 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 10 years, as his press empire grew, Murdoch established a hugely lucrative financial base, and these profits were routinely used to subsidise further acquisitions. By the 1970s, this power 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.
His desire for dominant cross-media ownership manifested early – he bought an ailing Australian record label, Festival Records, in 1961 and within a few years it had become the leading local recording company. He also bought a TV station in Wollongong, New South Wales, hoping to use it to break into the Sydney TV market, but found himself frustrated by Australia's cross-media ownership laws, which prevented him from owning both a major newspaper and a TV station in the same city. Since then he has consistently lobbied, both personally and through his papers, to have these laws changed in his favour.
He moved to the UK in the mid-1960s and rapidly became a major force there after his surprise acquisitions of the News Of The World and later The Times and The Sunday Times; both were controversial takeovers which further reinforced his growing reputation as a ruthless and cunning business operator. In the UK, he notably took on the British printers' unions to reduce his staff costs, and exploited 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, Private Eye dubbed him The Dirty Digger, a name that has endured.
During 1986-7, the confrontation with the unions NGA and SOGAT was considerable and highly controversial. The move of News International's London operation to Wapping in the East End resulted in nightly battles and riots outside the new plant and TNT (a delivery operation then owned by Murdoch and used to deliver newspapers during the disturbances); lorries and depots were frequently and violently attacked.
Before the Wapping dispute, English newspapers were (allegedly) the victims of widespread union malpractice, and they certainly suffered as businesses because of the British print unions, which were at best highly resistant to change and which were at worst riddled with corruption. Phantom employees, gross overstaffing, inheritance of jobs by family members, theft of supplies and other malpractice were said to have been common place throughout Fleet Street, and not just at Murdoch's properties.
Murdoch and his competitors soon successfully and controversially challenged the power of the unions in their workplaces. However, Murdoch's secretive and sometimes deliberately deceitful business practices won him few friends on the left. A case in point was the controversial Wapping plant, which was deliberately planned, built and and started in total secrecy, well before the unions became aware of its existence. Murdoch and the stridently anti-union Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher were seen as being in open collusion over the Wapping affair – a claim apparently supported by the evidence of the massive police protection that the Wapping plant was given during the dispute.
In 1985 Murdoch became a United States citizen to satisfy current legislation that only United States citizens could own American television stations – and yet also managed to have himself defined as an Australian citizen to retain his ownership of Australian media outlets. 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 Corporation had amassed huge debts which necessitated Murdoch to sell many of the American magazine interests that he acquired in the mid-1980s. Much of this debt came from his British-based BSkyB satellite network, which incurred massive losses in its early years of operation, which (in his customary manner) he heavily subsidised with profits from his other holdings until he was able to drive his main competitor to the wall.
In 1995 Murdoch's Fox Network became the object of intense scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after the case that Murdoch's foreign ownership of Fox Broadcasting contravened current legislation. The FCC, however, ruled in Murdoch's favour, stating that his ownership of Fox Broadcasting was in the public's best interests. In the same year Murdoch announced a deal with MCI to develop a major news website as well as funding a magazine, The Weekly Standard, about politics that has a pronounced right-wing view. Also in 1995, in partnership with Telstra, News Corporation launched the Foxtel pay television network into Australia.
In 1999 he significantly expanded his music holdings in Australia by acquiring the controlling share in the other 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 for several years.
Murdoch has been married three times. His first marriage ended in the late 1950s after only a few years. In 1961 he married an employee, journalist Anna Murdoch. They had three children, Elizabeth, Lachlan and James. Anna and Rupert divorced acrimoniously in 1998 after it was revealed that Murdoch had been conducting a long-running affair with another employee, Wendi Deng, a junior executive in News Corporation's Asian operations, who was 40 years his junior; they married soon afterwards. There was considerable speculation at the time that his marriage to a woman of Chinese origin was in part being used cynically, to make him appear more sympathetic to the Chinese and thus ease his entry into the immense media market in China.
He has four children from his previous marriages; his elder son Lachlan Murdoch was expected to take over running the corporation at some stage. However, in November 2003, another son, James Murdoch, was appointed head of Murdoch's British Sky Broadcasting operations, amid accusations of nepotism from shareholders.
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 examining what was available of the accounts, that Murdoch would normally have expected to pay about $350m tax: enough to "build seven new hospitals, 50 secondary schools or 300 primary schools". The article explained that the corporation's complex structure, international scope and use of offshore havens allowed News Corporation to avoid tax.
During the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, all 175 Murdoch-owned newspapers worldwide editorialized in favor of the war. [1]
In late 2003, Murdoch acquired a 34% stake in Hughes Electronics, operator of the largest US satellite TV system, DirecTV, from General Motors for $6 billion. Among his trophy properties around the world are The Times (acquired in 1981 from the Thomson family, who had bought it from the Astor interests in 1966) and the New York Post (he turned the Post from New York's most liberal paper into its most conservative).
In 2004 Murdoch announced that he was moving News Corporations' base out of Australia and that it would henceforward be incorporated in America. This was widely seen as a reaction to the Howard Liberal government's inability to alter Australia's media cross-ownership rules, which Murdoch has known to have wanted changed for decades, and which have prevented him from acquiring more newspapers and TV stations in Australian cities.
Murdoch's political perspective seems multi-faceted, although many biographers have speculated that his early dalliances with the left wing were largely a matter of opportunism, or were simply a pose intended to annoy his father. For instance, while at Oxford he was active in the Labour Club. However, during the bitter Australian Labor Party-Democratic Labor Party split in the mid-1950s he reportedly tried to encourage future South Australian Labor premier Don Dunstan to defect to the DLP, and offered Dunstan his newspaper's support if he did so (he refused). Murdoch actively supported the Australian Labor Party for some years, although he famously reversed his allegiance and used his newspapers to strongly support the Liberal Party in the dying days of Whitlam's Labor government in late 1975. In the US he has been a long-time supporter of the Republican Party and was a friend of Ronald Reagan.
He 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 the mainland Chinese political leadership – 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.
Publications owned by Rupert Murdoch in the United Kingdom (The Times, The Sun, the News of the World, The Sunday Times) support eurosceptic positions, and generally show contempt for the UK's European partners. Murdoch publications worldwide tend to adopt anti-French and pro-American positions.
This is an Article on Rupert Murdoch. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Rupert Murdoch Biography
Early life and career
Acquisitions in the UK
Moving into the United States
Divorce and remarriage
Recent activities
Murdoch and politics
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