Loved and loathed: The sun sets on Rupert Murdoch’s 70-year career

Media barons have historically dominated their home markets. There were, however, periods when Rupert Murdoch’s shadow loomed over the larger part of the world.

Where others were dominant in a medium, his was also a multimedia global empire, which set Murdoch apart from the Lord Beaverbrooks, or William Randolph Hearsts, Henry Luces, the Sulzbergers or more contemporary media moguls such as Ted Turner or Michael Bloomberg. He has now handed over the reins to his son Lachlan.

Lachlan Murdoch (right) is taking over from his father.Credit: Bloomberg

From newspapers, broadcast, cable and satellite television, film studios and book publishing to record labels: Murdoch originated and distributed content – and owned and micromanaged the platforms that originated and distributed that content – across much of the world.

He is, and deserves to be, regarded as Australia’s most successful businessman on the international stage, and one of the more powerful and influential figures in world affairs for much of his unusually lengthy career.

He is an admired, feared and even loathed figure in Australia, the UK and US, but there is no doubting his achievement in building the first global media empire and the single-mindedness and passion – the obsession – he has brought to that ambition for more than 70 years.

His career started in relatively modest circumstances in the early 1950s when his father, Keith Murdoch, died and left a 21-year-old Rupert three newspapers: The News and Sunday Mail in Adelaide and the Courier-Mail in Brisbane.

Murdoch once said that he never asked a prime minister for anything. He didn’t need to.

The latter was sold by the trustees for his father’s estate to pay taxes and repay debts, leaving the younger Murdoch with The News and its circulation of only about 75,000 as the unlikely foundation for a global media empire. The next 70 or so years have been a maelstrom of activity as Murdoch expanded rapidly, initially in Australia and then offshore.

He acquired the UK’s News of the World and The Sun in the late 1960s before crossing the Atlantic to the United States to launch the National Star (to compete with the National Inquirer) and purchase the New York Post.

Over the next decade-and-a-half, there was a string of newspaper acquisitions in the US, UK (including The Times of London) and Australia, where he took over the company that his father had helped build and turned it into the dominant media company in the country — the Herald & Weekly Times.

In the mid-1980s, he bought Twentieth Century Fox and a small group of television stations in the US that he would eventually build into the Fox film and television business that became the core of the News empire until he sold most of the business, excluding the Fox News and sports channels, to Disney in a $US71.3 billion ($111 billion) deal.

When Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News and Fox Sports in the US and Sky in the UK, News incurred multibillion-dollar losses as he chased his ambitious dream.Credit: AP

Recognising that the US was the key to News’ prospects, Murdoch moved there in the mid-1970s and then, in a demonstration of his pragmatism, he relinquished his Australian citizenship so that he could satisfy a requirement that only US citizens could own US television licences.

A defining moment in Murdoch’s professional life and News Corp’s history came with the sharemarket crash in October 1987.

Until the crash, Murdoch, determined to keep control of the group he had created, had funded the growth in his empire with debt – and lots of it – instead of raising equity and diluting his family’s interest and his complete authority over News. He’d also been far less interested in profits and dividends than in using the cash News generated to continually expand.

That nearly brought down the entire business. By 1990, it was on the brink of collapse, with a holdout by a small Pittsburgh bank threatening to blow up a $1 billion debt restructuring and cause News’ collapse. The loans officer involved capitulated, literally at the eleventh hour, and News and Murdoch, unlike many contemporary entrepreneurs – Robert Holmes a Court, John Elliott, Alan Bond and John Spalvins in this market – survived.

That brush with financial disaster seemed to chasten Murdoch.

From that time there was less emphasis on debt, and he consolidated his personal control of News by buying some of his extended family out of the entity that effectively controlled News. Later, he created a new, non-voting class of shares that enabled him to raise equity without diluting his control.

The realisation that he needed a stronger balance sheet and that profits were important, particularly if he wanted to attract the new equity the new class of shares enabled, didn’t deter Murdoch from continuing to take massive risks to expand the group.

When he launched Fox News and Fox Sports in the US, and Sky in the UK, News incurred multibillion-dollar losses as Murdoch kept doubling up on an extraordinarily ambitious vision of creating a network of satellite and cable TV platforms across the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America.

The initial losses never deterred him if the businesses were adding customers and influence. The Australian, if its costs were properly apportioned, probably lost money for half a century.

While he made some mistakes – the $US580 million acquisition of MySpace, for instance, was a disaster – his intuitive bets on cable and satellite television paid off.

Nor did he seem emotionally attached to the assets he acquired or developed – he traded in and out of assets throughout his career – except, perhaps, for a life-long love of newspapers. Few newspaper proprietors had as deep an understanding of every aspect of the medium as Murdoch, who is as comfortable writing or editing as he was with the production processes.

While Murdoch always played down the level of influence he had, there’s little doubt he had it and used it, not so much from any particular political convictions, despite his apparent conservatism, but to protect and further his business interests. Whether he could impact political fortunes or not, politicians believed he could.

His perceived power cleared the way for some of his acquisitions, particularly in the UK, and also enabled him to revolutionise, or at least modernise, the UK newspaper industry when he destroyed the historical power of the Fleet Street unions during a year-long strike in the 1980s by building a new plant at Wapping, with new presses and IT systems that wiped out layers of labour-intensive print union workers.

It helped that the UK government, headed by Margaret Thatcher – whose election The Sun had supported strongly and who had allowed Murdoch’s acquisition of The Times and Sunday Times to occur without a referral to the Monopolies Commission – was equally as supportive of News’ union-busting.

Murdoch once said that he never asked a prime minister for anything. He didn’t need to.

That perceived power and influence was very much his. News is not like most large public companies, with neat lines of authority, delegation, transparent structures and a chief executive who reports to a board.

No, News was Murdoch’s company and the only real power was his, which he exercised on matters both major and minor. He was very hands-on on matters that interested him, operating News as if it were a modest family company. To the extent that matters were delegated, the decisions were made by Murdoch loyalists who essentially did what they thought Murdoch would want them to do.

While allowing contrary views to a point, Murdoch could be ruthless. The senior executive ranks within his companies have churned a lot over the decades as Murdoch has attracted talented people to work for him and subsequently dumped them when they failed him, or failed to realise they were within an autocracy.

There’s little point in trying to chronicle the myriad of Murdoch’s wheeling and dealing over the years. But the closure of the News of the World tabloid and the splitting of his newspaper and television and film interests — to distance the more profitable and more highly valued Fox assets from the reputational and financial damage of the phone-hacking scandal — was perhaps the low point in Murdoch’s professional life.

His appearance before a House of Commons committee to be grilled over the scandal (and have a foam pie thrown at him) was, he said, “the most humble day of my life”.

Throughout his extraordinary career, Murdoch and his media businesses have polarised their communities. The consistent strategy that Murdoch originally deployed in Australia, and then even more aggressively in the UK for his major media properties, was to entertain as much as inform and to target mass audiences.

Whether it was The Sun with its page three girls or Fox with its MAGA cheerleaders, Murdoch was happy to play to the lowest common denominator if that’s where the money was. Indeed, Fox’s evolution points to a level of pragmatism – some might say amorality – about the sort of “journalism” that maximises revenues and profits.

While Murdoch has always played down the level of influence he had, there’s little doubt that he has it and used it, not so much from any particular political convictions, despite his apparent conservatism, but to protect and further his business interests.

That seemed to be more driven by cynicism than any particular conviction, other than it was the best strategy for making money. Murdoch’s personal political values were conservative, but at the weaker end of the scale compared with the positions taken by, say, Fox News or Sky in Australia, or even the convictions of his son, Lachlan.

Murdoch, for instance, thought Donald Trump was “a f---ing idiot”, according to biographer Michael Wolff. Fox, however, played a major role in getting Trump into the White House in 2016 and continues to pump out the “Big Lie” of the “stolen” 2020 election.

Murdoch recognised, in a media world that generally tilts progressive, that there was a lot of opportunity and money in owning the right. That’s why Fox was allowed and encouraged to double down on its pro-MAGA positioning and why Sky and the major Murdoch mastheads are positioned where they are.

You don’t get to have the controlling interest in two listed companies with a combined market value of more than $US25 billion – separate from the $US71.3 billion the family and shareholders received from the Disney deal – by being warm, fuzzy and principled.

Murdoch’s single-mindedness and the uncapped ambition he demonstrated throughout his life don’t appear to have been motivated by personal wealth or by the luxurious houses, yachts and other expensive assets that billionaires acquire and which Murdoch’s successes delivered to him and his family.

At its core, while media was the means, empire – the entrepreneurial satisfaction of building something vast and interesting – was the end. Whatever one thinks of him, it’s hard to deny that over a very long life he has succeeded in building and remaining the dominant figure in something vast, interesting and powerful.

Murdoch – the “Sun King” as he was sometimes called because everything and everyone in his businesses revolved around him – has now stepped away. The fate of the empire he built is uncertain. Revered by some, loathed and feared by many, he has, however, left his mark on the world.

Some might argue that he changed it.

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