Right-wing media baron Rupert Murdoch is 92 years old but still one of the most influential people in the world. His news empire is reshaping the world created on screens.
Keith Rupert Murdoch (March 11, 1931); Australian media executive and shareholder of News Corporation, based in New York, United States.
Murdoch, who started his career with newspapers, magazines, and television in his native Australia, expanded his company to British and American media and became one of the most important and wealthy media bosses in the world.
An article by Professor Roy Greenslade for Guardian Unlimited states that there are 175 newspapers belonging to Murdoch's media empire.
Murdoch, born in 1931, who turned a small publishing house into a world-class media giant, is known as a hardcore, ruthless capitalist after his disputes with the unions.
Murdoch was born in Melbourne to a Scottish family. His father Keith, who made a name for himself with the 'Canakkale War' news during the First World War, is one of the pioneers of Australian journalism...
Rupert grew up on his family's farm, Cruden. He studied at Geelong Grammar, a school for elite children, and became the editor of the student newspaper at the age of 16. Interned at the Melbourne Herald newspaper, the young man studied political science, history and political economy at Oxford after 1950 and completed this education in 1953. After his father's death, Murdoch joined News Ltd in Adelaide. A small publishing house was inherited.
By 1955, the 23-year-old publishing boss Murdoch had significantly increased the circulation of his Adelaide News and Sunday Mail. He started to expand his own publishing house by buying other newspapers on a credit basis.
He had to increase sales very quickly in order to pay off the debts he had incurred by buying new newspapers. He achieved this by turning to boulevard journalism. His newspapers addressed the masses, covering sensationalism, sex, and crime.
Entering the radio industry in 1957
Murdoch entered the radio business in 1957 through partnerships. A year later it sought to enter Sydney's highly competitive newspaper market in 1960, after obtaining the necessary license for Channel 9, the first television station in Adelaide, and partnering with three private transmitters. Thanks to his new purchase of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, and the scandalous newspaper Truth, News Ltd. The company became Australia's fourth-largest publishing house.
One of the rare jobs it hurt: Australian
Although the necessary infrastructure for sales was not sufficiently developed, the prestige project in the 60s was the establishment of a principle-wide daily newspaper. The newspaper Australian (with a circulation of 25,000) that was launched in "serious" became one of the few businesses Murdoch suffered a loss. Murdoch, who has a child from his first marriage, remarried in 1967 to reporter Anna Maria Torv and had three children with him.
UK market entry
Murdoch had already signed up in 1964 in New Zealand and Hong Kong. At the end of the 60s, it began to enter the media market of Great Britain, which was shaken by the crises. After buying the tradition-bound News of the World, then the largest London Sunday newspaper, he managed to make a very lucrative hit with The Sun, which he bought in 1969.
Five-folds The Sun's circulation
Murdoch's new marketing strategies (like the sex bombs on the third page of the Bingo game) increased its circulation from 650,000 to 4 million in ten years, making this sensational newspaper the UK's best-selling daily newspaper.
New York Post debacle
After suffering the biggest debacle of his publishing career by acquiring the oldest American newspaper, the New York Post, which cost him several million dollars a year, his press ventures in America remained mostly for local newspapers and eventually abandoned them as well.
Entered the television and cinema industries
His new goal was to enter the American television market. To this end, it was necessary for Murdoch to accept American citizenship in 1985. He first bought the satellite station sky band and the television company Metromedia with seven local broadcasters then bought the film company 20th Century Fox and merged them all into a TV broadcast chain under the name Fox Television.
Sky, the first television in Europe
By acquiring Sky Channel, Murdoch got the first European satellite channel. This broadcasting station was later split into four channels: Sky One, Sky News, Sky Movies, and Eurosport.
Quarrel with unions
He made headlines when he moved the production site of the London newspaper Times, which he had owned since 1981, which was a very prestigious newspaper for a long time, from Fleet Street to the printing houses called Wapping in the harbor neighborhood, which was protected by barbed wire. When the unions refused to move here and prepared to strike, Murdoch laid off 5,500 workers and hired unorganized printers and typesetters.
Prototype of the anti-union enemy
Although he was economically successful by cutting staff and cutting operating costs, Murdoch, after dealing with mass demonstrations, street riots, and constant strikes for 13 months, went down in British economic history as the prototype of the icy cold businessman and trade union enemy.
Largest magazine publisher in the USA
With the newspapers he continued, Murdoch established a kind of press monopoly in Australia. Murdoch, who also bought the Today newspaper in England, dominated about a third of the market here. With the acquisition of Triangle Publications (including TV Guide), it also became the largest magazine publisher in the United States.
One of the richest in the world...
He was 73rd on the list of the richest people in the world (2007) with a fortune of $ 9 billion.
Conservative editorial policy
Fox News Channel, owned by Rupert Murdoch, has been criticized for being politically conservative, defending conservative politicians and views. The news channel was also heavily criticized in the 2004 documentary 'Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism' produced and directed by Robert Greenwald. In an article written by Professor Roy Greenslade for Guardian Unlimited, he pointed out that all 175 newspapers belonging to Murdoch's media empire were covering news defending the Iraq war.
Britain's 'wiretapping'
It was understood that the families of the soldiers and many celebrities were listening to the scandal that broke out after it was revealed that Murdoch's News of the World newspaper had deleted the phone messages of a murdered young girl, and it was decided to close the newspaper. Rebekah Brooks, who was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper at the time of the incident, resigned and was detained, although she was later released on bail. The London Police Chief has resigned and his former reporter, Sean Hoare, who uncovered the incident, was found dead in his home.
Analysis
It is difficult to know exactly when Rupert Murdoch's alliance with the conservative right began. Murdoch's early career political views were quite eclectic. He was even interested in socialism during his student years at Oxford. However, January 1974 is the starting point for Murdoch's positioning of himself as a rightist. On this date, Murdoch sided with Gough Whitlam's Labor government in Australia. A secret diplomatic telegram sent by the U.S. Consul General reported to Washington that Murdoch had "instructed the editors of the newspapers he owned to kill Whitlam." Whitlam had to resign after this date, and Murdoch sided with the new government and began to offer them all his support.
Of those who made social and economic reconciliation impossible in the post-war era, if anyone is still alive, it is Murdoch. Murdoch was so despised by the educated elite in the UK that television writer Dennis Potter named the cancer tumor he contracted "Rupert". But for all of Murdoch's importance, we still do not fully understand what this long career tells us about the relationship between politics and media in our age. Just as Murdoch is ninety-one years old, it is time for us to seriously seek the answer to this question.
Rupert Murdoch was born in Australia in 1931 in a family of journalists. His father, Keith Murdoch, was a well-known war correspondent throughout the country for his reporting from the Gallipoli front in the First World War. Murdoch continued his life as an executive at the Herald Group, and upon his death in 1952 relinquished control of Adelaide News to his family. His son, still in his early twenties, took over Adelaide News and began to build his own empire. Within two decades, Rupert Murdoch has become one of the most successful editors and publishers the industry has ever seen. It would be an exaggeration to say that he invented modern journalism. However, it was Murdoch who also managed to control the newsrooms in the modern sense, to the extent that few of his contemporaries could.
Regardless, Murdoch loves newspapers and the journalistic trade like a snake handler loves snakes. He knows how to attract readers and negotiate with competitors. And he is the one who used small newspaper techniques to create a radical change in publishing. It is this mastery of every aspect of his trade that forms the basis of his strength. That's why it's still so important to a number of right-wing political leaders.
A few years after Murdoch opened Whitlam, he helped keep Margaret Thatcher from perpetuating the post-war political order, amid reports of scandal and left-wing extremism in British newspapers. Tony Blair signaled his acceptance of this change by attending the 1995 annual general meeting of Murdoch's News Corporation. The culture of competitive individualism that spread among young people in England in the early eighties created a gap between them and their children and grandchildren. Murdoch's entry into the US media world came later. In the mid-nineties, Fox News became the coordinating focus of populist conservatism, which served to nominate Donald Trump as the Republican candidate in 2016.
Murdoch has never forgotten that his job is to entertain, scandal, and intrigue people, whether it's the "hot girls" on the Sun, the pastors on the News of the World, or the Simpsons on Fox.
Murdoch had no plans for the internet industry that journalism had to adapt to. After the hilarious mismanagement of MySpace, he had to watch first Google and then Facebook take away the ad revenues that once formed the basis of the newspaper industry.
The worldview that Murdoch created and maintains in newsrooms is the worldview of most of the English-speaking world today.