Profile:He may be 76, but his buying of Dow Jones this week proves there has been no damping of Rupert Murdoch's dogged ambition to control the world's media, writes Rosita Boland
Mogul. Baron. Empire. They're all words defining power and nobility; originally coined in a different era, when a mogul was a member of the dynasty that ruled India until 1857, and the British empire alone spread its pink stains over vast tracts of the world. These words still survive, but their usage in the modern language is very often associated with a specific kind of feudalism, that of power within the media - media mogul, press baron, media empire. Rupert Murdoch, who this week finally acquired the Dow Jones company, with its flagship newspaper the Wall Street Journal, for $5.6 billion (€4.1 billion), is a man whose career is defined by all three expressions.
Rupert Keith Murdoch, now 76, was born in Victoria, Australia. His journalist father, Keith, who started out as a political correspondent, was knighted in 1933, and later managed Australia's Herald and Weekly Times newspaper group, had shares and controlling interests in many newspapers. One of these was the News, an evening paper in Adelaide.
When Murdoch snr died suddenly in 1952, his son, then a student at the University of Oxford, and extremely fond of gambling on horses, reluctantly came home. Keith Murdoch had wanted his son to quit gambling, sharpen up, and follow a career in newspapers. He also recognised his son needed to be challenged. In his will, he instructed trustees that Rupert should begin his career at the News, "if they considered him worthy of support".
By 1956, Murdoch was publishing Australia's first weekly TV magazine, already demonstrating his ability to spot a gap in a developing market. Television as a medium may have been new to the public, but, as later with the internet, he recognised that it would soon go from scarce and expensive to ubiquitous and cheap.
He subsequently bought several provincial papers, and in 1964, launched the Australian, a national daily.
In 1967, he divorced his first wife of 11 years, Patricia Booker, a former air hostess from Melbourne, with whom he had a daughter, Prudence. He has never been alone for long at any point in his personal life. The same year, he married Estonian-born Anna Tõrv, who was a trainee journalist in one of his papers. They went on to have three children, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James.
By 1968, Murdoch wanted to expand into the British press. Competing against the ill-fated Robert Maxwell, who was also developing what was to be a controversial media empire, he bought the News of the World, then the British paper with the biggest Sunday circulation. The following year, he bought the Sun, the paper that truly made his name resound in Britain. He changed it to a tabloid format, made the words "page three" shorthand for cheesy shots of topless "stunnas", and delivered a string of historic headlines. These ranged from the bizarre ("Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster") to the infamous "Gotcha" during the Falklands War, when the sinking of the Argentinian Belgrano took 323 lives.
OF ALL MURDOCH'S many newspapers, the one that has most clearly demonstrated - in an almost cartoon-like fashion - his own right-wing and conservative political beliefs has been the Sun. On the day of the 1992 general election, which Labour was a strong contender to win, the Sun's front-page headline warned "If [Labour leader] Neil Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?", complete with Kinnock's head as lightbulb. Two days later, when the Conservatives were still in power, the paper crowed: "It was the Sun wot won it".
By 1973, Murdoch had bought his first US newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News. In 1976, he bought the tabloid New York Post, and made it famous for its graphic reports of horrible crimes - "Headless body in topless bar". By the 1980s, he was a formidable international force in the media, controlling high-profile papers on three continents. In 1985, he became an American citizen (only citizens could buy the country's television stations). It allowed him to buy several independent television stations, after which he launched the US's fourth television network, Fox Broadcasting Company, out of which the conservative and controversial Fox News Channel developed a decade later. Murdoch is a long-term supporter of the Republican Party, and critics believe his politics are reflected in his media operations.
Very powerful men are rarely popular among their employees. In 1986, Murdoch gained many more enemies when he moved his News International papers overnight from Fleet Street to "Fortress Wapping" (protected by riot police), where new printing technology meant the redundancy of 5,000 printing staff. There was a long and bitter landmark battle with the unions. "You can't be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place," Murdoch said later. All the other British newspapers eventually changed to the same new technology.
WHILE MURDOCH HAS gained new readers via sensationalism, he has also alienated many others, who believe he is responsible for the widespread dumbing-down of both print and broadcast media. In 1994, when broadcaster Melvyn Bragg interviewed a terminally ill Dennis Potter, Potter famously declared: "I call my cancer Rupert . . . There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press."
In 1999, Murdoch divorced his second wife and married his third, Chinese-born Wendi Deng, all within three weeks. He was 68, she was 30, and an employee at his Asian satellite TV network, Star TV. The subsequent birth of their daughters, Grace and Chloe, and the attempt by Murdoch and Deng to include them in a previously legalised trust for Murdoch's other adult children, has infuriated his four older offspring. In a conciliatory move, this summer Murdoch gave all six of his children $100 million (€73 million) each in stock.
In 2005, ever keen to expand into new media, Murdoch bid $580 million (€420 million) for networking website MySpace. Soon after, site membership went from 20 million to 200 million, thus adding value to Murdoch's already astonishing wealth. Murdoch is worth $9 billion (€6.5 billion), putting him at number 73 on the Forbes rich list. One of his many homes is a 20-room penthouse on New York's Fifth Avenue, previously owned by Laurance Rockefeller and bought for $44 million (€32 million), in a building described by the New York Observer as "the most pedigreed building on the snobbiest street in the country's most real estate-obsessed city".
News Corp, his umbrella company, is worth $68 billion (€50 billion), with the Murdoch family controlling 31 per cent.
Although Murdoch owns BSkyB, as well as Fox, it's no secret that he's long wanted to expand his broadcast empire in the US. Business and the media in the US have long been synonymous with the Dow Jones, with its financial news wire service and prestige title the Wall Street Journal, which has won 31 Pulitzer Prizes. In March, Murdoch offered to buy the Dow Jones for a whopping $60 per share, even though it was valued at only $36 per unit.
The Bancroft family had effectively owned 64 per cent of the voting stock of Dow Jones. For months, discussion and arguments raged about preserving editorial integrity. This week, with $5.6 billion (just over €4 billion) on the table, money finally talked, the Bancrofts signed on the dotted line and sold out their shares. It is widely speculated that it is only a matter of time before Murdoch launches his own business news channel, by drawing on his newly acquired Dow Jones resources.
The day after Murdoch bought the Dow Jones, the editorial in the Wall Street Journal bravely declared: "We know enough about capitalism to know that there is no separating ownership and control . . . No sane businessman pays a premium of 67 per cent over the market price for an asset he intends to ruin."
Of all the millions of words ever published in the Wall Street Journal, it's the handful in that editorial that may come back to haunt it forever.
The Murdoch File
Who is he?The world's most powerful media player.
Why is he in the news?This week, he bought the American-based Dow Jones company, which includes the famous Wall Street Journal, for $5.6 billion.
Least appealing characteristic:His attitude to journalistic integrity and ethics, politics, unions . . .
Most appealing characteristic:Er, emmm, hmmm . . . how about his energy for a man of 76?
Most likely to say:"Is that newspaper/cable network/TV station/internet company/movie studio/magazine/publishing house for sale?"
Least likely to say:"I'm a Luddite."