Talented offspring of a talented dad – Business – Kommersant

Murdoch’s surname is steadily associated with the global media empire – a multitude of newspapers, magazines, TV channels, radio stations and Internet resources. It wasn’t always like that. Even 70 years ago, it was also steadily associated with front-line and parliamentary chronicles and attempts to introduce censorship in the media. This is what Sir Keith Arthur Murdoch became famous for, introducing his son Rupert to the world of mass media.

Goebbels of the best intentions

The fate of media mogul Keith Rupert Murdoch may have been predetermined long before he was born. His father Keith Arthur Murdoch, from a family of Scottish emigrants who moved to Australia at the end of the 19th century, preferred to work at the university in the Melbourne newspaper The Age. In 1908 he went to England, where he worked for the London Pall Mall Gazette and studied by correspondence at the London School of Economics. Staying in England is also remarkable in that Keith Murdoch, who suffered from speech defects, corrected them from his compatriot, speech therapist Lionel Logue, who had recently moved to London. The same one who many years later became the personal speech therapist of the British King George VI, who suffered from stuttering. For his services, the Australian doctor received the Royal Victorian Order (CVO), and became known throughout the world thanks to the Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech.

During the First World War, Keith Arthur Murdoch became famous as a talented war correspondent who covered the actions of the Australian Expeditionary Force in one of the most fierce battles – the Gallipoli operation.

In 1921, Keith Murdoch took over the Melbourne Herald (later known as The Herald), and then began buying up competitors. Newspapers alone were not enough for Murdoch. By 1935 he had acquired 11 local radio stations and later spearheaded the merger of the country’s rival news services into the Australian Associated Press Ltd. Two years earlier, in 1933, he had been knighted. After Australia’s entry into the war, Sir Keith took charge of a new government body, the State Information Office.

He secured a ban on the publication in the mainstream media of a different from the state point of view on military events, which many did not like. He was openly compared to Goebbels, criticized for his authoritarianism and violation of freedom of speech.

As a result, Sir Keith had to leave the civil service.

War, turbulent events and setbacks undermined Sir Keith’s health. He was diagnosed with cancer. He retired in 1949 and died three years later. Almost all of his £400,000 fortune was given to creditors. As it turned out, he was treated, lived and published newspapers, he almost exclusively in debt. Two small newspapers, a regional radio station, and the humble airline Ansett are all Sir Keith left behind for the family.

From scratch

When his father died, Rupert Murdoch was only 21 years old. Even in his school years, his father taught him to work in the editorial office. Rupert was first the editor of the school magazine, and later worked part-time at The Herald. Energy Murdoch Jr. was not to occupy. He began to revive his father’s business and bought up several small regional newspapers and the record company Festival Records.

In the mid-1960s, Murdoch founded the national daily newspaper The Australian, where he attracted the best correspondents and editors, which helped the publication to gain great popularity in the country. Soon he began building his own media empire, buying small publications for next to nothing.

Usually, after the purchase, the editorial policy changed – sensational investigations, secrets from the life of stars, scandalous revelations, provocative headlines – thanks to this, circulation soared.

In 1968, Murdoch ventured outside of Australia by purchasing his first British newspaper, the money-losing tabloid News of the World. A year later, Murdoch’s “stable” had another publication – the liberal newspaper The Sun, which was also in decline. Under a new owner, she began to publish photos of semi-nude models on the third page, parted with liberalism and, as a result, became profitable. The Battle of Britain was won.

After gaining a foothold in the UK, Murdoch set his sights on the US. The first acquisition (1973) was the popular Texas-based San Antonio Express-News. In 1974, the Star tabloid appeared, and in 1976, Murdoch bought one of the oldest American newspapers, the New York Post, which he converted to The Sun format. In 1979, the News Corporation holding was created, gradually merging all of its assets.

In 1981, the emperor of the yellow press swung at the sacred. The saint turned out to be the oldest newspaper still in existence, and undoubtedly the most influential of British newspapers, The Times of London.

There was a scandal in the country. The Prime Minister was required to block the deal, but Margaret Thatcher was a staunch opponent of state interference in business affairs. In addition, for The Times itself, the deal was a matter of life and death: the then owners did not hide the fact that they were ready to close it. The Times came under the control of an Australian.

Murdoch equipped it with the latest technology, laid off about 4 thousand printing workers (even the hunger strike of the staff did not prevent this). The result was achieved – a few years later, The Times, which was dying, became profitable.

Embrace the immensity

In the mid-1980s, Murdoch decided that the printed word was no longer enough for him. In 1985, he bought the American film company 20th Century Fox piecemeal and began to absorb regional television stations. To do this, he even had to part with Australian citizenship – only US citizens, albeit naturalized ones, have the right to own American television broadcasting companies. Murdoch became one of them.

On the basis of the purchased regional stations in 1986, the newly minted American creates the Fox Broadcasting company. Attracting young and promising TV producers and TV writers, Fox began to launch new TV shows and series that all of America was talking about. In 1987, the series “Married … with Children” was released, which gained wild popularity all over the world. In 1989, Fox launched the cult animated series The Simpsons, which broke several longest-running records, becoming the longest-running American sitcom, animated series, and prime-time entertainment series. And in the early 1990s, Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Place, and The X-Files made Fox products famous all over the world.

In 1989, Murdoch entered the British television market by launching the country’s first satellite television company, Sky Television. At first, the business turned out to be unprofitable, but the crisis was overcome by buying the rights to popular American TV series and reality shows.

The 1990s were the era of Murdoch’s television expansion. In 1993, he bought the Hong Kong satellite television corporation Star TV for $525 million. It was followed by media assets in Eastern Europe, the expansion of broadcasting to Latin America, the creation of channels in Western Europe.

In 1996, Murdoch founded Fox News to compete with 24/7 TV news pioneer CNN.

Fox’s special presentation of the news – without nuances, but with a confident division of the warring parties into “bad and good guys” – resonated not only with many ordinary Americans, but also with the conservative-minded elite.

This helped Murdoch immediately take away part of the audience from CNN, which preferred a more neutral presentation of events.

Fox News soon became the most watched cable news channel in the US. Media experts and human rights activists reproached Murdoch that his publications are biased and cover events in a favorable light for him. In 2003, on the eve of the war in Iraq, all 175 publications controlled by Rupert Murdoch, in one form or another, called for the start of an operation against Saddam Hussein. Murdoch, like his father once, began to be compared with Goebbels. “If you are a catalyst for change, you will definitely have enemies – and I am proud that I have them,” Murdoch answered these reproaches.

Matrix crashes

Having gathered under his control a lot of newspapers, radio stations and TV channels, Rupert Murdoch became the owner of a real media empire, covering almost the entire English-speaking population of the planet and influencing media politics in many parts of the world. But, like his father, Rupert Murdoch is in danger of not preserving the empire he created for his children – at least not to the same extent. The first major problem was events of 2011: then British journalists found out that News of the World employees hired a hacker to hack into the account of kidnapped schoolgirl Millie Dowler. So journalists received information about the girl. However, because of this, it seemed that the girl was online, while she had already been killed.

A parliamentary investigation into the activities of the News of the World was initiated, during which it turned out that the tabloid journalists had previously hacked into the mobile phones of British celebrities, politicians and even members of the royal family. Murdoch could not be forgiven for this. He publicly apologized, closed the News of the World – but this was obviously not enough to change the attitude towards himself and his publications, and not only in Britain.

To somehow rectify the situation, Rupert Murdoch in 2012 announced the division of News Corporation into two parts. In one – 21st Century Fox – all the entertainment assets of News departed. In another – News Corp. – passed all the information and newspaper assets of the corporation. Murdoch’s previously unshakable media empire, which has been constantly buying up others for many years, has now become an object of absorption itself – after all, after the scandal, its assets began to become cheaper. Bottom line: at the end of 2017, it was announced that the new owner of 21st Century was Walt Disney Co.

According to Rupert Murdoch’s entourage, he built his empire not only and not so much for the sake of money and fame, but for the desire to leave the family something more than his father once left him.

Rupert Murdoch has six children, and he managed to pick up almost all of them in positions in his vast empire. Lachlan Murdoch is co-chairman of News Corp., succeeding his father as CEO of Fox. And James Murdoch heads the division of News Corp. responsible for the markets of Europe and Asia. Moreover, the shareholder charter of the formally public company News Corp. drafted in such a way that the Murdoch family has a majority of votes at the shareholders’ meeting and on the board of directors.

It is too early to say what the legacy of Rupert Murdoch will turn out to be. Now the world media are discussing Murdoch’s two divorces at once. The first – official – with his wife Jerry Hall, with whom the billionaire has been married for six and a half years. The second – symbolic – with Murdoch’s former political favorite Donald Trump. And if a divorce from his wife is unlikely to threaten something serious for Murdoch’s media empire (in the worst case, the case will end with the payment of compensation), then Trump’s months-long absence from Fox News may result in an outflow of the conservative audience from this channel. Either way, the market capitalization of News Corp. since the beginning of the year has already fallen by more than 25%, dropping below the $10 billion mark.

Kirill Sarkhanyants, Evgeny Khvostik