Rupert Murdoch has influenced every facet of our modern media. The scion of a newspaper baron in Australia, Murdoch built a vast empire that now spans the globe. In the US, he owns the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and Fox News. He gave us The Simpsons, Page Six, and Bill O’Reilly.
And at 94 years old, he’s never been more powerful. Which is why a succession battle among his four oldest children had all the trappings of a Succession episode but with higher stakes, such as: Who gets a direct line into the Trump White House?
Earlier this month we learned the answer to that question. Rupert’s son Lachlan, a man philosophically aligned with his father’s conservative ideals, will run the empire after Rupert’s death.
But how was the empire created? How did the son of a somewhat obscure newspaper magnate in Melbourne go on to reshape the way we consume news and understand politics?
Today, Explained spoke with several experts who have tracked Murdoch’s rise and dominance across the globe. In the first episode of a two-part series, we focus on how Murdoch transformed his father’s holdings into a world-beating company, and how he bent people in power to his will.
Today, Explained’s Sean Rameswaram spoke with Matthew Ricketson, a professor of communication at Deakin University; Des Freedman, a professor of media and communication studies at Goldsmiths, University of London; and Graham Murdock, professor emeritus at Loughborough University London. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
For more on our miniseries about how Rupert Murdoch took over the world, listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. And please check back later today for the second installment of the miniseries.
Is Rupert Murdoch a nepo baby?
Des Freedman (Goldsmiths, University of London professor): Murdoch is absolutely a nepo baby.
Matthew Ricketson (Deakin University professor): If the term nepo was in existence in 1931, yes, he is a nepo baby.
One of our former prime ministers, Malcolm Turnbull, who tangled with Rupert Murdoch, has described him as Australia’s deadliest export.
His whole presentation is of this kind of scruffy, rebellious outsider figure, shaking his fist at the establishment and the elites. The reality is that when he was born in 1931, his father was the managing director of a big newspaper group in Australia. He went to Oxford University, and then his father dies in 1952 and leaves him one afternoon newspaper in Adelaide, which is another city here in Australia.
Graham Murdock (Loughborough University London emeritus professor): His father, Keith, really pioneered tabloid journalism in Australia. Keith Murdoch realized that newspapers had the power to bring down politicians. So Rupert inherited not just newspapers, but actually a whole kind of philosophy, if you like, of what newspapers could do and how to, how they operated.
MR: [Rupert Murdoch is] very clear from very early on that he wants to learn everything about running newspapers and then, very quickly, from about 1954, he starts expanding.
GM: He always had the reputation for being quite ruthless.
DF: The main ambition was to make his father proud and to do better than his father, to internationalize the father’s operation. And he was willing to throw everything at it to get there.
GM: When he came to Britain [in the 1960s], he bought the News of the World, which was this humongous bestselling Sunday tabloid, a huge commercial success. He began looking around for a daily title, and he fixed on The Sun.
He immediately converted it into a tabloid, became famous for having these semi-nude models.
MR: Topless women on page 3. Tabloid newspapers have been sensational for a long time. and for him, that is the key message. Those kinds of stories will drive circulation.
GM: His rise in the UK coincides with the rise of Margaret Thatcher. And they share a kind of notion — they’re both outsiders. She’s a grocer’s daughter from a provincial town, not part of the old English establishment and the old English establishment, also very hostile to Rupert. They share a kind of neoliberal philosophy to free markets and antagonism to public ownership. And Murdoch’s papers were very much in support of that Thatcher agenda.
MR: He already owns two of the most popular newspapers. And he wants to buy more. An opportunity comes up to buy The Times and the Sunday Times. And under the law at the time, there’s a requirement this matter is referred off to the monopolies and merger commission. Thatcher ensures that that doesn’t happen so that he’s able to buy The Times and The Sunday Times.
GM: The classic kind of paper of record in the UK, because he wanted to have that entree into the elite. If you look at Rupert’s career, he’s always had a popular newspaper that can address the masses, but you also have an elite newspaper so you’re speaking to the insiders, but you’re also speaking to the mass of the people.
These stories you’re telling us about Rupert’s time in the UK in the ’70s and the ’80s ‚ they establish I think some major themes: one, ruthlessness, a willingness for a newsman to lie if it sells more papers or does good business, and then not just a desire to inform the public about politics, but to drive politics himself.
MR: That is a good summary and you can see the bitter fruits of this decades later in the form of the phone-hacking scandal in the United Kingdom in the mid-2000s.
GM: The newspapers were declining in revenues and readership. So that kind of forced them to be even more militant in looking for sensation.
DF: Newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, that is mostly The Sun and the News of the World had hacked into the phones of members of the royal family, celebrities, but also, and this is crucial, also ordinary people, not famous people.
GM: It’s discovered that they’ve hacked a phone of this dead teenage girl, Millie Dowler. People are revolted. It creates a huge public reaction.
MF: You know, the Murdochs could not control the revulsion. They could not kind of put a lid on it. They were forced to do something that Murdoch has almost never done in his career, which is to close a newspaper.
DF: He closed that newspaper, the News of the World, instantly. This is a newspaper that had been around for over a century. It folded overnight.
GM: And then, of course, an official government commission of inquiry
DF: Murdoch sat down in front of a parliamentary committee; he looked old. It was an amazing performance. He forgot all the details when they were put to him, and he said, pretty soon after that, once he got out of the committee room, he magically regained his memory and regained his posture and his poise. And of course, he has gone on to live his life in full.
Rupert Murdoch’s first foray into the American media isn’t on TV.
DF: So he bought the New York Post in…
MR: …the mid-1970s…
DF: … to establish a base.
MR: He gets access to heavy hitters in the commercial world, in the political world, in the cultural world.
Trump’s relationship with Murdoch does go back to the 1980s. And to the New York Post.
GM: Murdoch had a very low opinion of him. This is a man who lost money running a casino.
MR: But a good gossip column is another one of Murdoch’s must-haves in his formula for newspaper success. Page Six is most definitely a very successful gossip column. Trump is one of its key sources. They kind of have that symbiotic relationship where they’re constantly pumping him up, and he’s constantly feeding them stories because he’s a bit of a gossip magnet himself.
DF: The brashness of Trump is very different to the much more considered strategic, studious, long-term thinking of Murdoch. It is not like it’s an immediate marriage.
MR: But he realizes pretty quickly that he can make a lot more money in television.
DF: And that’s when, you know, he buys 50 percent of 20th Century Fox. And that’s the beginning of the Fox Network, of the legacy we’re all now very familiar with.
The Simpsons ideologically is not the kind of thing you might think would sit that easily with a small-c conservative like Rupert Murdoch. This is a man who will do anything to increase the ratings and the audiences.
GR: He’s also buying up film studios.
DF: With Titanic as a movie that his studio financed; it could have ruined him — the gamble that he took on Titanic. And instead it made him — was it over a billion dollars that Titanic took?
But I think his ambition is always to come back to news. The Simpsons doesn’t get you into the White House or the front or the back door of Number 10, Downing Street. Being a news mogul does.
MR: The other piece of the puzzle, in helping him develop in America is the regulatory environment. There was this thing called the Fairness Doctrine, which came up after the Second World War.
GM: What that said was that if, if you were, if you were gonna cover contentious affairs on television, you had to present both sides of the story.
MR: Reagan was all about deregulation, getting rid of as much regulation as you can. So the Fairness Doctrine goes and what happens then is that it unleashes or unlocks the door for the rise of people like Rush Limbaugh. The idea of balance and Rush Limbaugh don’t exist in the same sentence, you know?
GM: It opened the space for overtly partisan television, because you didn’t have any longer to give the other side of the story.
MR: Roger Ailes, who was the key founding person for Fox News, and, Murdoch look at what the success that Rush Limbaugh is having, and they look to see if they can transplant that into television.
GM: And that opened the space for Fox News.
MR: Ailes and, um, Murdoch, they realize that instead of having lots and lots of correspondence everywhere, they’ll have the bare bone — so you’ll do the reporting of the news, but it won’t be a lavish suite of foreign correspondents. It’s much, much cheaper.
And you will bring in guys primarily from radio like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and so on, to provide opinions about the news, what it means, how to think about it, etc.
And so you put those people on in the evening and they bloviate on demand. They have big opinions and theatrical opinions. It changes the media landscape. It’s an enormously profitable business.
DF: Tabloidization — that’s what is applied to Fox News.
MR: You’ve ceased being a news or journalism outfit at that point, and you’ve become something quite different, which bears a much closer relationship with propaganda.
Do you think Rupert Murdoch surpassed his own expectations?
MR: Oh, undoubtedly. Undoubtedly. Look, who knows, I’m not in his head, so I don’t know. But if he could have looked into the crystal ball and seen himself from 1952 to 2025, I think it would’ve been very hard for him to conceive of being where he’s now.
DF: He certainly transformed the British media, the Australian media, and the US media. He has had this fascinating, but for many people, poisonous impact on political discourse, on politics more generally.
MR: Now we can see how much damage the company has done to journalism, to democracy. You know, they’ve created a monster, which has now gotten away from them. And there’s actually two monsters. The first monster is the Fox News audience, and the second monster is Donald Trump.
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