Keith Rupert Murdoch is an Australian-born American, a media tycoon, who founded News Corp., America’s largest newspaper by total circulation.
Early life and education
Rupert Murdoch was born on March 11, 1931, on a small farm in Melbourne, Australia. His favorite childhood hobby was horseback riding. Murdoch’s father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was a famous war corresponded, a journalist and copyreader who turned into a senior official of The Herald and Weekly Times distributing company, covering every Australian state with the exception of New South Wales.
Murdoch graduated from Geelong Grammar, an esteemed Australian school, in 1949 before he attended the Worcester College at Oxford University in England.
Career and Media Empire
After Murdoch’s father passed away in 1952, Murdoch took over the ownership of Adelaide newspaper, the News and the Sunday Mail.
Quickly after taking over the Sunday Mail and the News, Murdoch drenched himself in all parts of the papers’ everyday tasks. He wrote headlines, updated page designs and worked in the typesetting and printing rooms. He immediately converted the News into a narrative of crimes, sex and outrage, and even though these changes were controversial, the paper’s course took off.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Murdoch obtained various papers in Australia and New Zealand before venturing into the United Kingdom in 1969, assuming control over the tremendously popular Sunday tabloid, News of the World. The following year, Murdoch also purchased the daily table the Sun, and again managed an effective change with his style of reporting intensely on sex, sports and crime.
In 1974, Murdoch moved to New York City, to venture into the U.S. He expanded his news domain to the United States, with the acquisition of the Texas-based newspaper, the San Antonio News. As he had done in Australia and England, Murdoch rapidly expanded across the country, establishing a national newspaper, the Star, in 1974 and acquiring the New York Post in 1976. In 1979, Murdoch founded News Corporation, generally known as News Corp., as a holding organization for his different media properties. In 1981, Murdoch acquired The Times, his first British broadsheet and, in 1985, turned into a naturalized U.S. citizen, surrendering his Australian citizenship, to fulfill the legitimate prerequisite for U.S. television company ownership.
All through the 1980s and 1990s, Murdoch obtained news outlets around the world at a confounding pace. In the United States, he purchased up the Chicago Sun-Times, the Village Voice and New York magazine. In England, he gained the prominently respectable Times and Sunday Times of London.
It was also during these years that Murdoch started extending his media domain into TV and entertainment. In 1985, he acquired the twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and some other TV channels and merged these companies into Fox, Inc. which has since turned into one of the major American TV network.
In 1990, he established Star TV, a Hong Kong-based TV broadcasting network. After acquiring a few leading American and British academic and literary publishing companies all through the late 1980s, he combined them into HarperCollins in 1990. Murdoch has also made some investments into sports; he is a part proprietor of the Los Angeles Kings NHL franchise, the Los Angeles Lakers NBA franchise and the Staples Center, just as the Fox Sports website and Fox Sports 1.
With the beginning of the new century, Murdoch kept on extending News Corp’s properties to control increasingly more of the media individuals on a daily basis. In 2005, he acquired Intermix Media, the proprietor of the well-known social-networking site MySpace.com. In 2007, the long-lasting newspaper tycoon stood out as truly newsworthy with the acquisition of Dow Jones, the proprietor of the Wall Street Journal.
Murdoch has drawn wide disapproval for dominating the international media and for his traditional political perspectives, which are frequently reflected in the announcing of Murdoch-controlled outlets, like Fox News. In the 2010 American midterm elections, News Corp made a donation of $1 million each to the Republican Governors Association and the U.S. Assembly of Commerce, a group supporting Republican candidates. His detractors contended that the owner of major news sources covering the election should not contribute to the political campaigns involved.
Hacking scandal
However, Murdoch’s business met a huge blow in 2011 when his London newspaper, The News of the World, was involved in a telephone hacking scandal. A few editors and columnists were filed on charges for illicitly getting access to the phone messages of a few of Britain’s known figures. Murdoch was called to affirm this, and he shut down The News of the World. News Corp paid damages to some of the people who were hacked. Despite this scandal, News Corp still retains a significant share of virtually all forms of media across the globe.
New Leadership
In June 2015, news broke that Murdoch would hand over the administration of 21st Century Fox to his child James. Murdoch would stay with the organization as executive co-chairman, sharing the role with Lachlan, his eldest son.
Sale to Disney
In the middle of the restructuring of 21st Century Fox, the company still negotiated with Walt Disney over the sale of its properties. This discussion seemed to have ended in November 2017 however, in mid-December, an agreement was reached in which Disney would acquire the vast majority of 21st Century Fox in an all-stock exchange estimated at around $52.4 billion. Murdoch, who held control of Fox News, the Fox network and the FS1 sports channel, said he would turn those assets into a newly listed company.
While waiting for approval of this transaction with Disney, Murdoch tried to increase 21st Century Fox’s stake in the U.K.- based Sky News. However, the transaction was confronted with disagreements from government officials and controllers over worries about 21st Century monopoly on the British news market, in spite of the company’s request that Sky News would retain publication freedom.
Net worth
Rupert Murdoch and family’s net worth as of July 2019 is $21.5B.