Starting out as a newspaper publisher in his native Australia, Rupert Murdoch (born 1931) became a powerful media entrepreneur with wide holdings in England and the United States. His style of journalism evoked criticism from serious readers but served the entertainment needs of a broad audience.

Born March 11, 1931, in Melbourne, Australia, (Keith) Rupert Murdoch was the son of a distinguished journalist. His father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was a celebrated World War I reporter who later became chief executive of the leading Melbourne Herald newspaper group. From the beginning in 1955 with the tiny Adelaide News inherited from his father (who died in 1952), Murdoch created an international communications empire which eventually published over 80 papers and magazines on three continents.

In the process of expanding his News Corp. Ltd., Murdoch acquired critics as fast as properties for his sensationalistic brand of journalism. Appealing to the prurient interests of readers, Murdoch was compared to such yellow journalism tycoons of the past as William Randolph Hearst. Yet his business philosophy of offering readers what they were willing to buy most closely resembled the outlook of entertainer P. T. Barnum.

After studying at Oxford, Murdoch entered journalism as a reporter for the Birmingham Gazette and served an apprenticeship on the London Daily Express, where he learned the secrets of building circulation from the press baron Lord Beaverbrook. Returning to Australia to begin his publishing career, Murdoch revived the Adelaide News. In 1956 bought and built up the Perth Sunday Times. In 1960 he purchased the dying Sydney Daily and Sunday Paper, which he turned into the largest selling newspaper in Australia by employing aggressive promotion and a racy tabloid style. In 1964 he started The Australian, a national paper aimed at a more serious audience.

In early 1969 Murdoch debuted as a London publisher when he gained control of the Sunday paper News of the World, the largest-circulation English-language paper in the world. Later in 1969 he bought cheaply a tired liberal paper, the Sun, which he radically transformed into a sensationalistic tabloid featuring daily displays of a topless girl on page three. The Sun became the most profitable paper in his empire. In 1983, with circulation around four million, it earned $50 million, over 40 percent of News Corp.'s annual profits. In 1981 Murdoch bought the failing but prestigious London Times.

Murdoch expanded into the American market in 1973 when he acquired the San Antonio (Texas) Express and News. In early 1974 he started the weekly tabloid the National Star (later renamed Star) to compete with the popular Enquirer. Initially a weak imitation of the Sun, it adopted a format based on celebrity gossip, health tips, and self-help advice which boosted its circulation to almost four million.

In his quest for a big-city audience, Murdoch surprised the publishing world in 1976 when he bought the New York Post, a highly regarded liberal paper. By transforming its image he nearly doubled the circulation. In 1977 he took control from Clay Felker of the New York Magazine Corp., which included the trendy New York magazine, New West, and the radical weekly the Village Voice. Focusing on the struggling paper in competitive urban markets, Murdoch extended his holdings by buying the ailing Boston Herald in 1982 and the modestly-profitable Chicago Sun-Times in 1983.

From his first involvement in publishing, Murdoch applied a recognizable formula to most of his papers. His trademark operations included rigid cost controls, circulation gimmicks, flashy headlines, and a steady emphasis on sex, crime, and scandal stories. Reminiscent of the personalized style of the fictional Citizen Kane, Murdoch's uninhibited sensationalism was scorned as vulgar and irresponsible by his peers. One critic charged that what Murdoch did "just isn't journalism--it's a different art form."

On the other hand, Murdoch was seen as an astute and effective popular journalist who catered to the interests of his audiences, a view he espoused. Ignoring his critics, he regarded most papers as too elitist in their approach and too bland in appearance. He preferred a bright and entertaining product which would attract the largest body of readers. While he didn't think papers should be in the business of preaching to the public, he used his news columns to promote personal causes. With regard to a Labor government in Australia, he stated, "I elected them. And incidentally I'm not too happy with them. I may remove them."

Murdoch's newspaper style, though, did not fare as well in the United States as in Britain. The New York Post was a steady financial drain despite its increased circulation. Murdoch's formula did not attract advertisers. Collectively, led by the more subdued Star, Murdoch's American papers did not show a profit until 1983.

In 1983 Murdoch purchased a controlling interest in Satellite Television, a London company supplying entertainment programming to cable-television operators in Europe. His plan for beaming programs from satellites directly to homes equipped with small receivers did not progress, and his attempt to gain control of Warner Communications and its extensive film library did not succeed. However, in 1985 he did purchase the film company Twentieth Century Fox. A year later he bought six (Metromedia) television stations and sought to create a fourth major network called Fox Television. Since foreign nationals were not permitted by the United States to own a broadcast station, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. in 1985, in order to maintain his control of Fox Television. In 1987 he bought the U.S. publishing house Harper and Row.

Other than publishing, Murdoch's business interests included two television stations in Australia, half ownership in the country's largest private airlines, book publishing, records, films (he co-produced Gallipoli), ranching, gas and oil exploration, and a share in the British wire service Reuters News Corp. Ltd. which earned almost $70 million in 1983. His holdings rivaled such U.S. giants as Time, Inc. and the Times Mirror (now Time Warner) Company. In 1988, in connection with his television network, he bought Triangle publications--with holdings that included TV Guide, the leading television program listing publication--from Walter Annenberg for $3 billion. In 1995 he underwrote the Weekly Standard, a political magazine that generally supports Republican politics.

Murdoch has invested heavily in the sports industry. He triumphed over long-term business rival Ted Turner in 1997 when he purchased the Los Angeles Dodgers professional baseball team. Murdoch has also bought a partial interest in the New York Knicks, the New York Rangers, and Madison Square Garden, and in Australia owns an entire rugby league. Still energetically pursuing business at the beginning of the twenty-first century Murdoch wants to be poised to exploit new technologies and expand his empire ever further.

By the latter part of 2000, there was speculation that Murdoch was hoping to use sports offerings to tempt millions of cable TV viewers to switch to satellite dishes. Murdoch's News Corp. had its sights on gaining control of Hughes Electronics' DirecTV, the largest satellite television provider in the U.S. Murdoch had already pursued similar game plans in parts of Europe, Asia and Latin America. But the challenge in the U.S. was slightly different because most customers there were already tied into the cable infrastructure. But the number of satellite-equipped homes in the U.S. was expected to increase from 14.5 million in 2001 to 25 million by 2005, and DirecTV already held control of 66 percent of the market in 2001.

After months of negotiations, it appeared by mid-2001 that a merger between Sky Global, Murdoch's holding company of digital businesses, and Hughes Electronics, the parent of DirecTV, might finally be in the offing. Such a merger would leave Murdoch with a controlling interest in a global satellite TV network that stretched across Asia, into Europe and over the Americas. Murdoch was therefore poised in 2001 to cross national boundaries to create the world's first truly global media business.

In 2001, Forbes' ranking of the world's billionaires placed Murdoch 39th with an estimated worth of $7.8 billion. Murdoch's wealth was estimated at $9.4 billion in 2000, but the stock of his Australia-based News Corp. had plunged 33 percent and shares of subsidiary Fox Entertainment had slid 13 percent over the past year.

Living primarily in New York, Murdoch guarded his privacy with his wife Anna (a former Sydney Daily Mirror reporter) and their four children, one by a previous marriage. Murdoch divorced Anna in 1999 and married Wendi Deng, a former television executive.

In May 2001, it was announced that Deng was pregnant and expecting the couple's first child. Murdoch had commented a few months after marrying Deng in 1999 that any new children would not change the succession plans for his media empire. (In 1997, Murdoch had described his elder son Lachlan "first among equals" among his children.)

Talk of succession, however, was not to say that Murdoch was feeling his mortality. On his 70th birthday in March 2001, Murdoch made an estimate of the number of hours he had been alive, and the number of hours he had yet to live. He defined the number of hours he had been alive as the amount of time in his adult life that he had devoted to productive endeavors, i.e., time excluding sleep, sitting through meetings, speaking at industry conferences and similar activities. His conclusion: "I guess I've wasted half my life." On the other front, he estimated that he had 175,000 hours left to work, which seemed to suggest that he planned to still be making deals when he is 90.

Further Reading

• Good Times, Bad Times (1984) by Harold Evans a former London Times editor; Arrogant Aussie: The Rupert Murdoch Story (1985; Citizen Murdoch (1987); AsiaPulse News, May 11, 2001; The Financial Times, March 9, March 10, June 20, 2001; ." The Industry Standard, February 19, 2001; Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News, June 22, 2001.