1.2 Acquisitions in the UK

He moved to the UK in the mid-1960s and rapidly became a major force there after his surprise acquisitions of the News Of The World and later The Times and The Sunday Times; both were controversial takeovers which further reinforced his growing reputation as a ruthless and cunning business operator. In the UK, he notably took on the British printers' unions to reduce his staff costs, and exploited the selling power of soft-core erotica in the form of topless page three girls (such as Samantha Fox) to increase circulation. As a result, Private Eye dubbed him The Dirty Digger, a name that has endured.

During 1986-7, the confrontation with the unions NGA and SOGAT was considerable and highly controversial. The move of News International's London operation to Wapping in the East End resulted in nightly battles and riots outside the new plant and TNT (a delivery operation then owned by Murdoch and used to deliver newspapers during the disturbances); lorries and depots were frequently and violently attacked.

Before the Wapping dispute, English newspapers were (allegedly) the victims of widespread union malpractice, and they certainly suffered as businesses because of the British print unions, which were at best highly resistant to change and which were at worst riddled with corruption. Phantom employees, gross overstaffing, inheritance of jobs by family members, theft of supplies and other malpractice were said to have been common place throughout Fleet Street, and not just at Murdoch's properties.

Murdoch and his competitors soon successfully and controversially challenged the power of the unions in their workplaces. However, Murdoch's secretive and sometimes deliberately deceitful business practices won him few friends on the left. A case in point was the controversial Wapping plant, which was deliberately planned, built and started in total secrecy, well before the unions became aware of its existence. Murdoch and the stridently anti-union Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher were seen as being in open collusion over the Wapping affair – a claim apparently supported by the evidence of the massive police protection that the Wapping plant was given during the dispute.

1.3 Moving into the United States

In 1985 Murdoch became a United States citizen to satisfy current legislation that only United States citizens could own American television stations – and yet also managed to have himself defined as an Australian citizen to retain his ownership of Australian media outlets. In 1987 he bought The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd in Australia, the company that his father had once managed. By 1991 his Australian-based News Corporation had amassed huge debts which necessitated Murdoch to sell many of the American magazine interests that he acquired in the mid-1980s. Much of this debt came from his British-based BSkyB satellite network, which incurred massive losses in its early years of operation, which (in his customary manner) he heavily subsidised with profits from his other holdings until he was able to drive his main competitor to the wall.

In 1995 Murdoch's Fox Network became the object of intense scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after the case that Murdoch's foreign ownership of Fox Broadcasting contravened current legislation. The FCC, however, ruled in Murdoch's favour, stating that his ownership of Fox Broadcasting was in the public's best interests. In the same year Murdoch announced a deal with MCI to develop a major news website as well as funding a magazine, The Weekly Standard, about politics that has a pronounced right-wing view. Also in 1995, in partnership with Telstra, News Corporation launched the Foxtel pay television network into Australia.

In 1996 Fox established the FOX News Channel, a 24 hour news channel which reflects Murdoch's conservative views. Since its launch it has steadily eroded CNN's market share to the point where it now bills itself as the "most watched cable news channel".

In 1999 he significantly expanded his music holdings in Australia by acquiring the controlling share in the other leading Australian independent label Michael Gudinski 's Mushroom Records; he merged the two as Festival Mushroom Records (FMR). Both Festival and FMR were managed by Murdoch's son James for several years.

1.4 Divorce and remarriage

Murdoch has been married three times. His first marriage ended in the late 1950s after only a few years. In 1961 he married an employee, journalist Anna Murdoch. They had three children, Elizabeth, Lachlan and James. Anna and Rupert divorced acrimoniously in 1998 after it was revealed that Murdoch had been conducting a long-running affair with another employee, Wendi Deng , a junior executive in News Corporation's Asian operations, who was 40 years his junior; they married soon afterwards.

Murdoch has four children from his previous marriages; his elder son Lachlan Murdoch was expected to take over running the corporation at some stage. However, in November 2003, another son, James Murdoch, was appointed head of Murdoch's British Sky Broadcasting operations, amid accusations of nepotism from shareholders. He has two children with his current wife.

1.5 Recent activities

In 1999 The Economist reported that Murdoch had made £1.4 billion ($2.1 billion) in profits over the previous 11 years but had paid no net corporation tax. It further reported, after examining what was available of the accounts, that Murdoch would normally have expected to pay about $350m tax: enough to "build seven new hospitals, 50 secondary schools or 300 primary schools". The article explained that the corporation's complex structure, international scope and use of offshore havens allowed News Corporation to avoid tax.

During the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, all 175 Murdoch-owned newspapers worldwide editorialized in favor of the war. [1]

In late 2003, Murdoch acquired a 34% stake in Hughes Electronics, operator of the largest US satellite TV system, DirecTV, from General Motors for $6 billion. Among his trophy properties around the world are The Times (acquired in 1981 from the Thomson family, who had bought it from the Astor interests in 1966) and the New York Post (he turned the Post from New York's most liberal paper into its most conservative).

In 2004 Murdoch announced that he was moving News Corporations' base out of Australia and that it would henceforward be incorporated in America. This was widely seen as a reaction to the Howard Liberal government's inability to alter Australia's media cross-ownership rules, which Murdoch has known to have wanted changed for decades, and which have prevented him from acquiring more newspapers and TV stations in Australian cities.

2 Murdoch and politics

Murdoch's political perspective seems multi-faceted, although many biographers have speculated that his early dalliances with the left wing were largely a matter of opportunism, or were simply a pose intended to annoy his father. For instance, while at Oxford he was active in the Labour Club. However, during the bitter Australian Labor Party- Democratic Labor Party split in the mid-1950s he reportedly tried to encourage future South Australian Labor premier Don Dunstan to defect to the DLP, and offered Dunstan his newspaper's support if he did so (he refused). Murdoch actively supported the Australian Labor Party for some years, although he famously reversed his allegiance and used his newspapers to strongly support the Liberal Party in the dying days of Whitlam's Labor government in late 1975. In the US he has been a long-time supporter of the Republican Party and was a friend of Ronald Reagan.

He is often accused of running partisan media coverage for political parties that promote policies and decisions which favour his commercial interests. For example, it is believed that Murdoch tried to suppress publication of the memoirs of Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, in an attempt to curry favour with the mainland Chinese political leadership – Patten's book was critical of the Chinese government. Whatever the motives, the book was dropped from publication by Murdoch's HarperCollins publishing company. It was only because of Patten's political influence that the story came to light and the book was published by another firm. It is speculated that Murdoch wanted to please the Chinese government because it happened around the time he was attempting to get a foothold in the Chinese market with the launch of Star TV. In a similar move Murdoch attempted to prevent the publication of Mikhael Gorbachev's memoirs, however this was due to his fears of spreading propoganda. One stark contrast between the two incidents is the fact that his attempt to supress Gorbazhev's book was from a principled, anti-communist stance; his attempt to prevent the Patten book was to appease a communist state for commerical gain.

Publications owned by Rupert Murdoch in the United Kingdom ( The Times, The Sun, the News of the World, The Sunday Times) support eurosceptic positions, and generally show contempt for the UK's European partners. Murdoch publications worldwide tend to adopt anti-French and pro-American positions.

3 External links

• Rupert Murdoch Biography and Quotations from Woopidoo
• Rupert Murdoch profile from Time magazine
• "World's Richest People" Rupert Murdoch Profile from Forbes magazine
• Murdoch's unbreakable censorship from Turkish Daily News
• Satellite Broadcasting: Party Dominance Vs. Cultural Imperialism from China Information Centre
• LookSmart - Rupert Murdoch directory category
• Yahoo - Rupert Murdoch directory category

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