Socialist, Communist Marxist Rupert Murdoch & His Leftist Fox News ARE GOING DOWN!
Travis
Marxist USA instead of Capitalist Canada like me).
Perhaps the worst possible climax to Rupert Murdoch’s storied career
Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has been affectionately called the “Wizard of
Oz” and dismissed, not so warmly, as the “Dirty Digger.”
He is a man who arouses passions.
Now, at 80, he finds himself surrounded by scandal and shame.
Journalists at one of his newspapers, the News of the World, stand accused
of hacking the voicemails of thousands to promote conscienceless
sensationalism.
It may be the worst possible climax of a storied career that has seen Mr.
Murdoch build a business empire from a small, family-owned, Australian
newspaper, the Adelaide News, into a global media company that influences
cultures worldwide by controlling more than 100 newspapers, movie studio
20th Century Fox, Fox TV, publisher HarperCollins, the Wall Street Journal
and Dow Jones and Britain’s Sky satellite television network.
Part visionary and part opportunistic predator, Mr. Murdoch wields an
influence that has mesmerized presidents and prime ministers and left his
critics howling that he has lowered standards and replaced quality
journalism with vulgarity.
By promoting a mix of right-wing politics, topless models, tabloid gossip
and sensation-seeking stories, Mr. Murdoch’s media empire has always
invited criticism.
Former media mogul Conrad Black, who squared off against Mr. Murdoch in a
newspaper war between the London Times and the Daily Telegraph, once
wrote: “Rupert Murdoch is quite pleasant, though he is also one of the
very few completely ruthless and totally cynical people I have known.”
“I think The Simpsons [a Fox TV property] reflects his worldview: public
officials are crooks and the people are idiots.”
Mr. Murdoch defiantly denies he peddles sleaze, telling one interviewer:
“I’m rather sick of snobs who tell us they’re bad papers, snobs who only
read papers that no-one else wants.”
On another occasion he insisted: “Much of what passes for quality on
British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which
controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with
quality.”
A risk taker with an aggressive management style, Mr. Murdoch loves a
fight. He broke the Fleet Street press unions when he stormed into the
British newspaper industry and he broke up the three-network U.S.
television cartel when he created Fox TV. He pioneered satellite
television in Britain and Asia and created a multinational, multi-media
company to cope with the challenges of a new digital age.
“War is Rupert Murdoch’s natural state,” says Michael Wolff, who wrote The
Man Who Owns the News, a biography of the magnate.
Born in Australia, Mr. Murdoch has always had newspapers in his blood. His
father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was a reporter, editor and publisher who bought
the Adelaide News.
After a stint as a student at Oxford, the younger Mr. Murdoch worked
briefly at Britain’s Daily Express newspaper, before returning home at age
22, to inherit his father’s small, money-losing newspaper.
He rapidly turned the News around and built a base from which he began
acquiring other Australian newspapers and soon established Australia’s
first national newspaper, The Australian.
When Britain’s Mirror group of newspapers decided to shed its broadsheet
daily The Sun in 1969, Mr. Murdoch snapped it up; he turned it into a
tabloid and transformed British journalism with a mix of topless Page
Three “stunnas” and prurient prose.
In the 1970s, he brought a slightly toned down version of his formula to
the United States with the purchase of the New York Post and New York
magazine.
Mr. Murdoch admits to an element of luck in his career, recalling that his
first national newspaper in the United States was the supermarket tabloid
the Star, which was in competition with the National Enquirer.
“We lost money,” Mr. Murdoch told Esquire magazine in 2008. “Until one of
our reporters wrote the ‘true story’ of Elvis Presley. We said we would
serialize it, and it came out the day Presley died, completely by
coincidence.”
The newspaper’s circulation almost tripled overnight.
He had the same sort of lucky instinct when he established Fox TV, saying
when he wanted to start a reality crime show called America’s Most Wanted
network executives thought the idea was beneath them
“But I did it anyway,” he said.
In the early 1990s, he almost overextended himself with debts of more than
US$8-billion and nearly saw his empire collapse.
But he weathered the storm and went on to buy Dow Jones and the Wall
Street Journal in 2007 for almost $5-billion.
Mr. Murdoch’s roots have always been in newspapers and he has continued to
invest in them even when the industry appeared to be in decline.
But his relish for competition and the British news media’s ruthless
rivalries probably combined to encourage the scandalous behaviour that has
shamed the News of the World.
Killing the 168-year-old scandal-plagued newspaper on Sunday may now be
Mr. Murdoch’s final desperate attempt to shape and define his own personal
legacy.
National Post
pgood...@nationalpost.com
