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Keith Rupert Murdoch (born 11 March 1931) is an Australian, British and American media mogul. He is the founder, a major shareholder, chairman and managing director of News Corporation (News Corp).

Beginning with one newspaper in Adelaide, Murdoch acquired and started other publications in his native Australia before expanding News Corp into the United Kingdom, United States and Asian media markets. Although it was in Australia in the late 1950s that he first dabbled in television, he later sold these assets, and News Corp's Australian current media interests (still mainly in print) are restricted by cross-media ownership rules. Murdoch's first permanent foray into TV was in the UK, where he created Sky Television in 1989. In the 2000s he became a leading investor in satellite television, the film industry and the Internet.

Early life

Keith Rupert Murdoch was born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia in 1931. At the time, his father, Sir Keith, was a regional newspaper magnate based out of Melbourne and as a result, the family was quite wealthy.

Rupert was groomed by his father from an early age, and went off to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University in England where he supported the Labour Party. When Rupert was 22, his father died, prompting his return from Oxford to take charge of the family business; becoming managing director of News Limited in 1953.

Start in business

He began to direct his attention to acquisition and expansion. He bought the Sunday Times in Perth, Western Australia and, using the tabloid techniques of his father's mentor Lord Northcliffe, made it a success.

Over the next few years, Murdoch established himself in Australia as a dynamic business operator, expanding his holdings by acquiring suburban and provincial newspapers in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and the Northern Territory, including the Sydney afternoon tabloid, The Daily Mirror, as well as a small Sydney-based recording company, Festival Records. His acquisition of the Daily Mirror allowed him to challenge two powerful rivals in Australia's biggest city and to outmaneuver his afternoon rival in a lengthy circulation war.

His first foray outside Australia involved the purchase of a controlling interest in the New Zealand daily The Dominion. In January 1964, while touring New Zealand with friends in a rented Morris Minor after sailing across the Tasman, Murdoch read of a takeover bid for the sleepy Wellington paper by the British-based Canadian newspaper magnate, Lord Thomson of Fleet. On the spur of the moment, he launched a counterbid. A four-way battle for control ensued in which the 32-year-old Murdoch outwitted his rivals. He took an active interest in the paper, at least until distracted by bigger undertakings, and remained the dominant shareholder in New Zealand's Independent Newspapers Limited – the nationwide media group that ultimately developed from his takeover of The Dominion – until 2003.

Later in 1964, Murdoch launched The Australian, Australia's first national daily newspaper, which was based first in Canberra and later in Sydney. The Australian, a broadsheet, was intended to give Murdoch new respectability as a 'quality' newspaper publisher, as well as greater political influence.

In 1972, Murdoch acquired the Sydney morning tabloid The Daily Telegraph from Australian media mogul Sir Frank Packer, who later admitted regretting selling it to him. In that year's election, Murdoch threw his growing power behind the Australian Labor Party under the leadership of Gough Whitlam and duly saw it elected. As the Whitlam government began to lose public support following its re-election in 1974, Murdoch turned against Whitlam and supported the Governor-General's dismissal of the Prime Minister.

During this period, Murdoch turned his attention to Britain. His business success in Australia and his fastidious policy of making prompt periodic repayments of his borrowings had placed him in good standing with the Commonwealth Bank, which provided him with finance for his biggest venture yet, the takeover of the family company that owned News of the World, the Sunday newspaper with the biggest circulation in Britain.

Building the News Corporation

Acquisitions in Britain

When the Mirror group decided to get rid of its mid-market broadsheet daily newspaper The Sun in 1969, Murdoch acquired it and turned it into a tabloid format; by 2006 it was selling three million copies per day.

Murdoch acquired The Times (and The Sunday Times), the paper Lord Northcliffe had once owned, in 1981. The distinction of owning The Times came to him through his careful cultivation of its owner, who had grown tired of losing money on it.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Murdoch's publications were generally supportive of the UK's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. At the end of the Thatcher/Major era, Murdoch switched his support to the Labour Party and the party's leader Tony Blair. The closeness of his relationship with Blair and their secret meetings to discuss national policies was to become a political issue in Britain. Though this has recently started to change, with The Sun publicly renouncing the ruling Labour government and seemingly lending its support to David Cameron's Conservative Party, Prime Minister Gordon Brown's official spokesman said in November 2009 that Brown and Murdoch "were in regular communication" and that "there is nothing unusual in the prime minister talking to Rupert Murdoch".

In 1986, Murdoch introduced electronic production processes to his newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States. The greater degree of automation led to significant reductions in the number of employees involved in the printing process. In England, the move roused the anger of the print unions, resulting in a long and often violent dispute that played out in Wapping, one of London's docklands areas, where Murdoch had installed the very latest electronic newspaper publishing facility in an old warehouse. The unions had been led to assume that Murdoch intended to launch a new London evening newspaper from those premises, but he had kept secret his intention to relocate all the News titles there.

The bitter dispute at Fortress Wapping started with the dismissal of 6000 employees who had gone on strike and resulted in street battles, demonstrations and a great deal of bad publicity for Murdoch. Many suspected that the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher had colluded in the Wapping affair as a way of damaging the British trade union movement. Once the Wapping battle had ended, union opposition in Australia followed suit.

Murdoch's British-based satellite network Sky Television incurred massive losses in its early years of operation. As with many of his other business interests, Sky was heavily subsidized by the profits generated by his other holdings, but eventually he was able to convince rival satellite operator British Satellite Broadcasting to accept a merger on his terms in 1990. The merged company, BSkyB, has dominated the British pay-TV market ever since.

In response to print media's decline and the increasing influence of online journalism during the 2000s Murdoch proclaimed his support of the micropayments model for obtaining revenue from online news, although this has been criticised by some.

News Corporation has subsidiaries in the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the Channel Islands and the Virgin Islands. From 1986, News Corporation's annual tax bill averaged around seven per cent of its profits.

Moving into the United States

Murdoch made his first acquisition in the United States in 1973, when he purchased the San Antonio Express-News. Soon afterwards, he founded Star, a supermarket tabloid, and in 1976, he purchased the New York Post. On 4 September 1985, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen in order to satisfy the legal requirement that only US citizens were permitted to own American television stations. In 1987, in Australia he bought The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd, the company that his father had once managed. By 1991, his Australian-based News Corp. had worked up huge debts (much from Sky TV in the UK), forcing Murdoch to sell many of the American magazine interests he had acquired in the mid-1980s.

In 1995, Murdoch's Fox Network became the object of scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), when it was alleged that News Ltd.'s Australian base made Murdoch's ownership of Fox illegal. However, the FCC ruled in Murdoch's favor, stating that his ownership of Fox was in the best interests of the public. In the same year, Murdoch announced a deal with MCI Communications to develop a major news website and magazine, The Weekly Standard. In the same year, News Corp. launched the Foxtel pay television network in Australia in partnership with Telstra.

In 1996, Murdoch decided to enter the cable news market with the Fox News Channel, a 24-hour cable news station. Following its launch, the heavily-funded Fox News consistently eroded CNN's market share and eventually proclaimed itself as "the most-watched cable news channel." Ratings studies released in the fourth quarter of 2004 showed that the network was responsible for nine of the top ten programs in the "Cable News" category at that time.

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

Expansion in Asia

In 1993, Murdoch acquired Star TV, a Hong Kong company founded by Richard Li (son of Li Ka-shing) for $1 billion (Souchou, 2000:28), and subsequently set up offices for it throughout Asia. It is one of the biggest satellite TV networks in Asia. However, the deal did not work out as Murdoch had planned, because the Chinese government placed restrictions on it that prevented it from reaching most of China. It was around this time that Murdoch met his third wife Wendi Deng.

Recent activities

In late 2003, Murdoch acquired a 34 per cent stake in Hughes Electronics, the operator of the largest American satellite TV system, DirecTV, from General Motors for $6 billion (USD).

In 2004, Murdoch announced that he was moving News Corp.'s headquarters from Adelaide, Australia to the United States. Choosing a US domicile was designed to ensure that American fund managers could purchase shares in the company, since many were deciding not to buy shares in non-US companies. Some analysts believed that News Corp's Australian domicile was leading to the company being undervalued compared with its peers.

On 20 July 2005, News Corp. bought Intermix Media Inc., which held MySpace.com and other popular social networking-themed websites, for $580 million USD. On 11 September 2005, News Corp. announced that it would buy IGN Entertainment for $650 million (USD).

Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner are long-standing rivals. In 1996 Murdoch launched the Fox News Channel to compete against Turner's CNN.

Political activities

Australia

Murdoch's disconcerting experience with Thomas Playford in South Australia and his early political activities in Australia set the pattern he would repeat around the world.

Murdoch found a political ally in John McEwen, leader of the Australian Country Party, who was governing in coalition with the larger Menzies-Holt Liberal Party. From the very first issue of The Australian Murdoch began taking McEwen's side in every issue that divided the long-serving coalition partners. (The Australian, 15 July 1964, first edition, front page: "Strain in Cabinet, Liberal-CP row flares.") It was an issue that threatened to split the coalition government and open the way for the stronger Australian Labor Party to dominate Australian politics. It was the beginning of a long campaign that served McEwen well.

McEwen repaid Murdoch's support later by helping him to buy his valuable rural property Cavan, and then arranged a clever subterfuge by which Murdoch was able to transfer a large sum of money from Australia to England in order to finalize the purchase of The News of the World without obtaining the required authority from the Australian Treasury.

After McEwen and Menzies retired, Murdoch transferred his support to the newly elected Leader of the Australian Labor Party, Gough Whitlam, who was elected in 1972 on a social platform that included universal free health care, free education for all Australians to tertiary level, recognition of the People's Republic of China, and public ownership of Australia's oil, gas and mineral resources.

Rupert Murdoch's flirtation with Whitlam turned out to be brief. He had already started his short-lived National Star newspaper in America, and was seeking to strengthen his political contacts there.

Acquiring American Citizenship

In 1985 Murdoch became a United States citizen to satisfy legislation that only United States citizens could own American television stations. This also resulted in Murdoch losing his Australian citizenship.

Asked about the Australian federal election, 2007 at News Corporation's annual general meeting in New York on 19 October 2007, its chairman Rupert Murdoch said, "I am not commenting on anything to do with Australian politics. I'm sorry. I always get into trouble when I do that." Pressed as to whether he believed Prime Minister John Howard should be re-elected, he said: "I have nothing further to say. I'm sorry. Read our editorials in the papers. It'll be the journalists who decide that – the editors."

United States

Murdoch's publications generally have conservative leanings, in comparison with other national newspapers. During the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, all 175 Murdoch-owned newspapers worldwide editorialized in favor of the war. Murdoch also served on the board of directors of the libertarian Cato Institute.

On 8 May 2006, the Financial Times reported that Murdoch would be hosting a fundraiser for Senator Hillary Clinton's (D-New York) Senate reelection campaign. Murdoch's New York Post newspaper had opposed Clinton's Senate run in 2000.

In May 2007, Murdoch made a $5 billion offer to purchase Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal. At the time, the Bancroft family, which controlled 64% of the shares, firmly declined the offer, opposing Murdoch's much-used strategy of slashing employee numbers and "gutting" existing systems. Later, the Bancroft family confirmed a willingness to consider a sale – besides Murdoch, the Associated Press reported that supermarket magnate Ron Burkle and Internet entrepreneur Brad Greenspan were among the interested parties. On 1 August 2007, the BBC's "News and World Report" and NPR's Marketplace radio programs reported that Murdoch had acquired Dow Jones; this news was received with mixed reactions.

In a 2008 interview with Walt Mossberg, Murdoch was asked whether he had "anything to do with the New York Post's endorsement of Barack Obama in the democratic primaries." Without hesitating, Murdoch replied, "Yeah. He is a rock star. It's fantastic. I love what he is saying about education. I don't think he will win Florida... but he will win in Ohio and the election. I am anxious to meet him. I want to see if he will walk the walk."

United Kingdom

In Britain, Murdoch formed a close alliance with Margaret Thatcher, and The Sun credited itself with helping John Major to win an unexpected election victory in the 1992 general election. However, in the general elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005, Murdoch's papers were either neutral or supported Labour under Tony Blair. This has led some critics to argue that Murdoch simply supports the incumbent parties (or those who seem most likely to win an upcoming election) in the hope of influencing government decisions that may affect his businesses. The Labour Party under Blair had moved from the Left to a more central position on many economic issues prior to 1997. Murdoch identifies himself as a libertarian.

In a speech delivered in New York, Rupert Murdoch said that the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair described the BBC coverage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster as being full of hatred of America. Murdoch is a strong critic of the BBC, which he believes has a left-wing bias and is the major UK competitor to his satellite network Sky.

In 1998, Rupert Murdoch failed in his attempt to buy the football powerhouse Manchester United F.C. with an offer of £625 million. It was the largest amount anyone had yet offered for a sports club. It was blocked by the United Kingdom's Competition Commission, which stated that the acquisition would have "hurt competition in the broadcast industry and the quality of British football".

On 28 June 2006 the BBC reported that Murdoch and News Corporation were flirting with the idea of backing Conservative leader David Cameron at the next General Election. However, in a later interview in July 2006, when he was asked what he thought of the Conservative leader, Murdoch replied "Not much". In a 2009 blog, it was suggested that in the aftermath of the News of the World News of the World phone hacking affair, Murdoch and News Corporation might have decided to back Cameron, although there had already been a converging of interests between the two men over muting of the UK's communications regulator Ofcom.

In 2006, the UK's Independent newspaper reported that Murdoch would offer Tony Blair a senior role in his global media company News Corp. when the UK prime minister stood down from office.

He is also accused by former Solidarity MSP Tommy Sheridan of having a personal vendetta against him and of conspiring with MI5 to produce a video of him confessing to having affairs – allegations over which Sheridan had previously sued News International and won. On being arrested for perjury following the case, Sheridan claimed that the charges were "orchestrated and influenced by the powerful reach of the Murdoch empire".

Personal life

Marriages

Murdoch has been married three times. In 1956 he married Patricia Booker, a former shop assistant and air hostess from Melbourne with whom he had his first child, a daughter, Prudence, born in 1958. Rupert and Patricia Murdoch divorced in 1967.

In 1967 Murdoch remarried, to Anna Torv, an Estonian-born cadet journalist working for his Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph, who should not be mistaken for the actress Anna Torv (Fringe) with the same name, who happens to be the elder Torv's niece. During his marriage to Anna Torv, a Roman Catholic, Murdoch was awarded the KSG, a papal honour.

Torv and Murdoch had three children: Elisabeth Murdoch (born in Sydney, Australia on 22 August 1968), Lachlan Murdoch (born in London, UK on 8 September 1971), and James Murdoch, (born in Wimbledon, UK on 13 December 1972). Murdoch's companies published two novels by his then wife: Family Business (1988) and Coming to Terms (1991); both are widely regarded as vanity publications. Anna and Rupert divorced acrimoniously in June 1999.

Anna Murdoch received a settlement of US$ 1.2 billion in assets. Seventeen days after the divorce, on 25 June 1999, Murdoch, then aged 68, married Chinese-born Deng Wendi (Wendi Deng in Western style). She was 30, a recent Yale School of Management graduate, and a newly appointed vice-president of STAR TV. In October 1999 Anna Murdoch also remarried, to William Mann.

Rupert Murdoch has two children with Deng: Grace Helen (born in New York 19 November 2001) and Chloe (born in New York 17 July 2003).

Children

Murdoch's eldest son Lachlan, formerly the deputy chief operating officer at the News Corporation and the publisher of the New York Post, was Murdoch's heir apparent before resigning from his executive posts at the global media company at the end of July 2005. Lachlan's departure left James, chief executive of the satellite television service British Sky Broadcasting since November 2003, as the only Murdoch son still directly involved with the company's operations, though Lachlan has agreed to remain on the News Corporation's board.

After graduating from Vassar College and marrying classmate Elkin Kwesi Pianim (the son of Ghanaian financial and political mogul Kwame Pianim) in 1993, Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth, along with her husband, purchased a pair of NBC-affiliate television stations KSBW and KSBY in California with a $35 million loan provided by her father. By quickly re-organizing and re-selling them at a $12 million profit, in 1995 Elisabeth emerged as an unexpected rival to her brothers for the eventual leadership of the publishing dynasty's empire. But after quarrelling publicly with her assigned mentor Sam Chisholm at BSkyB, she struck out on her own as a television and film producer in London, where she has enjoyed independent success in conjunction with her second husband, Matthew Freud.

It is not known whether Murdoch will remain as News Corp's CEO indefinitely. For a while the American cable television entrepreneur John Malone was the second-largest voting shareholder in News Corporation after Murdoch himself, potentially undermining the family's control. In 2007, the company announced that it would sell certain assets and give cash to Malone's company in exchange for its stock. In 2007 Murdoch issued his older children with equal voting stock, perhaps to test their individual levels of interest and ability to run the company according to the standards he has set.