Rupert Murdoch

Comment

Political activities in the United States

McKnight identifies four characteristics of his media operations: free market ideology; unified positions on matters of public policy; global editorial meetings; and opposition to liberal bias in other public media.

3333r

In The New Yorker, Ken Auletta writes that Murdoch's support for Edward I. Koch while he was running for mayor of New York 'spilled over onto the news pages of the Post, with the paper regularly publishing glowing stories about Koch and sometimes savage accounts of his four primary opponents.'

According to The New York Times, Ronald Reagan's campaign team credited Murdoch and the Post for his victory in New York in the 1980 United States presidential election. Reagan later 'waived a prohibition against owning a television station and a newspaper in the same market,' allowing Murdoch to continue to control The New York Post and The Boston Herald while expanding into television.

On 8 May 2006, the Financial Times reported that Murdoch would be hosting a fund-raiser for Senator Hillary Clinton's Senate re-election campaign. 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.'

In 2010, News Corporation gave US$1 million to the Republican Governors Association and $1 million to the US Chamber of Commerce. Murdoch also served on the board of directors of the libertarian Cato Institute. Murdoch is also a supporter of the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act.

Murdoch was reported in 2011 as advocating more open immigration policies in western nations generally. In the United States, Murdoch and chief executives from several major corporations, including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing and Disney joined New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to form the Partnership for a New American Economy to advocate 'for immigration reform – including a path to legal status for all illegal aliens now in the United States'. The coalition, reflecting Murdoch and Bloomberg's own views, also advocates significant increases in legal immigration to the United States as a means of boosting America's sluggish economy and lowering unemployment. The Partnership's immigration policy prescriptions are notably similar to those of the Cato Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce — both of which Murdoch has supported in the past.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has similarly advocated for increased legal immigration, in contrast to the staunch anti-immigration stance of Murdoch's British newspaper, The Sun. On 5 September 2010, Murdoch testified before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law Membership on the 'Role of Immigration in Strengthening America's Econom'y. In his testimony, Murdoch called for ending mass deportations and endorsed a 'comprehensive immigration reform' plan that would include a pathway to citizenship for all illegal immigrants.

In the 2012 US presidential election, Murdoch was critical of the competence of Mitt Romney's team but was nonetheless strongly supportive of a Republican victory, tweeting: 'Of course I want him to win, save us from socialism, etc.'

In October 2015, Murdoch stirred controversy when he praised Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson and referenced President Barack Obama, tweeting, 'Ben and Candy Carson terrific. What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide? And much else.' After which he apologized, tweeting, 'Apologies! No offence meant. Personally find both men charming.'

During Donald Trump's term as US President Murdoch showed support for him through the news stories broadcast in his media empire, including on Fox News. In early 2018, Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, had an intimate dinner at Murdoch's Bel Air estate in Los Angeles.



Murdoch is a strong supporter of Israel and its domestic policies. In October 2010, the Anti-Defamation League in New York City presented Murdoch with its International Leadership Award 'for his stalwart support of Israel and his commitment to promoting respect and speaking out against anti-Semitism.' However, in April 2021, in a letter to Lachlan Murdoch, its director Jonathan Greenblatt wrote that the ADL would no longer make such an award to his father. This was in the immediate context of accusations made by the ADL against Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson and his apparent espousal of the White replacement theory.

Activities in Europe Murdoch owns a controlling interest in Sky Italia, a satellite television provider in Italy. Murdoch's business interests in Italy have been a source of contention since they began. In 2010 Murdoch won a media dispute with then Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. A judge ruled the then Prime Minister's media arm Mediaset prevented News Corporation's Italian unit, Sky Italia, from buying advertisements on its television networks.

Activities in Asia In November 1986, News Corporation purchased a 35% stake in the South China Morning Post group for about US$105 million. At that time, SCMP group was a stock-listed company, and was owned by HSBC, Hutchison Whampoa and Dow Jones & Company. In December 1986, Dow Jones & Company offered News Corporation to sell about 19% of share it owned of SCMP for US$57.2 million, and, by 1987, News Corporation completed the full takeover. In September 1993, News Corporation have agreed to sell a 34.9% share in SCMP to Robert Kuok's Kerry Media for US$349 million. In 1994, News Corporation sold the remaining 15.1% share in SCMP to MUI Group, disposing the Hong Kong newspaper.

In June 1993, News Corporation attempted to acquire a 22% share in TVB, a terrestrial television broadcaster in Hong Kong, for about $237 million, but Murdoch's company gave up, as the Hong Kong government would not relax the regulation regarding foreign ownership of broadcasting companies.

In 1993, News Corporation acquired Star TV, a Hong Kong company headed by Richard Li, from Hutchison Whampoa for $1 billion, and subsequently set up offices for it throughout Asia. The deal enabled News International to broadcast from Hong Kong to India, China, Japan and over thirty other countries in Asia, becoming one of the biggest satellite television networks in the east. 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.

In 2009, News Corporation reorganised Star; a few of these arrangements were that the original company's operations in East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East were integrated into Fox International Channels, and Star India was spun-off.

Personal life Residence In 2003, Murdoch bought 'Roseheart'y, an 11 bedroom home on a 5-acre waterfront estate in Centre Island, New York. In May 2013, he purchased the Moraga Estate, an estate, vineyard and winery in Bel Air, Los Angeles, California. In 2019, Murdoch and his new wife Jerry Hall purchased Holmwood, an 18th-century house and estate in the English village of Binfield Heath, some 4 miles north-east of Reading.

In late 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was reported that Murdoch and Hall had been isolating in their Binfield Heath home for much of the year. He received his first COVID-19 vaccine in nearby Henley-on-Thames on 16 December.

Marriages

In 1956, Murdoch married Patricia Booker, a former shop assistant and flight attendant from Melbourne; the couple had their only child, Prudence, in 1958. They divorced in 1967.

4444

In 1967, Murdoch married Anna Mann, a Scottish-born cadet journalist working for his Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph. In January 1998, 3 months before the announcement of his separation from Anna, a Roman Catholic, Murdoch was made a Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Gregory the Great, a papal honour awarded by Pope John Paul II. While Murdoch would often attend Mass with Torv, he never converted to Catholicism. Torv and Murdoch had three children: Elisabeth Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch, and James Murdoch,. Murdoch's companies published two novels by his then wife: Family Business and Coming to Terms, both considered to be vanity publications. They divorced in June 1999. Anna Murdoch received a settlement of US$1.2 billion in assets.

On 25 June 1999, 17 days after divorcing his second wife, Murdoch, then l

aged 68, married Chinese-born Wendi Deng. She was 30, a recent Yale School of Management graduate, and a newly appointed vice-president of his STAR TV. Murdoch had two daughters with her: Grace and Chloe. Murdoch has six children in all, and is grandfather to thirteen grandchildren. Near the end of his marriage to Wendi, hearsay concerning a possible link with Chinese intelligence became problematic to their relationship. On 13 June 2013, a News Corporation spokesperson confirmed that Murdoch filed for divorce from Deng in New York City, US. According to the spokesman, the marriage had been irretrievably broken for more than six months. Murdoch also ended his long-standing friendship with Tony Blair after suspecting him of having an affair with Deng while they were still married.

On 11 January 2016, Murdoch announced his engagement to former model Jerry Hall in a notice in The Times newspaper. On 4 March 2016, Murdoch, a week short of his 85th birthday, and 59-year-old Hall were married in London, at St Bride's, Fleet Street with a reception at Spencer House; this is Murdoch's fourth marriage.

Children Murdoch has six children. His eldest child, Prudence MacLeod, was appointed on 28 January 2011 to the board of Times Newspapers Ltd, part of News International, which publishes The Times and The Sunday Times. Murdoch's elder son Lachlan, formerly the Deputy Chief Operating Officer at the News Corporation and 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 Murdoch, 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 in 1993, Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth and her husband purchased a pair of NBC-affiliate television stations in California, KSBW and KSBY, with a $35 million loan provided by her father. By quickly re-organising 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. But, after divorcing Pianim in 1998 and quarrelling publicly with her assigned mentor Sam Chisholm at BSkyB, she struck out on her own as a television and film producer in London. She has since enjoyed independent success, in conjunction with her second husband, Matthew Freud, the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, whom she met in 1997 and married in 2001.

It is not known how long Murdoch will remain as News Corporation's CEO. 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, the company issued Murdoch's older children voting stock.

Murdoch has two children with Wendi Deng: Grace and Chloe. It was revealed in September 2011 that Tony Blair is Grace's godfather. There is reported to be tension between Murdoch and his oldest children over the terms of a trust holding the family's 28.5% stake in News Corporation, estimated in 2005 to be worth about $6.1 billion. Under the trust, his children by Wendi Deng share in the proceeds of the stock but have no voting privileges or control of the stock. Voting rights in the stock are divided 50/50 between Murdoch on the one side and his children of his first two marriages. Murdoch's voting privileges are not transferable but will expire upon his death and the stock will then be controlled solely by his children from the prior marriages, although their half-siblings will continue to derive their share of income from it. It is Murdoch's stated desire to have his children by Deng given a measure of control over the stock proportional to their financial interest in it. It does not appear that he has any strong legal grounds to contest the present arrangement, and both ex-wife Anna and their three children are said to be strongly resistant to any such change.

Portrayal on television, in film, books and music

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: 'Rupert Murdoch' – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR Murdoch and rival newspaper and publishing magnate Robert Maxwell are thinly fictionalised as 'Keith Townsend' and 'Richard Armstrong' in The Fourth Estate by British novelist and former MP Jeffrey Archer.

Murdoch has been portrayed by:

Barry Humphries in the 1991 mini-series Selling Hitler Hugh Laurie in a parody of It's a Wonderful Life in the television show A Bit of Fry & Laurie Ben Mendelsohn in the film Black and White Paul Elder in The Late Shift Himself on The Simpsons, first in 'Sunday, Cruddy Sunda'y and later in 'Judge Me Tender' Patrick Brammall in the 2-part mini-series Power Games Simon McBurney in the 2019 mini-series The Loudest Voice Malcolm McDowell in Bombshell Ben Miller in two UK comedy TV series: Tracey Ullman's Show and Tracey Breaks the News. It was speculated that the character of Elliot Carver, the global media magnate and main villain in the 1997 James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, is based on Murdoch. The screenwriter of the film, Bruce Feirstein, stated that Carver was actually inspired by British press magnate Robert Maxwell, who was one of Murdoch's rivals.

Whenever the Eagles drummer and lead singer Don Henley performs his 1981 hit solo release 'Dirty Laundr'y, which directly criticizes what Henley sees as the news industry favoring style and sensationalism over substance and proper journalism, he says that he'd 'like to dedicate this song to Mr. Rupert Murdoch.'

In the 1997 film Fierce Creatures, the head of Octopus Inc.'s Rod McCain character is likely modelled after Murdoch.

In 1999, the Ted Turner-owned TBS channel aired an original sitcom, The Chimp Channel. This featured an all-simian cast and the role of an Australian TV veteran named Harry Waller. The character is described as 'a self-made gazillionaire with business interests in all sorts of fields. He owns newspapers, hotel chains, sports franchises and genetic technologies, as well as everyone's favourite cable TV channel, The Chimp Channel'. Waller is thought to be a parody of Murdoch, a long-time rival of Turner.

In 2004, the movie Outfoxed included many interviews accusing Fox News of pressuring reporters to report only one side of news stories, in order to influence viewers' political opinions.

In 2012, the satirical show Hacks, broadcast on the UK's Channel 4, made obvious comparisons with Murdoch using the fictional character 'Stanhope Feast', portrayed by Michael Kitchen, as well as other central figures in the phone hacking scandal.

The 2013 film Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues features an Australian character inspired by Rupert Murdoch who owns a cable news television channel.

In the novel Dunbar by Edward St Aubyn the eponymous lead character is at least partly inspired by Murdoch.

Murdoch was part of the inspiration for Logan Roy, the protagonist of TV show Succession, who is portrayed by Brian Cox.

Murdoch is played by Malcolm McDowell in the 2019 film Bombshell.

References