Rupert Murdoch's Motley Empire (Fortune Classic, 1984)

[UpInArms]

http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2011/07/31/rupert-murdochs-motley-empire-fortune-classic-1984/?section=magazines_fortune

Murdoch had greater success achieving size, reach, and power -- things that associates say matter a lot to him. He routinely uses his newspapers to promote his political causes. His papers have been strident supporters of President Reagan and New York Mayor Edward Koch, and relentless attackers of politicians who offend his sensibilities, including Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman.

News Corp. publishes more than 80 newspapers and magazines in Britain, Australia, and the U.S. The newspapers include the Times of London, the oldest and one of the most prestigious English-language dailies, the Sun of London, the largest and one of the east prestigious English-language dailies, and the Daily Mirror, the largest afternoon paper in Australia. The company's other holdings include two Australian TV stations, four book publishers, a half interest in Australia's largest private airline, and parts in two oil and gas exploration consortiums.

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In the future envisioned by Murdoch, the line between entertainment and news will increasingly blur. His critics claim he's never known the difference anyway. Murdoch, 52, started in 1955 with a tired daily inherited from his father in the Australian city of Adelaide. He has applied a rigid formula of scandal, sports, cheesecake, and crime to most of the papers acquired since. Murdoch's tabloids luridly depict a world in which fiendish criminals prey on women and children, evil immigrants menace the natives, and most government affairs are too tedious to note. By the time he moved into England in 1969 to buy the Sunday News of the World, Murdoch's Australian company owned nearly a dozen papers. Most had been bought on the cheap with borrowed money and turned around with Dickensian cost controls, strident promotion, bingolike contests, and the tabloid formula.

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Murdoch stole quietly into the U.S. in 1973, buying two marginally profitable papers in San Antonio for $18 million. The next year he splashily launched the Star, a knock-off of the sensational weekly National Enquirer. Then came the acquisitions of the New York Post; New York magazine; the Village Voice, a far-left New York weekly; and the Boston Herald.

...more...

it was apparent as early as 1984 - if only anyone had really cared ...

sigh

[UpInArms]

1. reading further ....

A surprisingly large share of News Corp.'s profits flow from a handful of properties. The big contributors are the tabloids whose reporters, as the old joke goes at one of them, write the headline before they report the stories. Biggest of all is the Sun of London, whose circulation of nearly 4.3 million gives Murdoch 28% of the morning readers in Britain. Says the editor of a rival paper, goggle-eyed at the Sun's success: "It gets worse editorially and better commercially. Fleet Street knows they pinch stories and put words in people's mouths, and their intrusion into privacy, particularly of the Royal Family, is second to none."

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(referring to the Chicago Sun-Times):

A team of editors from New York and London has spiced the headlines, redirected the news coverage, and is turning the editorial voice from moderately liberal to reflect Murdoch's politics, which he calls radical conservatism. "We'll bring it back more to center," says Murdoch. "It won't be totally illiberal -- we'll be very much for small business and the small man."