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Rupert Murdoch: United States
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In 1998, Rupert Murdoch made a failed attempt to buy footballing power Manchester United FC. He offered £625 million. It was the largest amount of money anyone had offered for a sports club. It was rejected by the United Kingdom's Competition Commission, citing that the acquisition would have "hurt competition in the broadcast industry and the quality of British football".
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It is no coincidence that Rupert Murdoch does not own such a paper. His mission is to blur the lines between church and state and infuse the blend with his own distinctive, lively brand of populist values. And let's face it, no one does it better. If you can find someone who doesn't love a New York Post headline, hook him up to a heart monitor, fast.
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Murdoch's personal life is a story in itself. He married his first wife, Patricia Booker, in 1956. After having one child, Prudence, they divorced in 1960. He later married Anna Torv, a reporter at Sydney's Daily Mirror, with whom he had three children: Elizabeth, Lachlan and James. They were married 31 years and divorced in 1998—four years after Murdoch became an American citizen to satisfy foreign ownership regulations. His current wife is Wendy Deng, a former Star TV executive whom Murdoch met in Hong Kong after acquiring the satellite station (which has audiences from Japan to the Middle East) in 1993.
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Its media competitors keep scanning its ratings -- in vain at the moment -- for signs that Rupert Murdoch's cable station will wilt along with President Bush's poll numbers. At New York gatherings, one much-masticated indicator of possible zeitgeist shift is that even though Fox still leads the pack, CNN's increases during Katrina were greater in percentage terms than Fox's.
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Murdoch wanted to expand his holdings into the United States; he chose to begin with two small, struggling newspapers, buying the San Antonio Express, the San Antonio News, and their united Sunday paper for $18 million in 1973. He revamped the News with his sex and mayhem formula while leaving the Express relatively untouched. He then established a national American newspaper, the National Star (later just the Star), a tabloid that competed with the National Enquirer in the field of sensational, bizarre, and scarcely credible stories. Murdoch's formula came to include large photographs, big headlines, and brief stories. In 1974 Murdoch began spending most of his time in the United States; his wife had detested the snobbery in England and was happy to split her time between a 12-room duplex in New York City and a country farmhouse in rural New York.
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Murdoch is perhaps best known for owning Fox News, the “Fair and Balanced” cable news network. Murdoch launched the station in 1997 to counteract what he saw as a left-wing media bias. Since then, the station has become better known for its overheated, hysterical pundits than it has for its news reporting. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity are the poster boys for a roster of pundits who have created a separate, parallel universe where facts and opinion are one and the same, where vast liberal conspiracies are a given and the most empowered people in America—Christian white males—are in fact an embattled minority struggling to save their values, their way of life, and even Christmas from a vicious army of immigrants, gays, and judges.
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