The purchase launched the Australian on a course that
made him the most formidable media baron of the 20th and 21st
centuries, with properties around the world, a perch from which he finally
stepped down a few months ago at age 92.
At age 21, Murdoch inherited a single afternoon Australian
tabloid from his father, the foundation of what became News Corp. In 1969,
having bought a string of papers in his own country, he turned to the British
market when he bought the weekly News of the World and the daily London
Sun.
With his San Antonio acquisitions, he planned to
import the same formula that had made him a success on Fleet Street, what I
would call “3C X S”: i.e., crime, controversy, and cheesecake times scandal.
More specifically, it meant in his papers screaming
headlines, faux anti-elitism, and manufactured outrage—and, in the newsroom,
ousters of key managers and staffers as well as broken promises about editorial
independence.
Murdoch entered the American market just as the Watergate
scandal was slowly but steadily eroding support for Richard Nixon. Disdain for Tricky
Dick’s opponents was as much a part of the publisher’s DNA as scorn for journalistic
objectivity or ethical newsgathering methods. (“The American press might get
their pleasure in successfully crucifying Nixon,” he said, “but the last laugh
could be on them. See how they like it when the Commies take over the West.” He
could never imagine a world in which both Nixon and “the Commies” would
be gone.)
Given that Murdoch was far more enthusiastic about Nixon
than he has been in private about Donald Trump, I think it highly probable that
Nixon could have survived his growing scandals if he had Murdoch’s backing when
the publisher’s American holdings reached their eventual peak.
Even as he was getting ready to invade San Antonio, he
was seeking a wider arena for his outsized ambitions. He would have those in
just a couple of years, launching The National Star (later, renamed
simply The Star) as a supermarket tabloid competitor of The National
Enquirer in February 1974 and transforming the faded liberal daily The
New York Post into a rabid right-wing publication after his acquisition in
1976.
Nevertheless, it is one of the ironies of the past half-century, when daily newspapers withered successively under the assault of the evening news, 24-hour cable stations, and the Internet, Murdoch remained one of the most enthusiastic supporters or print against electronic journalism.
(The newspaper portion of his empire might be considerably slimmed down, if his
successor, son Lachlan Murdoch—notably less enthusiastic about the old medium—has
his way, according to this September 2023 AP article by Pan Pylas and
Jill Lawless.)
Though the Murdoch empire has, with more than a little
truth, been credited with creating the conditions for Trumpism, the denial of
climate science may be the most lasting and pernicious legacy of the publisher’s.
Had Murdoch’s influence merely extended to America, he
would just bear responsibility for the rise of a homegrown demagogue. But
because he is invested in six continents, he has been able to undermine climate-science
advocates and erode diplomatic and legislative efforts to curb the greatest existential
threat of our time.
It took two screenwriters, Herman Mankiewicz and Orson
Welles, to depict in fictional terms one of the early “yellow journalists”:
William Randolph Hearst, in “Citizen Kane.”
In contrast, Murdoch was translated into fiction by
the novelist Edward St Aubyn, in Dunbar, a 2017 retelling of King
Lear, and Jesse Armstrong and his team of writers for the recently
concluded series Succession.
Compared with other newspapers that he kept alive
despite constant losses (notably, The New York Post, which only recorded
its first annual profit in modern history this past year), San Antonio’s News
and Express fell by the wayside relatively quickly in the Murdoch stable
of newspapers.
After bamboozling readers for a decade with headlines
like “Ax Attacker Kills Sleeper,” “Armies of Insects Marching on S.A.,” and “Uncle
Tortures Tots with Hot Fork,” Murdoch began to hedge his bets with the two
papers he’d bought, closing the News in favor of a reconstituted Express-News
in 1984, then selling that to his longtime rival in the San Antonio market, the
Hearst Corp.
Now, it was America, not just San Antonio, that he was
looking to conquer. In the end, it would involve telling people what they most
wanted to hear, even if his private views were far different.
To satisfy the legal requirement that only American citizens
could own U.S. TV stations, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen in September
1985. Still, there is reason to wonder if he has anything other than contempt
for the great mass of his adopted countrymen—or if he feels any sensitivity at
all to those less fortunate than him.
In Michael Wolff’s recent book about the Murdochs and
their empire, The Fall, Rupert is quoted taking a swipe at both
his Fox evening anchor, Sean Hannity, and, implicitly, in the most insulting
manner possible, many in the latter’s audience: “He’s retarded, like most
Americans.”
In word and action, Murdoch might be the best example
of what columnist H.L. Mencken meant nearly a century ago in concluding, “No
one in this world, so far as I know...has ever lost money by underestimating
the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."
