Rupert Murdoch changed not only news media, but the world – and not for the better

Canadians can thank the Australian media mogul for our Sun tabloids and the Online News Act

Last week’s announcement that 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch was stepping down from day-to-day management after 71 years at the head of what became News Corp., the world’s largest newspaper publisher, brought a sigh of relief from liberals everywhere. It also sparked intrigue among viewers of the HBO series Succession, whose Machiavellian patriarch Logan Roy is based on the Australian media mogul. It’s not the first time that Murdoch has been a pop culture influence. The 1997 Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies portrayed a thinly-disguised Murdoch as power-mad media mogul Elliot Carver, who uses his newspapers in an attempt to orchestrate World War III. Life imitated art a few years later when Murdoch beat the war drums both in the U.S. and the UK for an invasion of Iraq on bogus grounds, including that its leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. His cable network Fox News had not coincidentally helped to shift U.S. politics to the right a few years earlier with its bellicosity and was pivotal in electing George W. Bush in a close race with Al Gore. More recently, it was complicit in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building by promoting conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was rigged, which cost Fox more than a billion Canadian loonies to settle a lawsuit by Toronto-based voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems.

Murdoch’s influence on UK media and politics was arguably more profound. After building the largest newspaper chain in Australia from the solitary Adelaide News he inherited from his father in 1952, Murdoch entered the UK market in 1969 by acquiring first the Sunday tabloid News of the World and then the Sun daily broadsheet, which he soon converted into a tabloid. It adopted Murdoch’s formula for tabloid success by focusing on sex, sensationalism and sports, including a topless Sunshine Girl on Page 3 every day. It eclipsed The Mirror in daily circulation within a decade and eventually hit 5 million, highest in the Western world. When the Toronto Telegram went out of business in 1971, its staff banded together to almost immediately turn out a similar Sun, albeit with a more modest bikini model on Page 3. The formula was so successful that it spread across the country from Ottawa to Winnipeg, Calgary, and Edmonton.

Murdoch stepped on a lot of toes in Britain, switching the Sun’s political allegiance from Labour to Conservative in order to help elect Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in 1978. She in turn looked the other way when Murdoch bought the Times and Sunday Times in 1981 from a frustrated Thomson family of Toronto, which had kept them off their presses for almost a year in a dispute with the powerful press unions. Thatcher repaid Murdoch’s continued support in 1986, when he moved his then-strikebound newspapers to new computerized non-union premises by providing massive police protection. Politically fickle, Murdoch soon switched his allegiance back to Labour and helped elect Tony Blair as prime minister in 1997. He began a brutal price war in 1993 between national newspapers in the UK by slashing the cover price of his Times from 45p to 30p in a vain attempt to overtake the market-leading Telegraph, which was then owned by Canadian media mogul Conrad Black. The surprise move devastated competitors, including the Independent, which was plunged into a cash crisis from which it never recovered.

After a phone hacking scandal in 2011 revealed that the News of the World had intercepted calls and messages from politicians, celebrities, and even members of the royal family, five Murdoch underlings were convicted in court, with three sentenced to prison for as long as 18 months. Murdoch contritely closed the historic newspaper but then cannily started a Sunday edition of his Sun. A government inquiry led to a finding by a parliamentary committee that Murdoch was “unfit” to run a major international company.

Murdoch’s duplicity in expanding his empire of influence was boundless. He promised to maintain the editorial independence of the Times and Sunday Times when he bought them, but according to former Sunday Times editor Sir Harold Evans, he “broke every one of those promises in the first years.” Murdoch also promised to keep management of the Times and Sunday Times separate, but as I documented in my 2022 book Re-examining the UK Newspaper Industry, his Times Newspapers got out of that promise during the recent pandemic by fudging the facts in a plea to government.

It noted the declining print circulation and advertising revenue of its Times papers but made no mention of their growing online revenues. The Covid-19 crisis, it claimed, had put publisher costs “under further and unprecedented pressure, which is unlikely to abate in the short to medium term” . . . The 2020-21 annual report for Times Newspapers Limited filed with Companies House the following month, however, showed that its profits had doubled again to £52.5m. Its revenues had risen by £17m, or 5%, thanks to strong growth in digital advertising and subscription revenues, as well as cover price increases which more than offset declines in print circulation and advertising.

Murdoch’s malign influence in his native country through his dominance of the media there, which also includes Sky News Australia, recently prompted calls by not one but two former prime ministers for a royal commission into what one of them called “an arrogant cancer on our democracy” who had created a “culture of fear.” Their 2020 petition gained more than a half million signatures, but instead of a Royal Commission into his influence, Murdoch used his influence to prevail upon the government he helped elect to introduce a Mandatory Bargaining Code which forced Google and Facebook to pay publishers like him.

Similar legislation was recently passed in Canada as the Online News Act, which has prompted Facebook to quit carrying links to news stories here, with Google almost sure to follow. Murdoch, however, is hopeful of such laws also being adopted in the U.S., where he owns major dailies such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, and the UK, where his Times and Sun newspapers have been actively vilifying the digital platforms.

Murdoch is being roundly lauded on his stepping down, including as “the last of the press barons” by the Washington Post. His like may never be seen again, at least hopefully not.