March 11, 2011. Copyright 2011, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Influential media magnate Rupert Murdoch shows no signs of slowing down as he turns 80
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, March 11, Graphic News:  The sun never sets on the empire that is Keith Rupert Murdoch's global concerns. From his native Australia, where he started out with a single loss-making newspaper, via pay-to-view channels in Asia and Europe to the United States, where his assets include the leading television network FOX, Murdoch's News Corporation dominates broadcast and publishing outlets. His recent acquisitions include Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and Shine, the UK's largest independent television production company, founded by his own daughter, Elisabeth -- a move which has cleared the way for her to join the board of News Corp, where her brothers, James and Lachlan, already sit. Only China, with its state-controlled media, has resisted Murdoch's advance. Last summer, in what many commentators saw as a retreat, he sold his stake in three Chinese television channels to a Beijing-backed fund, having earlier expressed his frustration at China's refusal to allow a more open industry. The irony of this is not lost on Murdoch's critics; such is its reach that almost every new proposition from News Corp now raises questions about media freedom. And the concessions it must make to gain the biggest prizes are considerable. To win British government approval for the controlling shares of BSkyB, for example, Murdoch has had to agree to let go of Sky News, the pioneering 24-hour news channel he brought to Britain in 1989.
 
The boy from Melbourne, who won a place at Oxford to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics, inherited one title from his father's regional newspaper business -- the struggling Adelaide News -- at the age of 22, but within 10 years had bought up many of the country's provincial papers and launched its first national daily, The Australian, a broadsheet which earned him both kudos and political power. By the early 70s Murdoch had acquired Sydney's morning paper, the Daily Telegraph, and is credited with helping Australia's Labour Party, under Gough Whitlam, to election victory through its editorial stance. It's an influence he has continued to exert through the decades, to his opponents' dismay, purchasing widely-read popular titles such as Britain's biggest-selling daily, The Sun, along with The News of the World -- currently the subject of a police investigation into alleged phone-hacking -- and at the opposite end of the market, the prestigious London-based Times and Sunday Times. Murdoch's News International arm was the first to introduce electronic production, at a converted warehouse in Wapping in 1986, a process which ended overnight the centuries-old method of printing with hot metal and drastically reduced the necessary workforce. In the bitter dispute that followed, Murdoch sacked all those who had protested by going on strike -- some 6,000 workers -- and broke the long-established power of the print unions.        
 
To expand into the United States, where he had already bought the New York Post and founded the tabloid Star newspaper, Murdoch became a U.S. citizen in 1985. In 1996 he launched his round-the-clock news channel, Fox News, as direct competition to the then-dominant Cable News Network, or CNN, owned by his great rival Ted Turner.

Murdoch has been married three times, his second wife, Anna Torv, winning one of the largest divorce settlements in history when their 32-year union ended. He married 30-year-old Wendi Deng, an employee of his Asian Star network, in 1999. The couple have two children, aged nine and seven. Currently 38th on the Forbes list of richest Americans, with an estimated personal wealth of $6.2 billion, he once appeared in an episode of the hit cartoon series The Simpsons, introducing himself as "Rupert Murdoch the billionaire tyrant".
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