{"id":166285,"date":"2025-09-30T10:33:53","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T10:33:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/fox-news-succession-how-rupert-murdoch-took-over-the-world-vox-com\/"},"modified":"2025-09-30T10:33:53","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T10:33:53","slug":"fox-news-succession-how-rupert-murdoch-took-over-the-world-vox-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/fox-news-succession-how-rupert-murdoch-took-over-the-world-vox-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Fox News succession: How Rupert Murdoch took over the world – vox.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

Free speech is endangered; unbiased and trustworthy news is elusive. In a time of noise, confusion, and spin, we\u2019re committed to clarity, truth, and depth \u2014 even when it\u2019s hard.
We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?<\/strong>
\ufeffRupert Murdoch built a media empire. It changed the way reality works.
Rupert Murdoch has influenced every facet of our modern media. The scion of a newspaper baron in Australia, Murdoch built a vast empire that now spans the globe. In the US, he owns the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and Fox News. He gave us The Simpsons<\/em>, Page Six, and Bill O\u2019Reilly.
And at 94 years old, he\u2019s never been more powerful. Which is why a succession battle among his four oldest children had all the trappings of a Succession <\/em>episode but with higher stakes, such as: Who gets a direct line into the Trump White House?
Earlier this month we learned the answer to that question. Rupert\u2019s son Lachlan, a man philosophically aligned with his father\u2019s conservative ideals, will run the empire after Rupert\u2019s death.
But how was the empire created? How did the son of a somewhat obscure newspaper magnate in Melbourne go on to reshape the way we consume news and understand politics?
Today, Explained <\/em>spoke with several experts who have tracked Murdoch\u2019s rise and dominance across the globe. In the first episode of a two-part series, we focus on how Murdoch transformed his father\u2019s holdings into a world-beating company, and how he bent people in power to his will.
Today, Explained<\/em>\u2019s Sean Rameswaram spoke with Matthew Ricketson, a professor of communication at Deakin University; Des Freedman, a professor of media and communication studies at Goldsmiths, University of London; and Graham Murdock, professor emeritus at Loughborough University London. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
For more on our miniseries about how Rupert Murdoch took over the world, listen to Today, Explained<\/em> wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Pandora<\/a>, and Spotify<\/a>. And please check back later today for the second installment of the miniseries.
Is Rupert Murdoch a nepo baby?<\/strong>
Des Freedman (Goldsmiths, University of London professor)<\/strong>: Murdoch is absolutely a nepo baby.
Matthew Ricketson (Deakin University professor)<\/strong>: \u200aIf the term nepo was in existence in 1931, yes, he is a nepo baby.
One of our former prime ministers, Malcolm Turnbull, who tangled with Rupert Murdoch, has described him as Australia\u2019s deadliest export.
His whole presentation is of this kind of scruffy, rebellious outsider figure, shaking his fist at the establishment and the elites. The reality is that when he was born in 1931, his father was the managing director of a big newspaper group in Australia. He went to Oxford University, and then his father dies in 1952 and leaves him one afternoon newspaper in Adelaide, which is another city here in Australia.
Graham Murdock (Loughborough University London emeritus professor)<\/strong>: His father, Keith, really pioneered tabloid journalism in Australia. Keith Murdoch realized that newspapers had the power to bring down politicians. So Rupert inherited not just newspapers, but actually a whole kind of philosophy, if you like, of what newspapers could do and how to, how they operated.
MR<\/strong>: [Rupert Murdoch is] very clear from very early on that he wants to learn everything about running newspapers and then, very quickly, from about 1954, he starts expanding.
GM<\/strong>: He always had the reputation for being quite ruthless.
DF<\/strong>: The main ambition was to make his father proud and to do better than his father, to internationalize the father\u2019s operation. And he was willing to throw everything at it to get there.
GM<\/strong>: When he came to Britain [in the 1960s], he bought the News of the World<\/a>, which was this humongous bestselling Sunday tabloid, a huge commercial success. He began looking around for a daily title, and he fixed on The Sun.
He immediately converted it into a tabloid, became famous for having these semi-nude models.
MR<\/strong>: Topless women on page 3. Tabloid newspapers have been sensational for a long time. and for him, that is the key message. Those kinds of stories will drive circulation.
GM<\/strong>: His rise in the UK coincides with the rise of Margaret Thatcher. And they share a kind of notion \u2014 they\u2019re both outsiders. She\u2019s a grocer\u2019s daughter from a provincial town, not part of the old English establishment and the old English establishment, also very hostile to Rupert. They share a kind of neoliberal philosophy to free markets and antagonism to public ownership. And Murdoch\u2019s papers were very much in support of that Thatcher agenda.
MR<\/strong>: He already owns two of the most popular newspapers. And he wants to buy more. An opportunity comes up to buy The Times and the Sunday Times. And under the law at the time, there\u2019s a requirement this matter is referred off to the monopolies and merger commission. Thatcher ensures that that doesn\u2019t happen so that he\u2019s able to buy The Times and The Sunday Times.
\u201cHe has had this fascinating, but for many people, poisonous impact on political discourse, on politics more generally.\u201d
GM<\/strong>: The classic kind of paper of record in the UK, because he wanted to have that entree into the elite. If you look at Rupert\u2019s career, he\u2019s always had a popular newspaper that can address the masses, but you also have an elite newspaper so you\u2019re speaking to the insiders, but you\u2019re also speaking to the mass of the people.
These stories you\u2019re telling us about Rupert\u2019s time in the UK in the \u201970s and the \u201980s \u201a they establish I think some major themes: one, ruthlessness, a willingness for a newsman to lie if it sells more papers or does good business, and then not just a desire to inform the public about politics, but to drive politics himself.<\/strong>
MR<\/strong>: That is a good summary and you can see the bitter fruits of this decades later in the form of the phone-hacking scandal<\/a> in the United Kingdom in the mid-2000s.
GM<\/strong>: The newspapers were declining in revenues and readership. So that kind of forced them to be even more militant in looking for sensation.
DF<\/strong>: Newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, that is mostly The Sun and the News of the World had hacked into the phones of members of the royal family, celebrities, but also, and this is crucial, also ordinary people, not famous people.
GM<\/strong>: It\u2019s discovered that they\u2019ve hacked a phone of this dead teenage girl, Millie Dowler. People are revolted. It creates a huge public reaction.
MF<\/strong>: You know, the Murdochs could not control the revulsion. They could not kind of put a lid on it. They were forced to do something that Murdoch has almost never done in his career, which is to close a newspaper.
DF<\/strong>: He closed that newspaper, the News of the World, instantly. This is a newspaper that had been around for over a century. It folded overnight.
GM<\/strong>: And then, of course, an official government commission of inquiry
DF<\/strong>: Murdoch sat down in front of a parliamentary committee; he looked old. It was an amazing performance. He forgot all the details when they were put to him, and he said, pretty soon after that, once he got out of the committee room, he magically regained his memory and regained his posture and his poise. And of course, he has gone on to live his life in full.
Rupert Murdoch\u2019s first foray into the American media isn\u2019t on TV.<\/strong>
DF<\/strong>: So he bought the New York Post in\u2026
MR<\/strong>: \u200a\u2026the mid-1970s\u2026
DF<\/strong>: \u2026 to establish a base.
MR<\/strong>: He gets access to heavy hitters in the commercial world, in the political world, in the cultural world.
Trump\u2019s relationship with Murdoch does go back to the 1980s. And to the New York Post.
GM<\/strong>: Murdoch had a very low opinion of him. This is a man who lost money running a casino.
MR<\/strong>: But a good gossip column is another one of Murdoch\u2019s must-haves in his formula for newspaper success. Page Six is most definitely a very successful gossip column. Trump is one of its key sources. They kind of have that symbiotic relationship where they\u2019re constantly pumping him up, and he\u2019s constantly feeding them stories because he\u2019s a bit of a gossip magnet himself.
DF<\/strong>: The brashness of Trump is very different to the much more considered strategic, studious, long-term thinking of Murdoch. It is not like it\u2019s an immediate marriage.
MR<\/strong>: But he realizes pretty quickly that he can make a lot more money in television.
DF<\/strong>: And that\u2019s when, you know, he buys 50 percent of 20th Century Fox. And that\u2019s the beginning of the Fox Network, of the legacy we\u2019re all now very familiar with.
The Simpsons ideologically is not the kind of thing you might think would sit that easily with a small-c conservative like Rupert Murdoch. This is a man who will do anything to increase the ratings and the audiences.
GR<\/strong>: He\u2019s also buying up film studios.
DF<\/strong>: With Titanic<\/em> as a movie that his studio financed; it could have ruined him \u2014 the gamble that he took on Titanic<\/em>. And instead it made him \u2014 was it over a billion dollars that Titanic<\/em> took?
But I think his ambition is always to come back to news. The Simpsons<\/em> doesn\u2019t get you into the White House or the front or the back door of Number 10, Downing Street. Being a news mogul does.
MR<\/strong>: The other piece of the puzzle, in helping him develop in America is the regulatory environment. There was this thing called the Fairness Doctrine, which came up after the Second World War.
GM<\/strong>: What that said was that if, if you were, if you were gonna cover contentious affairs on television, you had to present both sides of the story.
MR<\/strong>: Reagan was all about deregulation, getting rid of as much regulation as you can. So the Fairness Doctrine goes and what happens then is that it unleashes or unlocks the door for the rise of people like Rush Limbaugh. The idea of balance and Rush Limbaugh don\u2019t exist in the same sentence, you know?
GM<\/strong>: It opened the space for overtly partisan television, because you didn\u2019t have any longer to give the other side of the story.
MR<\/strong>: \u200aRoger Ailes, who was the key founding person for Fox News, and, Murdoch look at what the success that Rush Limbaugh is having, and they look to see if they can transplant that into television.
GM<\/strong>: And that opened the space for Fox News.
MR<\/strong>: Ailes and, um, Murdoch, they realize that instead of having lots and lots of correspondence everywhere, they\u2019ll have the bare bone \u2014 so you\u2019ll do the reporting of the news, but it won\u2019t be a lavish suite of foreign correspondents. It\u2019s much, much cheaper.
And you will bring in guys primarily from radio like Bill O\u2019Reilly and Sean Hannity and so on, to provide opinions about the news, what it means, how to think about it, etc.
And so you put those people on in the evening and they bloviate on demand. They have big opinions and theatrical opinions. It changes the media landscape. It\u2019s an enormously profitable business.
DF<\/strong>: Tabloidization \u2014 that\u2019s what is applied to Fox News.
MR<\/strong>: You\u2019ve ceased being a news or journalism outfit at that point, and you\u2019ve become something quite different, which bears a much closer relationship with propaganda.
Do you think Rupert Murdoch surpassed his own expectations?<\/strong>
MR<\/strong>: Oh, undoubtedly. Undoubtedly. Look, who knows, I\u2019m not in his head, so I don\u2019t know. But if he could have looked into the crystal ball and seen himself from 1952 to 2025, I think it would\u2019ve been very hard for him to conceive of being where he\u2019s now.
DF<\/strong>: He certainly transformed the British media, the Australian media, and the US media. He has had this fascinating, but for many people, poisonous impact on political discourse, on politics more generally.
MR<\/strong>: Now we can see how much damage the company has done to journalism, to democracy. You know, they\u2019ve created a monster, which has now gotten away from them. And there\u2019s actually two monsters. The first monster is the Fox News audience, and the second monster is Donald Trump.
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Free speech is endangered; unbiased and trustworthy news is elusive. In a time of noise, confusion, and spin, we\u2019re committed to clarity, truth, and depth \u2014 even when it\u2019s hard.We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?\ufeffRupert Murdoch built a media empire. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-166285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-world","entry","has-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}