Rupert K. Murdoch is the controlling shareholder and chief executive of News Corporation, Ltd. (News Corp), one of the largest and most powerful media companies in the world. In this position, Murdoch has become perhaps the world’s leading media mogul. His bold style, unconventional and visionary approach, and willingness to aggressively assume great risks have made him a figure both admired and disdained throughout the world. His company owns properties on four continents that produce and distribute products in television; films; book, newspaper, and magazine publishing; and online data services.

Murdoch began his rise to the status of media baron in a relatively modest way. He inherited his father’s newspaper holdings in 1952, which, after estate taxes, consisted of two small Australian papers, the Adelaide News and Sunday Mail. Murdoch was quickly able to reverse the unprofitable states of these newspapers, and he used the new profits to acquire other media properties, thereby exhibiting the fundamental growth strategy that would come to characterize his career. By the late 1960s, Murdoch expanded his newspaper and magazine empire to include British newspaper holdings, first acquiring London’s The News of the World in 1968 and soon thereafter The Sun. It was the transformation of The Sun into a sensationalized tabloid (which, most notoriously, included a regular “Page Three” feature of photos of topless women) that sealed Murdoch’s reputation as a media owner who was willing to pander to his audience’s worst instincts in exchange for commercial acceptance, a label that has dogged Murdoch throughout his career. However, it must be noted that such fears have sometimes proven to be unfounded, as was the case following Murdoch’s 1981 purchase of the revered London Times, which largely retained the stoic editorial character for which it was well known.

In the 1970s, Murdoch entered the U.S. media market by purchasing newspapers and magazines, and he also started the supermarket tabloid The Star. However, it was not until the mid-1980s that Murdoch began to make his mark on American television. His purchase of Metromedia’s independent television stations from John Kluge in 1985 came on the heels of his acquisition of the 20th Century-Fox studio. Murdoch saw the situation as a rare opportunity to purchase a group of choice television stations in the largest U.S. markets, thereby ensuring a distribution vehicle for his new studio’s programs. The combined moves allowed Murdoch to initiate the most serious effort to establish a fourth broadcast television network since the demise of Dumont in the mid-1950s and culminated in the establishment of the FOX Broadcasting Company.

Despite his career’s many successes, Murdoch’s empire nearly collapsed in 1990. Unfavorable conditions in the financial markets, combined with deep losses by some of News Corp’s start-up operations, such as British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), and the company’s extremely heavy short-term debt load (the result of many costly acquisitions, such as TV Guide, which News Corp purchased in 1988 from Walter Annenberg’s Triangle Publications) brought the company to the brink of financial ruin. While Murdoch was able to renegotiate the terms of his agreements, which avoided the disaster, News Corp’s financial problems temporarily placed Murdoch in the unusual position of being unable to aggressively expand his holdings. In fact, he was forced to shed some nonessential assets, including most of his U.S. magazine titles. It was only a relatively short time, however, before the company’s financial picture improved significantly and Murdoch was able to once again resume his familiar patterns of acquisition, as he did when he purchased a controlling interest in Asia’s Star-TV direct broadcast satellite service in 1993.

As perhaps befits a man with such a great level of power and influence, Murdoch has often found himself at the center of political firestorms. He became widely scorned by labor organizations and pro-labor politicians around the world because of his hard-line tactics in battling the British newspaper workers’ unions in the mid-1980s. His 1985 purchase of the Metromedia television stations required him to become an American citizen to comply with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) restrictions on foreign ownership of U.S. television stations; many felt he received inordinately preferential treatment by the Reagan administration in expediting the citizenship process. His FOX television network was able to avoid complying with the FCC’s “Financial Interest and Syndication” (Fin- Syn) rules—first by airing fewer hours of programming than were stipulated in the legal definition of a “network” and later by receiving a temporary FCC waiver of the rules—an action the other three broadcast networks vigorously opposed. In addition, Murdoch was the specific target of a 1988 effort by Senator Edward Kennedy (at the time a frequent target of Murdoch’s Boston Herald newspaper) to revoke another FCC ruling, one that waived cross-ownership restrictions that would have prevented Murdoch from owning both newspapers and television stations in New York and Boston. The end result of Kennedy’s efforts was that Murdoch eventually sold the New York Post (he later would receive a new waiver that allowed him to reacquire the struggling paper in 1993) and put Boston’s WFXT-TV into an independent trust.

A mid-1990s political storm held the potential to be the most costly that had ever surrounded Murdoch. Nearly ten years after he had become a U.S. citizen and after many millions of dollars had been invested in the FOX network and its owned-and-operated stations, questions arose related to Murdoch’s avoidance of the FCC’s restrictions on foreign ownership of television stations. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was seeking to block the purchase of a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, television station by FOX, asked the FCC to investigate whether it was Murdoch who owned the FOX stations, as he and News Corp claimed, or whether Australian-based News Corp was the legal owner, which would be in violation of the rules. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) joined the NAACP in asking the FCC to pursue the investigation but eventually withdrew from the complaint after gaining access for their programming on Murdoch’s Star-TV service in Asia. However, the NAACP continued to pursue the issue.

Murdoch’s media empire continued to grow and flourish as the new century approached. News Corp expanded its holdings of sports-related properties, most notably adding the Los Angeles Dodgers Major League Baseball franchise (along with its valuable real estate holdings) in 1998, and it also obtained full control over Liberty Media’s regional cable sports channels in 1999, which added to FOX Sports’ dominant presence in the sports television field. Murdoch also positioned his company for the future by merging TV Guide with Gemstar International Group in 2000, which effectively put News Corp at the very center of the burgeoning field of interactive television services. With the purchase of a major share of the Italian pay-cable service Telepiu from beleaguered French conglomerate Vivendi in the summer of 2002, Murdoch expanded his European holdings as well as his stake in pay-television services that could carry FOX productions. A rare failed effort occurred earlier that year when Murdoch attempted to merge his satellite operations with direct-to-home provider DirecTV. He lost out to rival Charles Ergen, owner of the other major satellite provider, EchoStar.

Murdoch also spent these years preparing for the ultimate succession of his children to News Corp leadership posts. His sons, Lachlan and James, were groomed for high-level positions within the organization, as was his daughter, Elisabeth, who left News Corp in 2000 to start her own independent production company. Younger son James has been in charge of News Corp’s new media efforts and, at the time of this writing, is chief executive at Star TV, the group’s Asian satellite broadcaster. Lachlan, who is most often considered to be his father’s heir apparent, has led the company’s print and publishing operations in Australia and New York and was named deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation, Ltd, in 2000.

Rupert Murdoch has been one of the most successful international entrepreneurs of his time and a lightning rod for controversy in many parts of the world. While other global media companies, such as AOL Time Warner and Bertelsmann AG, possess power and influence comparable to that of News Corp, Murdoch often appears to stand alone among the ranks of modern media moguls. This is because, unlike those other companies, News Corp is clearly identified as a corporate arm that is strongly controlled by a single individual. It is therefore fair to say that his absolute control over News Corp, with its holdings of some of the world’s most pervasive and influential media properties, makes Murdoch perhaps the single most powerful media magnate ever