Rupert Murdoch

Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KCSG (born Melbourne, March 11, 1931), usually known as Rupert Murdoch, is an Australian-American global media mogul. He is the major shareholder, chairman and managing director of News Corporation (News Corp). Beginning with one newspaper in Adelaide, Murdoch acquired and started other publications in his native Australia before expanding News Corp into the UK, US and Asian media markets. It was in the UK that he diversified into TV, creating Sky Television in 1989. In recent years he has become a leading investor in satellite television, the film industry, the Internet and the media.

According to the 2008 Forbes 400, Murdoch is the 109th-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $8.3 billion.

Acquisitions in Britain

Murdoch expanded into Britain in 1968. He succeeded in beating rival publisher Robert Maxwell to the acquisition of The News of the World, which had once been the most popular English-language newspaper in the world, with a claimed peak circulation of 8,441,966 in 1950. By 1968, circulation had dropped to around six million, and a substantial number of its shares were offered for sale by a member of the Carr family, which had part-owned and managed the company for nearly seventy years.

It was also the first time that Murdoch risked the entire business he had already created on the outcome of a new venture, as he mortgaged the most valuable of his existing Australian properties in order to buy the paper, having been promised that he would share control with the existing Carr management. After succeeding in this, Murdoch not only controlled The News of the World but had completely regained full ownership of all his Australian assets.

When the daily newspaper The Sun entered the market in 1969, Murdoch acquired it and turned it into a tabloid format; by 2006 it was selling three million copies per day.

Murdoch acquired the London Times (and The Sunday Times), the paper Lord Northcliffe had once owned, in 1981. The distinction of owning The Times came to him through his careful cultivation of its owner, who had grown tired of losing money on it.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Murdoch's publications were generally supportive of the UK's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

At the end of the Thatcher/Major era, Murdoch switched his support to the Labour Party and the party's leader Tony Blair. The closeness of his relationship with Blair and their secret meetings to discuss national policies was to become a political issue in Britain.

In 1986, Murdoch introduced electronic production processes to his newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States. The greater degree of automation led to significant reductions in the number of employees involved in the printing process. In England, the move roused the anger of the print unions, resulting in a long and often violent dispute that played out in Wapping, one of London's docklands areas, where Murdoch had installed the very latest electronic newspaper publishing facility in an old warehouse. The unions had been led to assume that Murdoch intended to launch a new London evening newspaper from those premises, but he had kept secret his intention to relocate all the News titles there.[citation needed] The bitter dispute at Fortress Wapping started with the dismissal of 6000 employees who had gone on strike and resulted in street battles, demonstrations and a great deal of bad publicity for Murdoch. Many suspected that the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher had colluded in the Wapping affair as a way of damaging the British trade union movement. Once the Wapping battle had ended, union opposition in Australia followed suit.

Today, most print newspapers around the world are published using his automated production methods, with significant cost savings as a result.

News Corporation has subsidiaries in the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the Channel Islands and the Virgin Islands. From 1986, News Corporation's annual tax bill averaged around seven per cent of its profits.