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Today, Explained
How Rupert Murdoch remade the world
00:26:32
Murdoch started his media empire in Australia, sharpened his playbook in the UK, and became one of the most powerful people in the world once he came to the United States.
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- [00:01]
Host
A lot happened this month. Do you remember Charlie Kirk, Jimmy Kimmel, James Comey? Easy to miss a resolution in the epic legal fight between the Murdochs, but their family drama matters because we've got a Fox News Secretary of Defense, Fox News Secretary of Transportation, Fox News Secretary of Jeanine Pirro. Our Fox News presidency is the crowning achievement of 94 year old media mogul Rupert Murdoch in Australia.
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Matthew Ricketson
If you say Rupert, if you mention the name Rupert, people know who you're talking about.
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Graeme Murdoch
He has been one of the most important kind of media owners, not only for what he owns, but also for the way he's used it.
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Des Friedman
He has had this fascinating but for many people, poisonous impact on political discourse, on politics more generally.
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Host
How Rupert Murdoch remade the world on Today Explained.
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Des Friedman
Support for the show today.
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Host
Comes from the Guardian. If you listen to our show, my guess is that you value independent voices and perspectives on the news. You want real reporting on real stories and you don't want to wonder if the news you're getting is being skewed by an unseen hand. The Guardian says they're fiercely independent too. They aspire to report the whole picture and their coverage goes beyond the news. They have new perspectives on culture, wellness, sports and more for U.S. and world news without compromise or a paywall. Read, watch and listen today@theguardian.com support for the show today comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Today's news moves fast, but the most important stories deserve deeper thinking, whether you're trying to understand the implications of a policy change or connecting dots across breaking stories. Claude, your new AI collaborator, can help you go beyond the headlines. Claude doesn't just summarize the news. It helps you explore the context, analyze the patterns and think through what it all means together. Try Claude for free at Claude AI todayexplained.
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Matthew Ricketson
Do you like the feeling of power you have as a newspaper proprietor? Of being able to sort of formulate policies for a large number of newspapers in every state of Australia?
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Rupert Murdoch
Well, there's only one honest answer to that, of course, and that's yes, of course one enjoys the feeling of power. I think Rupert is a very good and tough businessman.
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Interviewer
I've only seen one side of Mr.
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Des Friedman
Murdoch at the present moment.
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Matthew Ricketson
We won't stand people like him. We don't like people like him. He's too powerful, he's got too much money. People like him spit on people like us, treat us like dirt, kick us away.
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Host
Is Rupert Murdoch a nepo baby?
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Des Friedman
Murdoch is absolutely a nepo baby.
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Matthew Ricketson
If the term nepo baby was in existence in 1931. Yes, he is a Nepo baby.
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Des Friedman
My name is Des Friedman and I am a professor of media and communications at Goldsmith's, University of London.
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Matthew Ricketson
My name is Matthew Ricketson and I'm a professor of communication at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. One of our former prime ministers, Malcolm Turnbull, who tangled with Rupert Murdoch, has described him as Australia's 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. They lived in possibly the wealthiest suburb in Melbourne in Australia, 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.
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Graeme Murdoch
His father, Keith really pioneered tabloid journalism in Australia. My name is Graeme Murdoch, no relation, and I'm an emeritus professor at the University of Loughborough in the uk. 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 they operated.
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Matthew Ricketson
He's 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.
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Graeme Murdoch
And he always had the reputation for being quite ruthless. He was trying to get a deal done and this politician was being obstructive. So he said to him, look, I can either give you favourable publicity or I can pour a bucket of shit on you every day. What's it to be? Not surprisingly, the politician decided he'd rather have the favorable publicity. It's kind of illustrative of the sort of idea that you can make and break reputations and that was really part of the sort of family philosophy.
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Des Friedman
The main ambition was to make his father proud and to do better than his father, to internationalize the father's operation. And he was willing to throw everything at it to get there.
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Matthew Ricketson
He moves into England in the late 1960s.
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Graeme Murdoch
When he came to Britain, he bought the News of the World, which was this, you know, humongous best selling Sunday tabloid. A huge commercial success.
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Interviewer
Murdoch took over the News of the World in January. Since then, its circulation has risen by more than half a million. This old family business just off Fleet street is now his power base in the newspaper world.
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Rupert Murdoch
Was buying into a News of the World your own idea, or was it suggested from someone else? It was entirely my own idea.
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Graeme Murdoch
It had printing Presses, but they weren't used for most of the week, which was uneconomical. So he began looking around for a daily title and he fixed on the.
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Matthew Ricketson
Sun, which at that point is an ailing newspaper. And he turbo charges that Murdoch's plans.
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Interviewer
For the sun are still uncertain. It seems that it'll be a spicier version of the Daily Mirror.
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Rupert Murdoch
Depends what you call by spice and sex and salaciousness. We're obviously not going to avoid the subject, but it's not going to be a dirty pipe. Of course not.
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Graeme Murdoch
He immediately converted it into a tabloid, became famous for having these semi nude.
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Matthew Ricketson
Models, topless women on page three. Tabloid newspapers have been sensational for a long time and for him that is the key message. That's, you know, those kinds of stories will drive circulation. The most famous or infamous example of this, some years later is when he publishes the fake diaries of Adolf Hitler. He's advised these diaries are fake by a historian. He famously says, fucking publish, Fucking publish. And he's questioned about that. His answer is twofold, which. Well, first is, well, remember we're in the entertainment business and you know, I'll take the additional hundreds of thousands of copies in circulation that we got from this, the Sun. It became enormously popular, enormously influential, both through the size of its audience and through its ability to shape politics.
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Graeme Murdoch
His rise in the UK coincides with the rise of Margaret Thatcher. And they share a kind of notion, they're both outsiders. She's a grocer's daughter from a provincial town, not part of the old English establishment. And the old English establishment also very hostile to Rupert. But that becomes an advantage because with Thatcher he finds a kind of a fellow traveler. They share a kind of neoliberal sort of philosophy of free markets and antagonism to public ownership. And I mean, Murdoch's papers were very much in support of that Thatcher agenda.
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Matthew Ricketson
He already owns two of the most popular newspapers and he wants to buy more. An opportunity comes up to buy the Times and Sunday Times. And under the law at the time, there's a requirement that this matter is referred off to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, she ensures that that doesn't happen so that he is able to buy the Times and the Sunday Times, the classic kind of paper.
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Graeme Murdoch
Of record in the uk, because he wanted to have that entree into the elite.
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Des Friedman
He wants the prestige, he wants the power and he wants the audiences.
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Graeme Murdoch
If you look at Rupert's career, he's always had the popular newspaper that could address, you know, the masses. But you also have an elite newspaper, so you're speaking to the insiders, but you're also speaking to the mass of the people. That's what gives him his influence, that he can pull the strings at both.
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Interviewer
Levels, if you like, Mr. Murdoch. We've called this program who's Afraid of Rupert Murdoch? And it seems that many people are afraid, principally because they can't believe that you won't interfere and alter the character of the newspapers. You've bought the Sunday Times and the Times. What do you say to that?
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Rupert Murdoch
Well, I certainly didn't buy them to change them, and I certainly have the right to. To insist on excellence.
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Interviewer
It was alleged that in the Australian election, when Fraser beat Whitlam, your papers actually distorted the news in favour of your candidate. In both occasions you had industrial trouble.
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Rupert Murdoch
We in fact had trouble with a number of left wing journalists because we took their distortions out of their stories. We were not the only newspaper saying that the government should change.
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Interviewer
The Falkland Islands and their dependencies remain British territory.
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Matthew Ricketson
When Margaret Thatcher and her government launched the war in the Falklands, Murdoch's newspapers give a lot of editorial support for that.
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Host
Gotcha.
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Des Friedman
Our Lads sing Gumbo and Whole Cruiser.
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Host
Headline the Sun.
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Matthew Ricketson
Maggie sends in the troops.
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Interviewer
Headline the sun.
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Matthew Ricketson
The paper that supports our Boys.
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Des Friedman
This was central to cementing the relationship between Murdoch and Thatcher. If you were asked to name the two key people who reshaped Britain in this more neoliberal vein in the 1980s, it'd be hard to think of two other people. The Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch.
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Host
These stories you're telling us about Rupert's time in the UK in the 70s and the 80s, they establish, I think, three major themes. One, a ruthlessness, a willingness for a newsman to lie if it sells more papers or does good business. And then three, you know, not just a desire to inform the public about politics, but to drive politics himself.
- [11:42]
Matthew Ricketson
That is a good summary. And you can see the fruits of this, if you like, the bitter fruits of this decades later, in the form of the phone hacking scandal in the United Kingdom. In the kind of mid 2000s, the.
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Graeme Murdoch
Newspapers were declining in revenues and readership, so that kind of forced them to be even more militant in looking for sensation.
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Des Friedman
Newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, that is mostly the sun and the News of the World hacked into the phones of members of the Royal family, celebrities, but also, and this is crucial also, ordinary people, not famous people.
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Graeme Murdoch
It's discovered that they've hacked the phone of this dead teenage girl, Millie Dowler.
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Host
The face of Rupert Murdoch, after he apologized privately and publicly to the family of Millie Dowler.
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Matthew Ricketson
I was appalled to find out what had happened.
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Host
And I apologize and I.
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Matthew Ricketson
Have nothing further to say.
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Graeme Murdoch
People are revolting. It creates a huge public reaction.
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Matthew Ricketson
In the view of the majority of committee members, Rupert Murdoch is not fit to run an international company like BSkyB. 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.
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Des Friedman
He closed the News of the World instantly. It folded overnight.
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Graeme Murdoch
And then, of course, an official government commission of inquiry.
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Des Friedman
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, I would just like.
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Matthew Ricketson
To say one sentence. This is the most humble day of my life.
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Des Friedman
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.
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Graeme Murdoch
Rupert he's undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the media certainly in the last 50 years, not only for what he owns, but also for the way he's used it.
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Des Friedman
Australia was the training ground. The UK was where he could really find his feet and wield political power. Many, many millions of newspapers sold every day, which gives him the capital, but also the influence. All of those lessons are to be applied in the US and ultimately the rest of the globe.
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Host
Rupert Murdoch in America when Today Explained returns. Support for the show today comes from Ethos. Here's the thing about insurance. You want to get coverage before you need it. Here's the other thing about insurance. Getting coverage can be tedious and confusing. Ethos says, not anymore. Ethos is an online platform that says they make getting life insurance a fast and easy helping you protect your family's future in minutes, not months. There's no complicated process and it's 100% online, like me. There's no medical exam. You just answer a few health questions and Ethos will get you a quote. And I'm still laughing. You just answer a few health questions, that Ethos will get you a quote in as little as 10 minutes. That means you can get same day coverage without ever leaving your house. In some policies as low as $2 a day billed monthly. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote@ethos.com explained. That's e t h o s.com explained. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Sample rate for a 10 year life policy for 35 year old healthy non smoking males Support for Today Explained comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every entrepreneur knows that moment when break news hits and you're thinking, what does this actually mean for my business? New regulations drop, markets shift, geopolitical events unfold and suddenly you need to understand not just what happened, but how it connects to everything else. Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that can help you work through information in real time. You can upload docs, regulatory filings or multiple news sources to to help you see the bigger picture. Need to verify claims or research background context? Claude searches current sources and provides citations you can check. It works through complex news stories step by step, asking questions that reveal deeper meanings and connections others miss. See why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner and try Claude for free at Claude. AI todayexplained.
- [16:53]
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- [17:27]
Des Friedman
What does the say.
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Matthew Ricketson
Explained.
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Host
Rupert Murdoch's first foray into the American media isn't on TV. It's not in New York. It's in San Antonio, Texas, of all places.
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Graeme Murdoch
Well, I mean, yeah, but then it very quickly moved to New York. Start spreading the new news.
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Des Friedman
So he bought the New York Post in mid-1970s to establish a base.
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Matthew Ricketson
He gets access to all sorts of at the political level, gets access to heavy hitters in the commercial world, in the political world, in the cultural world. You know, the New York Post historically had backed Democrats. When he buys the New York Post, they campaign vigorously for Reagan's Reagan to become the president.
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Host
Phones run hot after big Debate Reagan wins TV poll 2 to 1 the.
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Matthew Ricketson
New York Post he is in sync with Ronald Reagan ideologically and with the sort of Republican Party values.
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Des Friedman
You know, it's a big city, but it's a narrow elite.
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Matthew Ricketson
Trump's relationship with Murdoch does go back to the 1980s and to the New York Post.
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Graeme Murdoch
Murdoch had a very low opinion of him. This is the man who lost money running a casino.
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Matthew Ricketson
But good gossip column is another one of Murdoch's. You know 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. You know, they kind of have that symbiotic relationship where they're constantly pumping him up and he's constantly feeding them stories because he's a bit of a gossip magnet himself.
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Host
Marla boasts to her pals about Donald, quote, best sex I've ever had.
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Des Friedman
The brashness of Trump is very different to the much more considered strategic, studious, long term thinking of Murdoch. It is not like it's an immediate.
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Matthew Ricketson
Marriage, but he realizes pretty quickly that he can make a lot more money in television.
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Des Friedman
And that's when, you know, he buys 50% of 20th Century Fox and that's the beginning of the Fox network of the legacy we are now very familiar with.
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Matthew Ricketson
He is the guy whose company bankrolled the Simpsons.
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Des Friedman
The Simpsons ideologically is not the kind of thing you might think would sit that easily with a small c conservative like Rupert Murdoch.
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Matthew Ricketson
He has made several cameo appearances where he was introduced as River Murdoch, the billionaire tyrant.
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Des Friedman
He's willing to take a hit for the greater good of the company. You know, this is a man who will do anything to increase the ratings and the audiences.
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Rupert Murdoch
The billionaire tyrant.
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Graeme Murdoch
He's also buying up film studios with.
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Des Friedman
Titanic as a movie that his studio financed. It could have ruined him, the gamble that he took on Titanic and instead it made him. Was it over a billion dollars that Titanic took?
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Matthew Ricketson
He's got those mediums which make a lot more money. And he's also doing similar things in Australia and in the uk. He develops a global media empire is what he does.
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Des Friedman
But I think his ambition is always to come back to news. The Simpsons doesn't get you into the White House or the front or the back door of number 10 Downing street being a news mogul does.
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Matthew Ricketson
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.
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Graeme Murdoch
What that said was that if you were going to cover contentious affairs television, you had to present both sides of the story.
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Matthew Ricketson
Reagan was all about deregulation, getting rid of as much regulation as you can. So the Fairness doctrine goes and that that what happens then is that unleashes or unlocks the door for the rise of people like Rush Limbaugh.
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Rush Limbaugh
Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program, a.
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Graeme Murdoch
Program exclusively designed for rich conservatives and.
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Matthew Ricketson
Right minded Republicans and those who, you know, the idea of balance and Rush Limbaugh don't exist in the same sentence.
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Rush Limbaugh
You know, any race of people should not have guilt about slavery. It's Caucasians.
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Graeme Murdoch
It opened the space for overtly partisan television, as you didn't have any longer to give the other side of the story.
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Matthew Ricketson
Roger Ailes, who was the key founding person for Fox News, and Murdoch and Ailes, they look at what the success that Rush Limbaugh is having and they look to see if they can transplant that into television.
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Graeme Murdoch
And that opened the space for Fox News.
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Matthew Ricketson
By this stage, in terms of cable news, you've got CNN, which began in about 1980. We're going to report the news, whether it's Afghanistan or Botswana or Moscow or whatever. Ailes and Murdoch, they realise that instead of having lots and lots of correspondence everywhere, they'll have the bare bones. You know, you'll do the reporting of the news, but it won't be a lavish suite of foreign correspondence. It's much, much cheaper. And you will bring in guys primarily from radio, like, you know, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and so on, to provide opinions about the news, you know, what it means, how to think about it, et cetera.
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Rush Limbaugh
The number that really scares me, African Americans on food stamps is up by 58%. How do they need to rethink Ludacris? All of corporate America, in my opinion, needs to rethink their responsibility to their country.
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Matthew Ricketson
And so you put those people on in the evening. Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and they bloviate on demand. You know, they don't just have opinions, they have big opinions and theatrical opinions.
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Rush Limbaugh
Tonight I can report the sky is absolutely falling. We are all doomed. The end is near. The apocalypse is imminent and you're going to all die. All of you. At least that's what the media mob and the Democratic extreme radical Socialist party would like you to think.
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Des Friedman
Tabloidization, that's what is applied to Fox News.
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Matthew Ricketson
It changes the media landscape in the sense that the predominant thing being, tell me what to think about the news, make me angry or upset or whatever about the news. It's an enormously profitable business. You know, you've ceased being a news or journalism outfit at that point and you've become something quite different, which bears a much closer relationship with propaganda. Murdoch has always run his media empire in, you know, different parts of it, work with different parts of an audience. The upmarket respected newspapers versus the down market ones. The Wall Street Journal was on Rupert Murdoch's radar for a long time.
- [24:36]
Des Friedman
This was a newspaper that was unbiable for him, that the family who owned. It said, not in a million years will we sell to a man like Rupert Murdoch. And yet within a matter of months, they had sold to Rupert Murdoch. And when you're Rupert Murdoch and you have both Fox News and the Wall Street Journal again, it positions you in a, in such a, you know, you have that powerful role. Who is really going to go against you.
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Host
Do you think Rupert Murdoch surpassed his own expectations?
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Matthew Ricketson
Oh, undoubtedly, undoubtedly. Look, who knows? I'm not in his head, so I don't know. But if he could have looked into the crystal ball and seen himself in, you know, from 1952 to 2025, I think it's very hard for him to, would have been very hard for him to conceive of being where he is now.
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Des Friedman
He certainly transformed the British media, the Australian media and the US media. He had, has had this fascinating but for many people, poisonous impact on political discourse, on politics more generally.
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Matthew Ricketson
Democrats have finally realized what cost them the election in 2024. And the answer is being a hole.
- [25:54]
Rush Limbaugh
Are you legal or illegal?
- [25:55]
Des Friedman
Illegal.
- [25:56]
Host
You're illegal.
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Matthew Ricketson
Yes.
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Rush Limbaugh
Welcome to America. Thank you. You can stay. Alright, thank you. Thank you so much for now.
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Matthew Ricketson
Now we can see how much damage the company has done to journalism, to democracy. It's like Victor Frankenstein and his monster. You know, they've created a monster which has now gotten away from them and there's actually two monsters. The first monster is the Fox News audience and the second monster is Donald Trump.
- [26:39]
Host
Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch and the fight for the future of Fox News tomorrow on Today Explained. Our show today was produced by Peter Balinon Rosen. He had help from Jolie Myers, Denise Guerra, Laura Bullard, Patrick Boyd, Adrian Lilly and Sean Ramis firm. That's me. Thanks to our guests Des Friedman from Goldsmiths, University of London. Graham Murdoch from the University of Loughborough, also in England and Matthew Ricketson from Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.
- [27:49]
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