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Rupert Murdoch
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Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KCSG (born 11 March, 1931 in Melbourne, Victoria), usually known as Rupert Murdoch, is an Australian-born 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.
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Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KCSG (born 11 March, 1931 in Melbourne, Victoria), usually known as Rupert Murdoch, is an Australian-born 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.
Beginnings
Early life and family
Murdoch's father was Sir Keith Arthur Murdoch, a powerful Australian newspaper proprietor of Scottish descent (Clan Murdoch is actually a sept of Clan MacDonald). His mother is Dame Elisabeth Murdoch (née Elisabeth Joy Greene), the daughter of a wealthy Irish family. Rupert attended Geelong Grammar School, one of Australia's most elite private schools, and was reading philosophy, politics and economics at Worcester College, University of Oxford, England, when his father died in 1952.
Before his death, Keith Murdoch had accumulated a great number of shares in newspaper companies, including some representing a controlling interest in News Limited, an Adelaide company publishing an afternoon newspaper called The News. He had appointed an experienced journalist named Rohan Rivett, a childhood friend and mentor of Rupert Murdoch, as editor of The News, with the hope that Rupert would enter a career in journalism and that Rivett would assist Rupert in learning the skills required. In his will, Keith Murdoch instructed his trustees that Rupert should begin his career at The News "if they consider him worthy of support". At that time of his father's death, Murdoch had written articles for Oxford student newspapers and had worked for a number of newspapers in a junior capacity. However, some thought he appeared to have little interest in journalism, but noted his enthusiasm for gambling and making money.
At the time of his death Keith Murdoch was heavily in debt, but possessed within a private family trust a considerable number of newspaper shares, some of which may have actually belonged to The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd. The trustees, in consultation with Keith's widow and Rupert's mother, Lady Murdoch, were forced to sell many of the shares and other property in order to pay death duties (inheritance taxes) and repay debt. Elisabeth was able to retain only the family home, Cruden Farm, plus the shares in News Limited and its subsidiaries, a Melbourne magazine publishing company named Southdown Press and The Barrier Miner, a regional newspaper at Broken Hill, New South Wales.
Start of business career
Rupert Murdoch returned from Oxford to become managing director of News Limited in 1953. Through his leadership, its staff, circulation and advertising revenue began to grow. He began to direct his attention to acquisition and expansion. He bought the Sunday Times in Perth, Western Australia and, using the tabloid techniques of his father's mentor Lord Northcliffe, made it a success.
In 1956, Murdoch began publishing Australia's first and most successful weekly television magazine, TV Week, at Southdown Press in Melbourne, which also published Australia's oldest women's magazine New Idea. With the Perth paper, the TV magazine and a re-energised New Idea all providing a steady and improving cash flow, he was able to secure finance for further expansion from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, a government-owned bank dedicated to supporting the development of Australian business.
A defining moment in Murdoch's life was the Stuart case in Adelaide: The News began a campaign to free Max Stuart, a young Aboriginal carnival worker, who had been convicted of the murder of a small girl on a beach near Ceduna, South Australia late in 1958. Stuart had been sentenced to death by hanging. The News was openly critical of the case against Stuart and investigated it extensively. The death penalty was eventually commuted to life imprisonment.
The campaign by The News sparked the ire of the Premier of South Australia, Sir Thomas Playford. He established a royal commission that was conducted by the state's Chief Justice, the same judge who had passed sentence on Stuart. The outcome confirmed Stuart's guilt and recommended that News Ltd (of which Murdoch was managing director) and its editor be charged with nine counts of seditious libel, a form of treason defined on the basis of medieval English law, and criminal libel. Eight of the charges were thrown out, but the jury could not agree on the ninth, which the prosecution subsequently withdrew. This experience gave Murdoch a taste of the overwhelming power of popularly elected politicians that would shape the future policies of all his newspapers. (In 2002, he financed a motion picture, Black and White, a fictionalised version of the Stuart story.) Shortly after this affair, Murdoch replaced Rivett as editor of The News.
Over the next few years, Murdoch established himself in Australia as a dynamic business operator, expanding his holdings by acquiring suburban and provincial newspapers in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and the Northern Territory, including the Sydney afternoon tabloid, The Daily Mirror, as well as a small Sydney-based recording company, Festival Records. His acquisition of the Daily Mirror allowed him to challenge two powerful rivals in Australia's biggest city and to outmanoeuvre his afternoon rival in a lengthy circulation war.
His first foray outside Australia involved the purchase of a controlling interest in the New Zealand daily The Dominion. In January 1964, while touring New Zealand with friends in a rented Morris Minor after sailing across the Tasman, Murdoch read of a takeover bid for the sleepy Wellington paper by the British-based Canadian newspaper magnate, Lord Thomson of Fleet. On the spur of the moment, he launched a counterbid. A four-way battle for control ensued in which the 32-year-old Murdoch, in a pointer of things to come, comprehensively outwitted his rivals. He took an active interest in the paper, at least until distracted by bigger undertakings, and remained the dominant shareholder in New Zealand's Independent Newspapers Limited - the nationwide media group that ultimately developed from his takeover
of The Dominion - until 2003.
Later in 1964, Murdoch launched The Australian, Australia's first national daily newspaper, which was based first in Canberra and later in Sydney. The Australian, a broadsheet, was intended to give Murdoch new respectability as a 'quality' newspaper publisher, as well as greater political influence. The paper had a rocky start that was marked by publishing difficulties and a rapid succession of editors who found it impossible to cope with Murdoch's persistent interference. Touted as a serious journal that was devoted to covering the affairs of the nation, the paper actually veered between tabloid sensationalism and intellectual mediocrity until Murdoch found a compliant editor who was able to tolerate his frequently unpredictable whims.
The departure in 1966 of the Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies saw a chaotic six years of politics after Menzies' chosen successor Harold Holt drowned and was replaced by John Gorton and William McMahon. In 1972, Murdoch acquired the Sydney morning tabloid The Daily Telegraph. In that year's election, Murdoch threw his growing power behind the Australian Labor Party under the leadership of Gough Whitlam and duly saw it elected. As the Whitlam government began to lose public support following its re-election in 1974, Murdoch turned against Whitlam and supported the Governor-General's dismissal of the Prime Minister.
During this period, Murdoch turned his attention to Britain. His business success in Australia and his fastidious policy of making prompt periodic repayments of his borrowings had placed him in good standing with the Commonwealth Bank, which provided him with finance for his biggest venture yet, the takeover of the family company that owned The News of the World, the Sunday newspaper with the biggest circulation in Britain.
Building the Empire
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 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. 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.
Moving into the United States
Murdoch made his first acquisition in the United States in 1973, when he purchased the San Antonio Express-News. Soon afterwards, he founded Star, a supermarket tabloid, and in 1976, he purchased the New York Post. On September 4, 1985, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen in order to satisfy the legal requirement that only US citizens were permitted to own American television stations. In 1987, in Australia he bought The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd, the company that his father had once managed. By 1991, his Australian-based News Corp. had worked up huge debts, forcing Murdoch to sell many of the American magazine interests he had acquired in the mid-1980s. Much of this debt came from his British-based satellite network Sky Television, which incurred massive losses in its early years of operation. As many of his other business interests had been, Sky was heavily subsidized by the profits generated by his other holdings, but eventually he was able to force rival satellite operator British Satellite Broadcasting to accept a merger on his terms in 1990. (The merged company, BSkyB, has dominated the British pay-TV market ever since.)
In 1995, Murdoch's Fox Network became the object of scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), when it was alleged that News Ltd.'s Australian base made Murdoch's ownership of Fox illegal. However, the FCC ruled in Murdoch's favor, stating that his ownership of Fox was in the best interests of the public. In the same year, Murdoch announced a deal with MCI Communications to develop a major news website, as well as founding a conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard. In the same year, News Corp. launched the Foxtel pay television network in Australia in partnership with Telstra.
In 1996, Murdoch decided to enter the cable news market with the Fox News Channel, a 24-hour cable news station. Following its launch, the heavily-funded Fox News consistently eroded CNN's market share and eventually proclaimed itself as "the most-watched cable news channel." Recent ratings studies released in the fourth quarter of 2004 showed that the network was responsible for nine of the top ten programs in the "Cable News" category.
In 1999, Murdoch significantly expanded his music holdings in Australia by acquiring the controlling share in a leading Australian independent label, Michael Gudinski's Mushroom Records; he merged that with Festival Records, and the result was Festival Mushroom Records (FMR). Both Festival and FMR were managed by Murdoch's son James Murdoch for several years.
Expansion in Asia
In 1993, Murdoch acquired Star TV, a Hong Kong company founded by Richard Li (son of Li Ka-shing) for $1 billion (Souchou, 2000:28), and subsequently set up offices for it throughout Asia. It is one of the biggest satellite TV networks in Asia. However, the deal did not work out as Murdoch had planned, because the Chinese government placed restrictions on it that prevented it from reaching most of China. It was around this time that Murdoch met his third wife Wendi Deng, who worked for Hong Kong's Star TV. Later, Murdoch partnered with Chinese media pioneer Liu Changle to start Phoenix Satellite Television in a deal through which Murdoch owned 45% of the company, Liu Changle 45%, and CCTV Hong Kong 10%. Phoenix has become one of the most popular and profitable TV stations among Chinese viewers around the world, particularly in China itself.
Recent activities
, 2009]]
In late 2003, Murdoch acquired a 34 per cent stake in Hughes Electronics, the operator of the largest American satellite TV system, DirecTV, from General Motors for $6 billion (USD).
In 2004, Murdoch announced that he was moving News Corp.'s headquarters from Adelaide, Australia to the United States. Choosing a US domicile was designed to ensure that American fund managers could purchase shares in the company, since many were deciding not to buy shares in non-US companies. Some analysts believed that News Corp's Australian domicile was leading to the company being undervalued compared with its peers.
On July 20, 2005, News Corp. bought Intermix Media Inc., which held MySpace.com and other popular social networking-themed websites for $580 million USD. On September 11, 2005, News Corp. announced that it would buy IGN Entertainment for $650 million (USD).
Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner are long-standing rivals. In 1996 Murdoch launched the Fox News Channel to compete against Turner's CNN.
The subject of Murdoch's alleged anti-competitive business practices resurfaced in September 2005. Australian media proprietor Kerry Stokes, owner of the Seven Network, instituted legal action against News Corporation and the PBL organization, headed by Kerry Packer. The suit stems from the 2002 collapse of Stokes' planned cable television channel C7 Sport, which would have been a direct competitor to the other major Australian cable provider, Foxtel, in which News and PBL have major stakes.
Stokes claims that News Corp. and PBL (along with several other media organizations) colluded to force C7 out of business by using undue influence to prevent C7 from gaining vital broadcast rights to major sporting events. In evidence given to the court on September 26, 2005, Stokes alleged that PBL executive James Packer came to his home in December 2000 and warned him that PBL and News Limited were "getting together" to prevent the AFL rights being granted to C7.
Recently, Murdoch has bought out the Turkish TV channel, TGRT, which had been previously confiscated by the Turkish Board of Banking Regulations, TMSF. Newspapers report that Murdoch has bought TGRT in a partnership with the Turkish recording mogul Ahmet Ertegün, and Murdoch is alleged to have acquired Turkish citizenship in order to overcome the current prohibition against capital sales to foreigners.
Political activities
Australia
Murdoch's disconcerting experience with Thomas Playford in South Australia (see above: "Start of Business Career") and his early political activities in Australia set the pattern he would repeat around the world.
Murdoch found a political ally in John McEwen, leader of the Australian Country Party, who was governing in coalition with the larger Menzies-Holt Liberal Party. From the very first issue of The Australian Murdoch began taking McEwen's side in every issue that divided the long-serving coalition partners. (The Australian, July 15, 1964, first edition, front page: “Strain in Cabinet, Liberal-CP row flares.”) It was an issue that threatened to split the coalition government and open the way for the stronger Australian Labor Party to dominate Australian politics. It was the beginning of a long campaign that served McEwen well.
McEwen repaid Murdoch's support later by helping him to buy his valuable rural property Cavan, and then arranged a clever subterfuge by which Murdoch was able to transfer a large sum of money from Australia to England in order to finalize the purchase of The News of the World without obtaining the required authority from the Australian Treasury.
After McEwen and Menzies retired, Murdoch transferred his support to the newly elected Leader of the Australian Labor Party, Gough Whitlam, who was elected in 1972 on a social platform that included universal free health care, free education for all Australians to tertiary level, recognition of the People's Republic of China, and public ownership of Australia's oil, gas and mineral resources.
Rupert Murdoch's flirtation with Whitlam turned out to be brief. He had already started his short-lived National Star newspaper in America, and was seeking to strengthen his political contacts there.
Renunciation of Australian citizenship
Asked about the Australian federal election, 2007 at News Corporation's annual general meeting in New York on October 19, 2007, its chairman Rupert Murdoch, who had relinquished his former Australian citizenship for citizenship of the USA, said, "I am not commenting on anything to do with Australian politics. I'm sorry. I always get into trouble when I do that." Pressed as to whether he believed Prime Minister John Howard should be re-elected, he said: "I have nothing further to say. I'm sorry. Read our editorials in the papers. It'll be the journalists who decide that -- the editors."
United States of America
Murdoch's publications have conservative leanings in comparison with other national newspapers. During the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, all 175 Murdoch-owned newspapers worldwide editorialized in favor of the war. Murdoch also served on the board of directors of the libertarian Cato Institute. News Corp.-owned Fox News is often criticized for its alleged Republican and/or conservative bias, though it denies these allegations.
On May 8, 2006, the Financial Times reported that Murdoch would be hosting a fundraiser for Senator Hillary Clinton's (D-New York) Senate reelection campaign. Murdoch's New York Post newspaper had opposed Clinton's Senate run in 2000.
In May 2007, Murdoch made a $5 billion offer to purchase Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal. At the time, the Bancroft family, which controlled 64% of the shares, firmly declined the offer, opposing Murdoch's much-used strategy of slashing employee numbers and "gutting" existing systems. Later, the Bancroft family confirmed a willingness to consider a sale -- besides Murdoch, the Associated Press reported that supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle and Internet entrepreneur Brad Greenspan were among the interested parties. On August 1, 2007, the BBC's "News and World Report" and NPR's Marketplace radio programs reported that Murdoch had acquired Dow Jones; this news was received with mixed reactions.
In a 2008 interview with Walt Mossberg, Murdoch was asked whether he had "anything to do with the New York Post's endorsement of Barack Obama." Without hesitating, Murdoch replied, "Yeah. He is a rock star. It's fantastic. I love what he is saying about education. I don't think he will win Florida... but he will win in Ohio and the election. I am anxious to meet him. I want to see if he will walk the walk."
United Kingdom
In Britain, Murdoch formed a close alliance with Margaret Thatcher, and The Sun credited itself with helping John Major to win an unexpected election victory in the 1992 general election. However, in the general elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005, Murdoch's papers were either neutral or supported Labour under Tony Blair. This has led some critics to argue that Murdoch simply supports the incumbent parties (or those who seem most likely to win an upcoming election) in the hope of influencing government decisions that may affect his businesses. The Labour Party under Blair had moved significantly to the Right on many economic issues prior to 1997. Murdoch identifies himself as a libertarian.
In a speech delivered in New York, Rupert Murdoch said that the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair described the BBC coverage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster as being full of hatred of America. Murdoch is a strong critic of the BBC, which he believes has a left-wing bias and is the major UK competitor to his cable network Sky.
In 1998, Rupert Murdoch failed in his attempt to buy the football powerhouse Manchester United FC with an offer of £625 million. It was the largest amount anyone had yet offered for a sports club. It was rejected by the United Kingdom's Competition Commission, which stated that the acquisition would have "hurt competition in the broadcast industry and the quality of British football".
On June 28, 2006 the BBC reported that Murdoch and News Corporation were flirting with the idea of backing Conservative leader David Cameron at the next General Election. However, in a later interview in July 2006, when he was asked what he thought of the Conservative leader, Murdoch replied "Not much".
In 2006, the UK’s Independent newspaper reported that Murdoch would offer Tony Blair a senior role in his global media company News Corp. when the UK prime minister stood down from office.
He is also accused by former Solidarity MSP Tommy Sheridan of having a personal vendetta against him and of conspiring with MI5 to produce a video of him confessing to having affairs -- allegations over which Sheridan had previously sued News International and won. On being arrested for perjury following the case, Sheridan claimed that the charges were "orchestrated and influenced by the powerful reach of the Murdoch empire".
Private Meetings with Politicians
Murdoch has a history of hosting private meetings with influential politicians. Both parties naturally dismiss such meetings as politically insignificant; social events, informal dinners or friendly drinks. It has however been argued that such meetings are significant because of Murdoch's exceptional influence as a media oligarch, as well as his consistent interest in and involvement with politics issues.
David Cameron
In August 2008 David Cameron accepted free flights to hold private talks and attend private parties with Murdoch on his yacht, the Rosehearty. Cameron has declared in the Commons register of interests he accepted a private plane provided by Murdoch's son-in-law, public relations guru Matthew Freud; Cameron has not revealed his talks with Mr Murdoch. The gift of travel in Freud's Gulfstream IV private jet was valued at around £30,000. Others guests attending the "social events" included the then EU trade commissioner Lord Mandelson, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and co-chairman of NBC Universal Ben Silverman. The Conservatives are not disclosing what was discussed.
Kevin Rudd
April 21 2007, Australian prime minister in waiting Kevin Rudd dined with Rupert Murdoch in New York, following a one-hour private meeting at Murdoch's News Corporation Building. The two men refused to say what they had discussed. Mr Murdoch would say only that they had discussed "a lot of things". Rudd would say only: "It was just a good chat about things. Life, the world, politics."
Barack Obama
Early Summer 2008; a "tentative truce" was brokered during a secret meeting between Barack Obama, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes (President of the Fox News Channel) at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. Obama had initially resisted Murdoch's propositions, despite senior News Corp executives having recruited the Kennedys to act as go-betweens. Obama resented Fox News's portrayal of him "as suspicious, foreign, fearsome - just short of a terrorist," while Ailes said "it might not have been this way if Obama had more willingly come on the air instead of so often giving Fox the back of his hand." A "tentative truce" was agreed upon; Obama would be portrayed more fairly, while Obama would be more willing to appear on Fox.
Personal life
Marriages
Murdoch has been married three times. In 1956 he married Patricia Booker, a former shop assistant and air hostess from Melbourne with whom he had his first child, a daughter Prudence Murdoch, who was born in 1958. They were divorced in 1967, the same year that he married Anna Torv, an Estonian-born cadet journalist working for his Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph. Torv's niece, also called Anna Torv, is now a television and voice actor.
Torv and Murdoch had three children: Elisabeth Murdoch (born in Sydney, Australia on August 22, 1968), Lachlan Murdoch (born in London, UK on September 8, 1971), and James Murdoch, (born in Wimbledon, UK on December 13, 1972). Murdoch's companies have published two novels by his then wife: Family Business (1988) and Coming to Terms (1991); both are widely regarded as vanity publications. Anna and Rupert divorced acrimoniously in June, 1999.
Anna Murdoch received a settlement of US$ 1.2 billion in assets. Seventeen days after the divorce, on June 25, 1999, Murdoch, then aged 68, married Chinese-born Deng Wendi (Wendi Deng in Western style). She was 30, a recent Yale School of Management graduate, and a newly appointed vice-president of STAR TV. In October 1999 Anna Murdoch also remarried, to William Mann.
Rupert Murdoch has two children with Deng: Grace (born in New York November 19, 2001) and Chloe (born in New York July 17, 2003).
Children
Murdoch's eldest son Lachlan, formerly the deputy chief operating officer at the News Corporation and the publisher of the New York Post, was Murdoch's heir apparent before resigning from his executive posts at the global media company at the end of July 2005. Lachlan's departure left James, chief executive of the satellite television service British Sky Broadcasting since November 2003, as the only Murdoch son still directly involved with the company's operations, though Lachlan has agreed to remain on the News Corporation's board.
After graduating from Vassar College and marrying classmate Elkin Kwesi Pianim (the son of Ghanaian financial and political mogul Kwame Pianim) in 1993, Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth, along with her husband, purchased a pair of NBC-affiliate television stations KSBW and KSBY in California with a $35 million loan provided by her father. By quickly re-organizing and re-selling them at a $12 million profit, in 1995 Elisabeth emerged as an unexpected rival to her brothers for the eventual leadership of the publishing dynasty's empire. But after quarrelling publicly with her assigned mentor Sam Chisholm at BSkyB, she struck out on her own as a television and film producer in London, where she has enjoyed independent success in conjunction with her second husband, Matthew Freud.
It is not known whether Murdoch will remain as News Corp's CEO indefinitely. For a while the American cable television entrepreneur John Malone was the second-largest voting shareholder in News Corporation after Murdoch himself, potentially undermining the family's control. In 2007, the company announced that it would sell certain assets and give cash to Malone's company in exchange for its stock. In 2007 Murdoch issued his older children with equal voting stock, perhaps to test their individual levels of interest and ability to run the company according to the standards he has set.
Portrayal on television and film
Rupert Murdoch has been portrayed by Barry Humphries in the 1991 mini-series Selling Hitler, Hugh Laurie in a parody of It's a Wonderful Life in the television show A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Ben Mendelsohn in Black and White, Paul Elder in The Late Shift and by himself on The Simpsons. Kevin Kline's character Rod McCain in Fierce Creatures is a harsh, thinly-disguised parody of Murdoch; so too is the media tycoon character Elliot Carver (portrayed by Jonathan Pryce) in the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies. Mr. Murdoch is also frequently parodied on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann. A very crude portrayal by the UK's satirical puppet show Spitting Image shows Mr Murdoch as a very rough and vulgar Australian who frequently lifts a buttock cheek in the air to fart whilst in company.
Tax evasion
In 1999, The Economist reported that Newscorp Investments had made £1.4 billion ($2.1 billion) in profits over the previous 11 years but had paid no net corporation tax. It also reported that after an examination of the available accounts, Newscorp could normally have been expected to pay corporate tax of approximately $350 million. The article explained that in practice the corporation's complex structure, international scope and use of offshore tax havens allowed News Corporation to pay minimal taxes.
See also
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