Front Burner - How Rupert Murdoch changed the world
Episode Date: September 26, 2023How did Rupert Murdoch build one of the most successful and politically influential media empires in the world? David Folkenflik, media correspondent for NPR News, tells the story of Murdoch's aston...ishing rise, the growth of Fox News, how world leaders flew around the globe in hopes of his support, and — from sexual harassment to phone hacking — how his companies got embroiled in scandal.
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Hi, I'm Tamara Kandaker.
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?
Well, there's only one honest answer to that, of course, and that's yes.
Of course one enjoys the feeling of power.
This is Rupert Murdoch, being interviewed by the Australian public broadcaster in 1967.
In the decades since, he's built one of the world's most influential media empires, his reach spanning from Australia to the UK to the US, with papers like the Times of London and The Sun,
the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post,
and on TV, Sky News Australia, and of course, Fox News,
all making him one of the most powerful people on earth.
For decades, his companies have shifted elections
and shaped national political conversations,
a power Murdoch understood early on.
The newspaper can create great controversies, stir up arguments within the community, discussion,
can throw light on injustices, just as it can do the opposite, can hide things and be
a great power for evil.
Now at 92 years old, he's stepping aside as chair of Fox Corporation and News Corp,
leaving his son Lachlan in control of both.
For more on what drove Rupert Murdoch's long career, I'm joined by David Fulkenflik.
He's a media correspondent for NPR News.
David Fulkenflik. He's a media correspondent for NPR News.
Hi, David. Thanks so much for doing this.
Hey, pleasure.
So I want to start at the very beginning of Rupert Murdoch's media empire. When he's just 21 years old and he's studying at Oxford in England, he gets control of his first newspaper. So tell
me about that. How does that happen? Well, he's a student. He's been a bit of a rabble rouser,
a bit of a leftist of all things, and been learning a bit about newspapering. His father
had been concerned about whether or not he'd be up to it as a career, as a calling, a profession.
up to it as a career, as a calling, a profession.
And his father dies.
And he gets a single newspaper in a good-sized city,
but sort of a bit of a backwater of Adelaide on the southern coast of Australia.
And so Murdoch walks in feeling
that his father has been screwed over.
He's of the belief that his father's been cheated
of being able to have an ownership stake
in several other newspapers in more prominent Australian cities.
And this is really a notion that is a theme for him throughout the rest of his life.
The idea that there are elites against him.
Now, again, this is a guy who went to Oxford.
His father was knighted for service to the Commonwealth.
His father was one of the most prominent political journalists in Australia.
And Murdoch took this newspaper and had a sense of, I'm going to make it interesting. I'm going
to make it lively. I'm going to be deeply invested in its workings and surprised everyone. He was a
good newspaper man. He was smart about it. He made it appeal to more working class sensibilities.
He made it livelier and crisper and a little more salacious.
He made money and started to expand.
My role has certainly been in building this company has been to create competition everywhere.
We tended to take the sick newspapers, the ones that weren't worth much, the people felt were about to fold up.
And by energy and drive and getting people around us who were good, we managed in most cases to turn the corner.
And this is how we've built a fairly large company.
So from the very beginning, he believes that the elites are against him and he's taking on the world and he's driven by that idea.
He starts buying up newspapers across Australia and then he eventually makes his way over into Europe. Right.
Yeah. I mean, he used the money that he made then to jump over back to Britain, where some of his father's mentors and peers had been these press barons on Fleet Street.
And he acquires the news of the world, which was a fading tabloid that had been working class.
It's in London that Rupert
Murdoch's power is having most impact. His group now holds 43% interest in the news of the world,
the British Sunday newspaper with the biggest circulation. He made a bunch of promises to the
ownership and he took it in the direction he wanted. The newspaper is editorially brighter,
but still contains a strong emphasis on sex and titillation.
Which was much more scandal driven, much more antagonistic towards elites, you know, sort of right of center populist.
And he did the same thing with The Sun, which had been a leftist populist tabloid.
And he took it more conservative over time and a much rougher approach.
I'm not ashamed of any of my newspapers at all.
And I'm rather sick of snobs who tell us that they're bad papers,
snobs who only read papers that no one else wants.
I doubt if they read many papers at all.
And whereas on most issues, they consider themselves liberals or radicals or something.
They think they ought to be imposing their taste on everybody else in the community.
And it was very successful.
These became sort of these dual economic engines driving his fortunes in the UK and then allowing him to propel back across an ocean once more to the United States and start picking up properties there. And this ultra aggressive approach that you mentioned where he kind of tells these owners what he thinks they need to hear to green light the deal.
That's also how he snaps up and starts some of the American properties that a lot of us
are familiar with.
Yeah, this was a pattern for him.
There are two things that probably listeners should know.
He had sort of this high-low strategy where he wanted these populist properties that would make
him money and give him mass appeal. But he also wanted certain kinds of elite outlets like the
Australian. He bought the Times of London and the Sunday Times in the early 1980s to be able to
reach elites and have a place at the table with
the bankers, the financiers, the lawyers, the lawmakers, people who really made British
society's rules and then operated it. He wanted the same in the United States. He ultimately gets
the Wall Street Journal in 2007. And yes, you're totally right. By telling owners what they needed
to hear, often owners in financial distress or weren't who weren't confident that they could continue to operate these properties in ways that wouldn't drain their own fortunes.
He told them what they needed to hear. You hear it again and again with the news of the world, with the New York Post, which had been a liberal outfit.
Dorothy Schiff sold it, convinced that Rupert Murdoch would maintain basically the philosophical outlook that it animated during her proprietorship. Totally not the case.
The Times of London, The Wall Street Journal similarly made promises, broke promises,
didn't matter. He was offering real money to acquire these things. And he felt once he had them, they were his.
You talked a bit about the way that he goes about buying up these properties and the way that he makes them more provocative and scandalous.
But is there ideology that's driving him or a personal philosophy in the way that he overhauls
the content of these papers and all the outlets that he buys up?
You know, it's interesting.
He was early on perhaps more socially progressive.
For example, The Australian, which is now seen as a pretty reactionary newspaper capable of very good
journalism, nonetheless started out doing a lot of enterprising reporting about the
fates of and the circumstances of Aboriginals in Australian society and really highlighting
some of the terrible injustices being rendered to them by the Australian nation and its people.
You also expect your papers to express an opinion, though, do you?
The papers themselves, and of course in the feature pages, we encourage it.
The Australian particularly is an open paper,
although itself has had very radical opinions,
in which I've played a large part.
Similarly, there were times at which his newspapers
did some crusading reporting and journalism that I think would be held from all sectors.
But I think Murdoch fundamentally is quite conservative.
And yet I think he's a very pragmatic entrepreneur.
So he wielded his newspapers in such a way that I think it served the politicians and policies ultimately that he wanted.
But he also wanted to be allied with popular politicians and policies as a way of gaining influence to benefit his businesses.
It was kind of a circular reinforcing logic.
But yes, if you read The Sun, if you read the news, the world, if you read the New York Post, if you watched Fox News,
and we can talk more about Fox in a moment, you know, there were these consistent themes,
fears of the others, that is of immigrants coming in to take away jobs, to change the nature of
British or American or Australian society. There would be concerns about whether there was a racial
backlash against whites, concerns about the changing roles of men and women in American society.
Was this somehow emasculating or or feminizing, you know, American British society?
Yeah. You mentioned Fox News. A lot of the stuff is pre Fox News.
So how does that come about and what does he want to do with with this network?
that come about? And what does he want to do with this network? Well, you know, Murdoch had already in the United States in the late 80s kicked off a fourth television network, which government
regulators and other television professionals said basically couldn't be done. That just wasn't
going to be viable. And he succeeds there. When we can firmly announce the starting of a Fox News
channel. It was a rather rash idea. I said,
let's try it. And everybody said, no, CNN has been there for years. There's no room for more
than one news channel. And we tried it and we put a different viewpoint, if you like.
And he has for a long time wanted to enter television news in a serious major way.
And his argument.
Embraced by his partner, Roger Ailes, who becomes the CEO and then chairman of Fox News, is that there is a significant swath of the American public, as he felt in Britain and Australia, that weren't being served by the likes of.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, or the BBC,
and that their sensibilities were being dismissed,
ignored, or mocked,
and that this would be a place where,
just by the nature of the stories chosen,
even if the journalism is just as rigorous,
that it will provide a different outlook and sensibility.
It's really given comfort and voice to the big conservative, the normal American conservative,
working class people, particularly people in the countryside. They love it.
And, you know, that's a pretty appealing pitch. You know, in America, we think
as largely I understand people do in Canada, you know, let, let a thousand flowers bloom,
you know, there should be a multiplicity of voices speaking. And that sounds appealing.
And that is kind of how they started. They took the news less seriously. Um, they promoted,
you know, a lot of it was views casting rather than newscasting because they were heavily emphasizing the opinion side of the ledger.
And there was one other element, which is that tabloid blood really flowed through the veins of Fox News.
And so it was kind of combative.
It liked a good fracas and fight. so as murdoch acquires more and more properties his political influence grows and and politicians
start to see him as kind of a kingmaker because of his willingness to help them. And his outlets often explicitly
back politicians and elections work in tandem with them to attack the competition. Talk about
some of the people who have courted him for his support. Well, in the United States, people have
been courting Murdoch for decades. Rudy Giuliani, who has been banned from the airwaves at Fox News.
Nonetheless, back in the day, when he was running for mayor of New York in 89 and later in 1993,
he was seeking the support of the New York Post. Fox News changed the equation greatly because
it ended up becoming, in short order, particularly after 9-11,
one of the places that served as a clearinghouse for the Republican Party.
What happened is that candidates would essentially audition for endorsements from other public
officials, but also for support from major donors and contributors by appearing on Fox News.
And Roger Ailes and
Rupert Murdoch could determine who would get airtime to audition and how much they'd get
by dint of who they allowed on their shows. So he's a guy that people really want to see.
And it's not just in this country. Tony Blair, when he wanted to run for prime minister in the
United Kingdom, he flew 10,000 miles to an island off the coast of Australia to address the corporate board of News Corp for Murdoch as a way of showing his willingness to work with him, something the Labour Party had not done previously.
You had extracted really as much as you could from Mr. Blair in terms of policy promises.
He'd gone a considerable distance in your direction.
You assessed he'd gone as far as he was ever going to go, so you endorsed him. That's right, isn't it?
Yeah, I think so. David Cameron flew on Murdoch's then son-in-law's private jet when he wanted to run against the Labour Party on the conservative side to meet with Murdoch on a yacht off a Greek island.
Mr. Cameron might have thought stopping Santorini would impress me.
I don't really remember the meeting, but...
Australian candidates and prime ministers come to Murdoch's corporate headquarters in New York,
again, traveling thousands of miles.
Murdoch's aides call it kissing the ring,
an act of sensually bending a knee to the power of this global media magnate.
I think that's part of the democratic process.
media magnate. I think that's part of the democratic process. They, all politicians of all sides, like to have their views known by the editors of newspapers or publishers,
hoping that they will be put across, hoping that they will succeed in impressing people.
That's the game.
You mentioned Tony Blair and David Cameron.
There was also Margaret Thatcher that had a relationship with Rupert Murdoch.
And he and his empire also benefited from these relationships
that he formed with politicians, right?
Like there was the story of Wapping, for example,
which I was hoping you could briefly recap for us.
Sure, in the 1980s,
there were these strong regulatory
and other barriers to Murdoch taking over
the Times of London and the Sunday Times.
People were askance about him
as a guy who'd come from Australia.
He was a tabloid owner.
People very worried about these,
you know, historic titles going to Murdoch.
And although it was denied for decades, it turns out that that Prime Minister Thatcher
and one of her top aides met with Murdoch to kind of hammer out details of how he could
take them over with a pledge that he'd be supporting her.
That is, it was a political deal.
And later on, you know, he basically broke these unions that operated the press shops
on what's called Fleet Street, what was then the sort of main center for the newspapers in London.
And Margaret Thatcher was essentially his partner in that all the way through. Similarly, in this
country, if you look during the Trump years, Murdoch did throw his support to Trump.
And when Trump surprising, you know, not just Trump, but Murdoch and everybody else won, Murdoch suddenly had an entree in the White House like the ones he had enjoyed in 10 Downing Street, but never really experienced here in the United States.
It's my distinct honor to introduce the commander in chief and the President of the United States, my friend Donald J. Trump.
And so you can see ways in which Murdoch is able to leverage his political alliances into
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Beyond the way that he was able to leverage these relationships for his own empire,
what did he do with this tremendous amount of power and political influence? Beyond backing
certain politicians, what are some notable policies the Murdoch empire had an influence on
around the world? Well, I think it's ironic that Murdoch himself, an immigrant to the United
States, became a naturalized citizen so that he
could own television properties here, for example, has pushed out some of the strongest anti-immigrant
rhetoric in the major media outlets that we've seen in this country, frequently in the New York
Post, frequently in Fox News, and on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, although,
to be fair, those pages were quite conservative before he ever arrived. Similarly, you've seen The New York Post and Fox News and The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard, which
a magazine now defunct that he used to own, really pushed hard for the idea that America would lead
an invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a
demonstration of might and as a warning against others in the world that would intend to threaten
us. And he deployed his outlets in Australia and the United Kingdom as well to pressure
the conservative prime minister in Australia, John Howard, and the center-left prime minister
in the United Kingdom of the Labor Party tony blair to support bush in
this have you shaped that agenda at all in terms of perceptions of the war in terms of how the war
is viewed no i didn't think so i mean we tried tried in what way? Well, we basically supported our papers and I would say supported the Bush policy in the Middle East.
You know, Murdoch, Murdoch can't dictate who becomes president or prime minister.
Murdoch can't determine on his own what will happen.
determine on his own what will happen. And I think his influence is at times overstated, but he provides ballast and support and oxygen and energy, and he allows people the opportunity to
make the case for things that, you know, straight journalism might otherwise tend to undermine.
Right. But there are a number of times when he runs into trouble with the provocative
But there are a number of times when he runs into trouble with the provocative tabloid style approach of some of his outlets. There are a bunch of scandals that happen throughout his tenure.
And briefly, which are the ones that stick out to you before 2020, which we'll talk about in a second?
Look, there are things that are scandalous in their own right, like how his outlets treat climate change,
own right, like how his outlets treat climate change, which I think is really one of the signal issues of our time and one of the most signal challenges to journalism of our era.
But if you think about the nature of Murdoch's outfits, you know, it takes on the nature of
the guy himself. He likes to punch hard and it means that he wants to go for a good story and
he's got a good nose for that. But, you know, if you look at what happened when there was a deadly stadium collapse and stampede outside Liverpool in 1989, they based coverage on anonymous police sources to say that this was basically the fault of British soccer fans who are hooligans, who are trampling each other and being violent
towards each other.
And it turned out that most of the blame accrued to very poor crowd management and disaster
response by police themselves.
And Murdoch's tabloid, The Sun, published this essentially slander of the fans who were
at this site.
Ninety seven people ultimately died from the event.
And they published it on the headline, these these slanders under the headline the truth and uh it stood for years
and you had boycotts for decades in liverpool of the sun as a result by many people there and it
took years for the murdochs to apologize for it similarly I'd say the phone hacking scandal is just one that shocks the
conscience. It turned out that the people working on behalf of Murdoch's tabloids had
hacked into hundreds of people's cell phones, cell phone messages, emails, and the like.
It turned out they were doing this towards British veterans who'd been killed in the wars,
towards crime victims. It turned out one was
a 13-year-old girl who had been abducted and killed. And once that became revealed publicly,
thanks to The Guardian, people realized that if the tabloids could do that to her,
they would do it to anyone. And then if you get, you know, as Fox News progressed,
it became increasingly extreme.
There were the ways in which they played host to an amplified racist lies about Barack Obama claiming he hadn't been born in this country and making him seem as alien and as sinister a figure as possible based on false claims. There's also the major scandal at Fox News when Roger Ailes,
the chairman, and later Bill O'Reilly were accused of sexual harassment.
Yeah, and this is a fascinating moment.
It turned out that Ailes had engineered Fox, which was not only offering a very,
you know, a throwback image of what America should be, a very conventional notion of,
well, men should be the strong ones, women should be supporting them and always attractive,
very conventional notion of, well, men should be the strong ones. Women should be supporting them and always attractive and presenting, you know, women on the air in not only choosing them by
their looks, but presenting them in very form fitting outfits. I revealed that there was this
thing called the leg cam that operated where in the show called the five, which was the panel
discussion group of five people, they always, they picked the woman who they felt was the most
physically appealing. This was their judgment and their words for it.
And they would put her on the far left side of the set. And the camera would swoop in at the,
you know, after ad breaks in the beginning of the show and sort of linger and go the full contour
of her legs so that they could show it off. And it was just one of many evocations of the fact that Roger Ailes
wanted this to be attractive and appealing to basically people like him, older men. But it
turned out he'd been casting these roles with women that he very frequently pressured to have
sex with him. And so he turned this into an almost assembly line factory of sexual harassment.
Dozens of women came forward.
I should say that Ailes, who died in 2017,
the year after being fired, denied all of these claims.
But so many women came forward.
Gretchen Carlson, who had been one of his star hosts,
taped him on her iPhone, making essentially demands of her. In Carlson's complaint, she says Ailes then began sexually harassing her, making comments
in one-on-one meetings like,
"...I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago," adding that
sometimes problems are easier to solve that way.
She was paid $20 million by Fox, and Fox had to come to terms with the fact that women
came forward not just with allegations against Roger Ailes, but other stars, including Bill O'Reilly, at that time their top primetime star, and other figures inside the network.
So people might not remember this because Fox News has become so synonymous with Trump, but Murdoch and Fox News didn't immediately embrace him.
Murdoch actually didn't take him seriously at first. He did eventually when it became clear how popular Trump was and how it could be a mutually beneficial relationship.
And that's when you see Fox News change their primetime lineup and make it more pro-Trump.
Sean Hannity is speaking at a Trump rally.
When does that backfire for Fox News?
The first primary debate in 2015 was in August of that year for the Republican Party.
It was run by Fox.
And Trump didn't like the questions being
asked of him, of one of their then hosts, Megyn Kelly. You've called women you don't like fat
pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals. Your Twitter account. Only Rosie O'Donnell.
And so he goes after her. He made it about him and Fox.
He made Fox the target of his anger.
And then Fox spent months trying to make it up to him because they realized that their audience was behind him.
They end up being very supportive and letting, you know, essentially turning over vast swaths of time to him speaking, to his speeches, to people essentially championing
his candidacy. It really was them catching up to their audience. And I think you saw that
throughout the Trump presidency was there were times where it would be perceived that he had
gone too far. And yet each time the audience made clear to Fox that they were on Trump's side.
And so Fox had to kind of whisk right back into support, snap back into action.
I think that was most acute, of course, after the 2020 elections itself,
leading up to the January 6th insurrection.
Fox News played a central role in the controversy following the election
and Donald Trump's unproven claims that the election was rigged. This wound up as a very expensive lawsuit between Dominion, which made voting
machines, and Fox. So tell me about that. So on election night, Fox is the first
television network to call the key swing state of Arizona for Joe Biden.
The Fox News decision desk is of Arizona for Joe Biden. The Fox News decision desk is calling
Arizona for Joe Biden. And while that holds no official consequence, it signaled that according
to the people at Fox, that it was going to be almost impossible for Trump to run the table and
to win reelection in 2020. Well, Trump attacked Fox. Trump tried to get Fox to retreat from it. Murdoch,
to his credit, said, you know, we're not going to back down just because somebody's ordering us to.
And so in the days and weeks after, you have Fox hosts bending over backwards,
twisting themselves like pretzels to try to accommodate a world in which fraud has occurred
on a mass level involving multiple states and jurisdictions and officials from both parties
to try to cheat Donald Trump of the race. And Fox ends up giving extraordinary amount of airtime to
this claim that Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machine and election tech company, is involved in intentionally trying to defraud and
cheat Donald Trump of the election. Again, completely baseless claim. But you saw four
of their hosts, as Rupert Murdoch himself later acknowledged under oath, not only gave people the
chance to offer these thoughts, but embraced them to varying degrees. And that
includes Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro, and Maria Bartiromo. But others did as
well. You know, earlier this year, the Murdoch signed off on paying just shy of $800 million
to Dominion to settle its defamation case. So, you know, these things have consequences.
Okay, so as Rupert Murdoch has gotten older, he's 92 now, and he's gone through various health scares like falling and severely injuring himself on his son's yacht. The question
of who would replace him has been the subject of endless fascination. Obviously, this race
inspired the HBO show Succession, which is about a media mogul and his kids battling over
control of the family empire. What do we know about how the real Murdoch raised his kids in preparation for potentially taking over his empire?
Murdoch wanted to be succeeded by one of his sons.
He has four daughters, but, you know, like his father, he looks to the son to be a successor.
He really pitted his boys against each other.
each other. Lachlan and James, he initially wanted Lachlan when Lachlan in the early 2000s felt that Rupert wasn't preventing some of his top lieutenants from sabotaging him. He went back
to Australia. James Murdoch came to the fore, actually was seen as a pretty good executive,
got caught up in the hacking scandal. He had signed off on a payment. So he had some knowledge
of it, although he said he didn't really understand the details in the moment.
And then Lachlan ultimately was prevailed to come back, but he pitted them against each other,
I think, rather than simply preparing them. He really is kind of a throw them in the water and
see if they can swim kind of guy. Lachlan, he's clearly trying to set up as his successor,
as the inheritor of the legacy, but also of the corporate reign.
So he's stepping back now in his 92nd year and saying, you know, Lachlan's going to be running the show, but I'll still be around, which isn't really that different from where we are right now anyway.
But it presupposes that once he dies or is incapacitated, that Lachlan will be allowed to sort of continue doing it.
It's not at all clear that the other three Murdoch children who will inherit the control of the Murdoch family trust once Rupert Murdoch himself is no longer around to operate it, that they will support him.
You know, Lachlan has this as long as his dad's around and doesn't change his mind.
He has set Lachlan up,
but he's also created this competitive
and distrustful atmosphere,
which means that Lachlan doesn't have the automatic
or even much more than modest support of his siblings
who are the people he needs to rely on
if he wants to continue.
Yeah, so this is not a lock
and there could still be plenty of drama ahead. Okay. Thank
you so much, David. I really appreciate it. You bet. All right. That's all for today. I'm Tamara
Kendacker. Thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you tomorrow. Thank you.