Today, Explained - The making of the Fox News empire

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

How a nepo baby from Australia changed political discourse and remade the world. We revisit the rise of Rupert Murdoch and his media empire. This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen with help from Denise Guerra, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Adriene Lilly, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Rupert Murdoch speaking at a Fox News podium. Photo by Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In just about a week, Rupert Murdoch is going to launch a new publication, the California Post. In digital and print, no less, it's been described as a New York Post for the left coast. If Mr. Murdoch seems unbothered by reports of the death of media, perhaps that's for a reason. Murdoch media isn't dying. Former Fox News personalities are currently running the Departments of Defense and Transportation. One is the borders are. One is the director of national intelligence. And Donald Trump, you may recall, is in the White House. Rupert Murdoch, knows what he's doing. 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. He has had this fascinating, but for many people, poisonous impact on political discourse, on politics more generally. Today, on Today, I'm Today Explained a rerun of a show we ran last fall.

My co-o, Sean Ramos firm, on how Rupert Murdoch remade the world. Do you remember? Do you like the feeling of power? you have as a newspaper proprietor, being able to sort of formulate policies for a lot of number of newspapers in every state of Australia. Well, there's only one on it down to that, of course, and that's yes. I don't know. Of course one enjoys the feeling of power. I think Rupert is a very good and tough businessman.

We've only seen one side of Mr Murdoch at the present moment. 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. like kickers. Is Rupert Murdoch a nepo baby? Murdoch is absolutely a nepo baby. If the term nepo baby was in existence in 1931, yes, he is a nepo baby.

My name is Des Friedman and I am a professor of media and communications at Goldsmith's University of London. My name is Matthew Rickettson and I'm a professor of communication at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. One of our former Prime Minister's, 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. His father, Keith, really pioneered tabloid journalism in Australia. My name is Graham Murdoch. No relation. And I'm an emeritus professor. at the University of Loughborough in the UK, Keith Murdoch realised that newspapers had the power to bring down politicians.

So Rupert inherited not just newspapers, but actually a whole kind of philosophy, if he like, of what newspapers could do and how they operate it. 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. 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? What surprisingly, the politician decided he'd rather have the favourable 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. The main ambition was to make his father proud and to do better than his father,

to internationalise the father's operation. and he was willing to throw everything at it to get there. He moves into England in the late 1960s. 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. 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. Was buying into the news of the world your own idea or was it suggested from someone else? It was entirely my own idea. 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 sun. Which at that point is an ailing newspaper, and he turbocharges that. Murdoch's plans for the sun are still uncertain. It seems that it'll be a spicier version of the Daily Mirror.

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 paper, of course not. He immediately converted it into a tabloid, became famous for having these semi-nude models. Topless women on page three. Tabloid newspapers have been sensational for a long time, and for him that is the key message.

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. 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. 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 grossest 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 traveller. They share a kind of neoliberal sort of philosophy of free markets and antagonism to public ownership. I mean, Murdoch's papers were very much in support of that. Thatcher agenda. He already owns two of the most popular newspapers, and he wants to buy more. An opportunity comes up to buy the Times and the Sunday Times. And under the law at the time,

there's a requirement that this matter is referred off to the Monoplies and Mergers Commission. Prime Minister, Margaret Ford, Thatcher, she ensures that that doesn't happen so that he is able to buy the Times and the Sunday time. The classic kind of paper of record in the UK, because he wanted to have that entree into the elite. He wants the prestige, he wants the power, and he wants the audiences. 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 news. paper, 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 levels, if you like, yeah. 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? Well, I certainly didn't buy them to change them,

and I certainly have the right to insist on excellence. It was alleged that in the Australian election, when Fraser beat Whitlam, your papers actually distorted the news in favor of your candidate. In both occasions, you had industrial trouble. 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.

The Falkland Island, and their dependencies remain British territory. When Margaret Thatcher and her government launched the war in the falcons, Murdoch's newspapers give a lot of editorial support for that. Gotcha! Our lads sing gumbo and hole cruiser! Headline, the Sun. Maggie sends in the troops, headline the Sun. The paper that supports our boys.

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 to other people, the Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch. 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 new. 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. 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 newspapers were declining in revenues and readership. So that kind of forced them to be even more militant in looking for sensation.

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. It's discovered that that. They've hacked the phone of this dead teenage girl, Millie Dowler. The face of Rupert Murdoch, after he apologized, privately and publicly, to the family of Millie Dowler. I was appalled to find out what had happened. And I apologize, and I have nothing to this.

People are revolted. It creates a huge public reaction. In the view of the majority of committee members, Rupert Murdoch is not fit to run an international company like B-Sky-B. You know, the Murdox 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. He closed the news of the world instantly.

It folded overnight. And then, of course, an official government commission of inquiry. 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 to say, one sentence.

This is the most humble day in my life. 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. Rupert, he's unduly. 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.

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 the globe. Rupert Murdoch in America when today explained returns. Hey, it's Olivia from Ollie. Is it just me? Or are these wellness trends getting ridiculous? Protein tracking, biohacking. It's too much. Start small with Ollie's daily multivitamin. Just two

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It's not in New York. It's in San Antonio, Texas, of all places. Well, I mean, yeah, but then it very quickly moved to New York. Start spreading the new. So he bought the New York Post in... Midnight in Sony's. To establish a base. 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. Bones run hot after big debate.

Reagan wins TV poll two to one, the New York Post. He is in sync with Ronald Reagan ideologically and with the sort of Republican Party values. You know, it's a big city, but it's a narrow elite. Trump's relationship with Murdoch does go back to the 1980s and to the New York Post. Murdoch had a very low opinion of him. This is the man who lost money running a casino. 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. Marla boasts to her pals about Donald,

quote, best sex I've ever had. 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 marriage. But he realizes pretty quickly that he can make a lot more money in television. 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. He is the guy whose company bankrolled. The Simpsons ideologically is not the kind of thing you might think would sit that easily with a small sea conservative like Rupert Murdoch. He has made several cameo appearances where he was introduced as... River Murdoch, the billionaire town. 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. The billionaire town. He's also buying up film studios. With 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? 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. But I think his ambition is always to come back to news. The Simpsons doesn't get you in the United. to the White House or the front or the back door of number 10 Downing Street, being a news mogul does.

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. What that said was that if you were going to cover contentious affairs on television, You had to present both sides of the story. Reagan was all about deregulation, getting rid of as much regulation as you can. So the fairness doctrine goes, and that, what happens then is that unleashes or unlocks the door for the rise of people like Rush Limbaugh. Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program, exclusively designed for rich conservatives and right-minded Republicans and those who are either. You know, the idea of balance and Rush Limbaugh don't exist in the same sentence, you know?

Any race of people should not have guilt about slavery. It's Caucasians. It opened the space for overtly partisan television, as you didn't have any longer to give the other side of the story. 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. And that opened the space for Fox News. 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 realize 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, etc. The number that really scares me, African Americans on food stamps is up by 58%. How only do they need to rethink ludicrous, all of corporate America, in my opinion, needs to rethink their responsibility to their country. 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. 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. Tabloidisation, that's what is applied to Fox News. 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 different parts of it, work with different parts of an audience, the up-market respected newspapers versus the down-market ones. The Wall Street Journal was on Rupert Murdoch's radar for a long time. This was a newspaper that was unbuyable 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 such a,

you know, you have that powerful role who is really going to go against you. Do you think Rupert Murdoch surpassed his own expectations? 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 from 195 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. He certainly transformed the British media, the Australian media and the US media. He has had this fascinating, but for many people, poisonous impact on political discourse, on politics more generally.

Democrats have finally realized what cost them the election in 2024, and the answer is being a-hole. Are you legal or illegal? You're illegal? Yeah. Welcome to America. Thank you. You can stay.

All right, thank you. Thank you so much. For now. 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. Our show today was produced by Peter Bannon-Rosen. He had help from Jolie Myers, Denise Guerra, Laura Bullard, Patrick Boyd, Adrian Lilly, and Sean Ramos from. That's me. Thanks to our guests, Des Freedman from Goldsmiths University of London, Graham Murdoch from the University of Lough, also in England. And Matthew Rickettson from Deacon, University in Melbourne, Australia.