Rupert Murdoch

Start of business career

After his father's sudden death in 1952, Rupert returned to Australia to take over the running of his father's business. Although he had expected to inherit a considerable fortune and a prominent position, he was left with a relatively modest inheritance — after death duties and taxes, the main legacy was ownership of the Adelaide journal The News (which gave its name to his company). His early publishing career was notable for the News' campaign against the murder conviction of Aborigine Max Stuart, for which Murdoch took much credit, although the real hero of the story was Murdoch's crusading editor, Rohan Rivett.

Over the next few years, Murdoch gradually established himself as one of the most dynamic media proprietors in the country, quickly expanding his holdings by acquiring a string of daily and suburban newspapers in most capital cities, including the Sydney afternoon paper, The Daily Mirror, as well as a small Sydney-based recording company, Festival Records. His acquisition of the Mirror proved crucial to his success, allowing him to challenge the dominance of his two main rivals in the Sydney market, the Fairfax Newspapers group (which published the hugely profitable Sydney Morning Herald) and the Consolidated Press group (owned by Sir Frank Packer, which published the city's leading tabloid newspaper, The Daily Telegraph).

In 1964, Murdoch made his next important advance when he established The Australian, Australia's first national daily newspaper, based first in Canberra and later in Sydney. The Australian, a broadsheet, gave Murdoch a new respectability as a 'quality' newspaper publisher, and also greater political influence, since The Australian has always had an elite readership, if not always a large circulation.

In 1972, Murdoch acquired the Sydney-based newspaper The Daily Telegraph from Sir Frank Packer, making him one of the 'big three' newspaper proprietors in Australia, along with Sir Warwick Fairfax in Sydney' and his father's old business The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd., in Melbourne. In the 1972 elections, Murdoch swung his newspapers' support behind Gough Whitlam and the leftist Australian Labor Party, but by 1975, he had turned against Labor, and since then, he has almost always supported the rightist Liberal Party.

Over the next ten years, as his press empire grew, Murdoch established a hugely lucrative financial base, and these profits were routinely used to subsidize further acquisitions. In his early years of newspaper ownership, Murdoch was an aggressive, micromanaging entrepreneur; the popular myth regarding this period suggests that his standard tactic was to buy loss-making Australian newspapers and turn them around by introducing radical management and editorial changes, and fighting no-holds-barred circulation wars with his competitors. For an alternative view, see Bruce Page's ([2] The Murdoch Archipelago). By whichever methods his success was achieved, by the 1970s, Murdoch's power base was so strong that he was able to acquire leading newspapers and magazines beyond Australia, in both London and New York, as well as many other media holdings.

Murdoch's desire for dominant cross-media ownership manifested early — in 1961, he bought an ailing Australian record label, Festival Records, and within a few years, it had become the leading local recording company. He also bought a television station in Wollongong, New South Wales, hoping to use it to break into the Sydney television market, but found himself frustrated by Australia's cross-media ownership laws, which prevented him from owning both a major newspaper and television station in the same city. Since then, he has consistently lobbied - both personally and through his papers - to have these laws changed in his favour.

Copyright 2008 - France BtoB from Wikipédia