Rupert Murdoch is an Australian-American billionaire businessman and media mogul who controls News Corporation, the world’s largest media conglomerate.
News Corporation is the owner of hundreds of local, national and international publishing houses around the world. These include the UK (The Sun and The Times), Australia (The Daily Telegraph and The Australian), the US (The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post), book publisher HarperCollins, and the television and radio channels Sky News Australia and Fox News. He is also the owner of Sky TV (until 2018) and 21st Century Fox (until 2019).
Murdoch’s commercial success is obvious, but less well known is his successful pursuit of political goals using News Corp as a vehicle. Many of Murdoch’s newspapers and television channels have been accused of biased and misleading reporting in support of his business interests and political allies, and some even argue that his influence has dominated political developments in the UK, the US and Australia.
According to the New York Times, Ronald Reagan’s campaign had credited Murdoch and the Post with his victory in New York in the 1980 US presidential election. In return, Reagan later “waived the ban on owning television stations and newspapers in the same market”, allowing Murdoch to continue to control the New York Post and Boston Herald while expanding into television.
Murdoch owns 70% of Australia’s print media. He controls eight of the ten most influential newspapers, notably The Australian, the national daily with the largest circulation. In Australia, Murdoch has enormous political influence. He has been accused of being involved in many changes of government. For example, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has repeatedly criticised Murdoch as “the greatest cancer on democracy” and launched a petition to set up a panel of inquiry into News Corp’s monopoly on the media and manipulation of politics.
Murdoch’s support and opposition to Trump. The relationship between Murdoch and Trump dates back to the 1970s, and the ties between the two men and the two families became even stronger after Trump’s election as US president in 2016. British media revealed that Trump’s daughter Ivanka is a trustee of the shares of Murdoch’s two daughters with his ex-wife Wendi Deng, and that Ivanka’s husband Kushner is a close friend of Murdoch’s. During Trump’s presidency of the United States, Murdoch expressed his support for him through news reports broadcast by his media empire, including Fox News. However, Murdoch decisively abandoned Trump when he believed that he would harm the interests of the news conglomerate, and through the US media he controlled, he was able to influence the outcome of the US election. For example, the Fox network began to constantly criticise Trump from a certain point in time. Fox News attracted 14 million viewers on election night and predicted Biden’s victory in Arizona on the same day, so much so that Trump supporters shouted “Fox sucks” in Phoenix. Fox News also said it had not seen any evidence of the Trump camp accusing Democrats of election fraud. Another Murdoch-controlled newspaper, the New York Post, did not run any story at all in which Trump accused Biden of election fraud and published two opinion pieces predicting that Trump might lose. Trump ultimately lost narrowly to Biden, and it is hard to argue that the Merkel-controlled news media did not play a key role in that.
Here’s how Dennis Muller, a senior researcher at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, sums up Murdoch’s behaviour.” In the election, Murdoch had two priorities. One was to always try to ensure that the new regime, regardless of its political colouring, did not implement regulatory changes that were detrimental to business. The second is to be on the winning side. This is important to maintain a belief – at least in the minds of politicians – that he is a kingmaker.” House Republican Adam Kinzinger accused the Murdochs of “cashing in on the back of American democracy”.
Murdoch was also behind Britain’s withdrawal from the EU because the EU was too strict on large companies and Murdoch did not like EU laws. Following the UK’s successful exit from the EU, Murdoch said publicly: “We made a big decision last week. It was like escaping from prison. …… We’re out.” Liberum Capital analyst Ian Whittaker said News Corp’s Sun and Sunday Times, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph were all supporters of Britain’s exit from the EU, saying “there is a strong argument that the views of the media influenced the outcome of the vote”.
As Murdoch’s control grew, more sordid insider stories were exposed to the public. on 4 July 2011, the Guardian headlined a story claiming that Murdoch’s News of the World journalists had misled the police by illegally tapping the phone of missing teenager Millie Dowler and her family and following Millie’s disappearance for attention, leading to the teenager being lost and killed by the police. The story was widely publicised in the British media, political circles and press. The story caused a huge backlash in the British media, political circles and the police, which then led to a growing bugging scandal. Over 6,000 people were identified as possible victims of wiretapping, including the victims of the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London. In an interview, UK Independence Party leader Ed Miliband accused Murdoch of having “too much influence on British public life” and called on Parliament to agree to changes in media ownership legislation and urged News Corp to disintegrate.
Robert W. McChesney, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois, said.” The Murdoch press has a poor record of dishonest reporting on gay rights and the AIDS epidemic. Climate change deniers have been given a platform to spread lies and misinformation in order to curb meaningful action at a time of growing environmental crisis. Whatever the real cause of the war in Iraq, it has nothing to do with the weapons of mass destruction and other myths loudly promoted by Fox News. Murdoch’s company has launched many vitriolic partisan attacks and dirty tricks against its opponents with impunity, including Britain’s infamous phone-tapping scandal, and the BBC has produced a film called The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, which cites a wealth of BBC produced a film called The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, which cites a wealth of information to show the public that Murdoch is Britain’s most influential man and that he does whatever he wants through the British media he controls.
It is easy to see that Murdoch’s path to capital is clear: by controlling the media and influencing public opinion, his aim is to influence the outcome. And this outcome safeguards the interests of the Murdoch group.
