Murdoch’s Controversial Career Spans Nearly Six Decades

Posted July 7th, 2011 at 4:45 pm (UTC-5)
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The career arc of the man at the center of Britain's phone hacking scandal, Rupert Murdoch, spans nearly six decades — from his start as a reporter for Britain's Birmingham Gazette and a copy editor for London's Daily Express in the early 1950s, to his current incarnation as the head of News Corporation (also known as News Corp), a muti-billion-dollar media company spanning three continents.

Now, with the Australian-born mogul's announcement that he is closing the News of the World, the British tabloid accused of phone hacking, Murdoch's media empire is facing its biggest crisis to date – a crisis critics would say is a direct result of the kind of tabloid journalism he helped pioneer.

Journalism ran in Keith Rupert Murdoch's family: his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was a celebrated World War I correspondent who went on to head Australia's Melbourne Herald newspaper group. After his father's death in 1952, the younger Murdoch returned to Australia and took over the two newspapers his father owned – Adelaide's Sunday Mail and The News.

Murdoch founded Australia's first national newspaper, the Australian, in 1964. Four years later, he purchased the News of the World, Britain's best-selling newspaper, and the Sun, another popular British tabloid. In 1970, the Sun pioneered the “Page Three” feature, consisting of a photograph of a topless model, usually on the paper's third page.

Murdoch entered the U.S. media market in the early 1970s, launching the Star, a weekly sensationalist tabloid, in 1974. In 1975, he purchased the New York Post tabloid, which he sold in the 1980s and bought back in 1993. He subsequently bought and sold a number of American publications, and in 1981 purchased two venerable British newspapers — The Times of London and the Sunday Times.

In 1985, Murdoch bought the 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, the American film studio. That same year, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen, making it legally possible for him to purchase six of the seven television stations owned by Metromedia Inc. and create the Fox Broadcasting Company.

Murdoch's News Corp is also part owner of Britain's Sky News television channel.

In 2007, he acquired the respected American business newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.

This year, Forbes magazine ranked Murdoch 122nd on its list of the world's 1,140 billionaires. The magazine estimated his personal wealth at $7.6 billion.