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Rupert Murdoch Bio, Founder of News Corp.

The Australian-American media tycoon Rupert Murdoch was born in Melbourne on March 11, 1931, the son of Sir Keith Arthur Murdoch, the Australian newspaper giant. Rupert studied at elite private schools and attended college at Oxford in England, where he was studying when his father died in 1952; in his will, the elder Murdoch expressed his wish for Rupert to begin his career with The News, an Adeleide afternoon newspaper in which he owned a controlling interest. The stock in News Limited, The News' parent company, along with the Southdown Press magazine company and The Barrier Miner newspaper in Broken Hill, New South Wales, were the only investments the Murdoch estate was able to keep after paying the late Murdoch's debts.

Murdoch left Oxford for Adeleide in 1953 and became managing director of News Limited, combining his interest in the business end of things with his late father's desire for him to work in journalism. The paper's revenues improved quickly under his watch, and he soon bought the Perth Sunday Times. In 1956, still only 25, he directed Southdown Press to publish the country's first weekly television-oriented magazine, TV Week, the success of which on top of his other profitable ventures allowed him to continue to expand from these moderate beginnings. In 1964, he launched The Australian, the country's first national daily paper; though it was intended to be a serious paper that would give Murdoch political influence in the country as an opinion-maker, his micro-management made it difficult for him to keep a stable and competent staff.

In the late 1960s he began to expand overseas, buying the British paper The News Of The World, which had until lately been the most popular English-language paper in the world but had experienced a decline that brought it to market. He soon purchased The Sun as well, and converted it to a tabloid format; his success with other British papers led to his successful bid to purchase The Times in 1981. Always politically conservative, Murdoch's papers generally supported Margaret Thatcher, the recently elected Tory Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and President Ronald Regan in the United States.

His American acquisitions began in 1973 with the San Antonio Express-News, and he founded the Star, the well-known supermarket tabloid, to compete with The National Enquirer. In 1976, he added the New York Post to his empire, and became a naturalized American citizen in 1985 in order to allow him to begin buying television stations -- doing so quickly so that he had enough to found the "fourth network" of American broadcast television, the Fox Network, the following January. Originally broadcasting in only six cities, Fox took longer to grow than CBS, NBC, and ABC had, and took a few years to find its identity -- such shows as the horror drama Werewolf, Joan Rivers' late night talk show, and the teen spy comedy The Adventures of Beans Baxter fell by the wayside as The Tracey Ullman Show (and its Simpsons cartoon shorts), 21 Jump Street, and Married With Children became popular successes. Fox pioneered reality television, a genre little explored by the other networks, with the late 80s introductions of America's Most Wanted and COPS, which nearly twenty years later are among primetime's longest-running shows.

Fox became a central part of the empire because of the vast potential of American television. Cult hits and phenomena aside, its first leap into mainstream success was the 1993 contract to broadcast National Football League games, previously the domain of CBS. The network continued to move to capture younger viewers with Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, the X-Files, and In Living Color, and expanded to seven nights of programming a week. In 1990 it brashly flaunted the early success of The Simpsons by scheduling it opposite the ratings powerhouse The Cosby Show, which had been as representative a sitcom of the 80s as The Simpsons would be for the 90s.

In 1995, Murdoch had to defend himself in a Federal Communications Commission investigation into the claim that his ownership of the Australian News Limited made it illegal for him to own and operate Fox, but the FCC eventually ruled in his favor. The following year he started the Fox News Channel, a 24-hour cable news network backed with major funding that quickly ate away at CNN's market share, which had previously faced no serious challenges. In 2004, News Corporation's business offices finally moved from Adelaide to New York City.

News Corporation has recently been active with purchases of internet companies, paying $650 million for IGN Entertainment and $580 million for Intermix Media, the company that owned MySpace -- the non-MySpace Intermix holdings were then sold off to a former MySpace executive.

Murdoch's conservative political views have been reflected by his media outlets, especially Fox News, which while occasionally criticizing the Bush administration has been a strong proponent of the War in Iraq and the War against Terrorism. During the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, all of Murdoch's newspapers published editorials in favor of the war -- a company-wide consensus reminiscent of the old Hearst empire.

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