Murdoch

  • Keith Rupert Murdoch was born on March 11, 1931.
  • He was born in Melbourne, Australia.
  • He went to Oxford University.
  • For his first job, he briefly worked as an editor on Lord Beaverbrook’s London Daily Express.
  • He is worth $17.1 Billion.
  • In 1953, his father dies, leaving him in control of the News Ltd. company in Adelaide, Australia, which he turned into a huge success.
  • Murdoch turned failing newspaper, The Adelaide news, into a huge success. After he started the ‘Australian’ which was the first national paper in the country.
  • Murdoch became a US Citizen in 1985 in order to be able to expand his market to US television broadcasting.
  • In Britain in 1989 Murdoch inaugurated Sky Television.
  • The following year Murdoch sought to expand his presence in American television with the launch of Fox News, a news and political commentary channel that became highly influential.
  • Murdoch’s media empire includes Fox News, Fox Sports, the Fox Network, The Wall Street Journal, and HarperCollins.
  • In the general elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005, Murdoch’s papers were either neutral or supported Labour under Tony Blair
  • In July 2011, Murdoch, along with his youngest son James, provided testimony before a British parliamentary committee regarding phone hacking. In the UK, his media empire came under fire, as investigators probed reports of 2011 phone hacking. This was later known as ‘Leveson’, which came to the public eye after a young girl who was murdered had her phone hacked by reporters/journalists in order to make a story. 
  • On 15 July, Murdoch attended a private meeting in London with the family of Milly Dowler, where he personally apologized for the hacking of their murdered daughter’s phone. He apologized for the “serious wrongdoing” and titled it “Putting right what’s gone wrong”.
  • May 2012 a parliamentary panel tasked with investigating the scandal released a highly critical report, which stated that Rupert “is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company” and that he showed “willful blindness” concerning misconduct within his corporation
  • In 2015 Murdoch was succeeded as CEO at 21st Century Fox by James.
  • In 2017 he agreed to sell most of the holdings of 21st Century Fox to the Disney Company. Two years later the deal closed and was valued at about $71 billion. The hugely profitable Fox News and various other TV channels were excluded from the sale, and they became part of the newly formed Fox Corporation.

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