Rupert Murdoch: how a single Adelaide newspaper became a global empire

Keith Murdoch died in 1952 leaving his son a controlling stake in one paper: The News, an Adelaide afternoon daily with a circulation respectable enough to matter in South Australia and modest enough to be overlooked everywhere else. Rupert was twenty-one. He'd been studying at Oxford when his father died and came home to take the chair before he'd finished his degree. What followed over the next seven decades is one of the most consequential — and contested — expansions in the history of global media. But the story starts, stubbornly and instructively, in Adelaide.

The inheritance and what it actually was

There is a persistent myth that Rupert Murdoch was handed a ready-made empire by his father. The record doesn't quite support that. Keith Murdoch had been a celebrated journalist and later a powerful press executive — he ran the Herald and Weekly Times group for many years — but he didn't own it outright. What he left Rupert was the controlling interest in News Limited, the company that published The News in Adelaide, along with some other smaller shareholdings. The Herald and Weekly Times itself remained under separate control, and would famously be acquired by Murdoch's News Corporation only in 1987, decades later, in what many observers at the time read as a son finally absorbing the institution that had overshadowed his father.

I'll admit I got this wrong for years, mentally inflating Keith's legacy. The actual inheritance was real, but it was a base, not a throne.

Perth, then Sydney: the mainland push begins

Murdoch's first move beyond Adelaide came quickly. In 1956 he acquired The Sunday Times in Perth, a paper with a tabloid instinct and a willingness to run stories that more genteel mastheads left alone. The Sunday Times acquisition is worth pausing on because it established the template Murdoch would apply again and again: buy a paper in a competitive or underserved market, sharpen its popular appeal, grow circulation, and use the revenue base to fund the next acquisition.

Sydney followed. In 1960, after protracted negotiations, News Limited acquired The Daily Mirror, inserting itself into the fiercely competitive Sydney afternoon newspaper market. The Mirror was already a popular tabloid; Murdoch made it sharper, louder, more willing to chase the story that sold papers at the newsstand rather than the story that earned approving editorials from the broadsheet establishment. Circulation climbed. Rivals bristled. The approach worked.

By the early 1960s Murdoch controlled a small but growing chain of Australian papers and had developed what his critics called a formula — sensationalism, aggressive pricing, outsized personal involvement in editorial — and what his defenders called a genuine feel for readers who other publishers patronised or ignored.

The Australian and the national project

In 1964 Murdoch launched The Australian, the country's first national daily broadsheet, based initially in Canberra. This is the part of the origin story that often gets buried under the tabloid narrative, and it deserves more weight. Launching a national broadsheet in Australia in 1964 was genuinely difficult. The country's geography made distribution expensive. The existing newspaper barons had their city markets locked up. There was no established national readership, no model to follow.

The Australian lost money for years. Murdoch subsidised it from his profitable tabloids. Whatever one thinks of the paper's later editorial direction — and it has generated controversy enough for several careers — the act of launching it was not commercially conservative. It was a punt on the idea that Australians would support a paper that took the whole country seriously as a single audience. That conviction, pursued at real financial cost, is not nothing.

Britain: the leap that changed everything

The jump to Britain in the late 1960s transformed Murdoch from a significant Australian media proprietor into something different in kind. He acquired the News of the World in 1969 — a transaction that involved outmanoeuvring Robert Maxwell, which at the time felt like a coup — and The Sun shortly after. What he did with The Sun is well-documented: he relaunched it as an aggressively populist tabloid, introduced Page Three, and within a few years had turned a failing broadsheet-converted-to-tabloid into the highest-circulation daily in Britain.

The British acquisitions are also where the regulatory and political entanglements began in earnest. Murdoch's purchase of The Times and The Sunday Times in 1981 — approved by the Thatcher government without a formal referral to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, under a clause relating to financially failing papers — attracted significant criticism at the time and has been relitigated many times since. The Leveson Inquiry, which reported in 2012 following the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed News International, put much of this history under extremely uncomfortable light. The Inquiry found serious, systemic wrongdoing at News of the World; the paper was subsequently closed by News Corporation in 2011.

The American chapter and the citizen question

Murdoch's US expansion in the 1970s and 1980s brought a wrinkle that required a formal resolution: US law prohibited non-citizens from owning television broadcast licences. Murdoch became an American citizen in 1985, a decision that enabled the acquisition of the television stations that became the foundation of the Fox network. He has said the decision was driven by business necessity. His critics characterised it as a citizenship-of-convenience. Both things can be true.

The Fox Broadcasting Company launched in 1986, with a fourth US network seeming to many in the industry like an expensive fantasy. Fox News Channel launched in 1996. Within a few years it was the most-watched cable news network in the United States, and it has remained so. Whatever one's view of its journalism — and views are, to put it mildly, varied — its commercial success is undeniable and its political influence has been extensively documented by American academics, journalists and the January 6th Congressional committee among others.

For comparison with another Australian dynasty that expanded aggressively from a domestic base, the structural parallels and differences with the Packer empire are worth reading about in The Packers: three generations of Australian power, money and gamble.

News Corporation, restructuring and the split

By the late twentieth century, News Corporation had become one of the largest media conglomerates on the planet, with assets spanning newspapers, film studios (20th Century Fox), book publishing (HarperCollins), satellite television (BSkyB, Star TV in Asia) and much else. The corporate structure was complex, the cross-holdings sometimes labyrinthine, and the governance — particularly the concentration of voting power in the Murdoch family through a dual-class share structure — was a recurring source of tension with institutional investors.

In 2013 News Corporation split into two separately listed entities: the newspaper and publishing businesses retained the News Corp name, while the film and television assets were spun into 21st Century Fox. The split was widely read as an attempt to insulate the more valuable screen assets from the reputational and legal damage flowing from the UK phone-hacking scandal. In 2019, Disney acquired 21st Century Fox's entertainment assets for a figure widely reported to be around $71 billion, though Murdoch's family retained control of Fox Corporation — the news and sports broadcasting business — and the reconstituted News Corp.

For the kind of resource-dynasty story that provides an interesting contrast to media-empire building, the Hancock family's trajectory is worth reading alongside this one: The Hancock dynasty: iron ore, the Pilbara and the fortune Gina Rinehart rebuilt.

The succession question, unresolved

Rupert Murdoch married four times. He has several children. The question of who would run the empire after him has been a subject of intense speculation and occasional public family conflict for at least twenty years. Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence have all figured in the succession narrative at various points, with Lachlan ultimately emerging as the designated heir. James's departure from the family business — he resigned from the News Corp board in 2020, citing disagreements over editorial content — was one of the more striking public ruptures.

In late 2023, Murdoch announced he was stepping back from the executive chairman roles at both Fox Corporation and News Corp, handing those positions to Lachlan. He was ninety-two. A Nevada court proceeding around the same time, reported at length by the New York Times and others, concerned an attempt to alter the family trust in ways that would have consolidated Lachlan's control over the media assets after Rupert's death. The other Murdoch children contested it; a Nevada court commissioner reportedly found against the attempt. The matter, as of this writing, remains part of ongoing legal proceedings.

The Adelaide thread

There is something almost wilfully ironic about tracing the phone-hacking scandal, the Fox News culture wars and the Disney megamerger back to an afternoon tabloid on King William Street in Adelaide. But that is where the thread begins. The inheritance was modest. The ambition was not. Whatever verdict history ultimately returns on Rupert Murdoch — and I suspect it will be a split decision, as it always is with figures who reshape industries while accumulating enemies on an industrial scale — the Australian chapter is not a footnote. It is the whole foundation.

The papers that funded the Fox network, the tabloid instincts that shaped it, and the regulatory battles that required Murdoch to become an American to fight them: all of it traces back to a twenty-one-year-old who came home from Oxford to run a paper in Adelaide. The Tycoons & Dynasties archive has no shortage of people who started with something and built an empire. Very few of them built one this large, or one this argued-about.