On 9 September 1953, a small page-two item in the Adelaide News announced: “Mr Rupert Murdoch, son of the late Sir Keith Murdoch, is to join the staff of News Ltd.” Seventy years later almost to the day, the news of his resignation as chairman of the global media empire that company became arrived to noticeably more fanfare.
When I started writing about the 92-year-old’s early years, the inevitability of his exit presented a poignant vantage point to take stock of how the Murdoch model came to be, when the endpoint — and the damage — is clear.
Like News Corporation’s new chair, Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert was groomed for success by his father, Sir Keith. One of Australia’s most prominent and controversial newspapermen, Murdoch Sr had spent his final years acquiring companies such as News Ltd as part of a small family chain for his occasionally wayward son to inherit — a son he regarded as a “zealous Laborite” with “alarming left-wing views”, but hoped might lead a “useful altruistic and full life” in the media.
In 1953, South Australia had been run by a gerrymandered conservative government for decades, and Murdoch’s The News actively catered to the disenfranchised, Labor-voting readership that its rival, The Advertiser, wasn’t speaking to. Rupert’s personal politics at the time happened to align with those readers, but speaking directly to an untapped audience’s grievances while shaking up a complacent establishment would become the Murdoch playbook, from The Sun to Fox News.
These stories go some way to explaining the foundational contradictions evident in Rupert’s folksy parting dig this month at “elites” in “cahoots” with the non-Murdoch media. How he could fashion himself an outsider, sticking it to “elite” establishments all around the world, even as an Oxford-educated heir to a lineage of populist press barons from his father, Sir Keith, to Keith’s mentor Lord Northcliffe, to the American “yellow press” moguls Northcliffe emulated.
They show how Rupert has relished challenging systems and smashing norms for short-term profit and muscling his way into a market, with truth and consistency becoming secondary to landing a deal or winning a fight. Which is one thing when running an afternoon paper in 1950s Adelaide or 1960s Sydney, but which has an undeniably corrosive effect when rolled out on an industrial scale across the English-speaking world.
Rupert’s 70 years in the business have been marked by technological disruption and globalisation. The young man who made an awkward, fumbled bid to secure some of Australia’s first commercial television licences in 1958, became the great union-smasher of Wapping in the 1980s, backed by Margaret Thatcher and labour-saving, job-slashing computer technology. He seized these changes to achieve a scale and influence surpassing all his predecessors, to become the last newspaper tycoon.
The media world Rupert leaves behind is almost unrecognisable from the one he inherited. His resignation letter thanked the truck drivers, cleaners, assistants, and camera operators of his modern enterprise, but not the legion of workers once required to report and make the news with hot metal and ink, clattering typewriters, and rumbling presses — now ancient history.
The landscape has changed, but so many of the questions playing out at the start of the Rupert era are still being asked today. Questions about monopoly and polarisation, about how our media and politics are being captured by capital and vested interests. About public discourse being recklessly riled up for profit by outlets that are structurally geared towards sensationalism and conflict. Rupert’s son Lachlan might now have the chair, but there are plenty of disruptor-reactionary capitalists vying to be his father’s spiritual successor.
As for Rupert, his resignation note suggests he might never really leave, promising to remain involved “every day” with “thoughts, ideas, and advice” and even threatening to haunt the office on Friday afternoons. Lachlan is now closer in age to Sir Keith when he died than Rupert when he took over. The son will never enjoy the mix of privilege, freedom, and youthful iconoclasm his father enjoyed as a 22-year-old in the hot seat.
I was reminded of a similar farewell note written in December 1949, when Sir Keith Murdoch announced his resignation as the Herald and Weekly Times’ managing director after a health scare. It was thought to be the beginning of his retirement, but he too stuck around, and as chairman spent the remaining three years white-anting his successor, John Williams, while quietly building up a rival chain for Rupert to inherit. Sir Keith’s final act was to lead a boardroom coup against Williams, defiantly reasserting his control over the company.
For the past century, the story of the Murdochs in the media has been about that endless pursuit of control and power. Even as a self-titled Chairman Emeritus — whatever that means — Rupert’s old habits may yet die hard.
• Walter Marsh is a journalist and the author of Young Rupert: the making of the Murdoch empire (Scribe Publications)
