Rupert Murdoch | Exit of the patriarch  Premium

The Murdoch news empire has had its share of controversies and scandals.

The old fox of news, and one of the world’s most influential — and controversial — media barons, who mastered the art of survival in a seven-decade run, is hanging up his boots. Rupert Murdoch, a ruthless newspaper man, has always done things his way, betting on profit, most often by tapping into the fears, insecurities and prejudices of his worldwide audience.

The announcement on Thursday led to a surge in shares of both Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, America’s most-watched TV news channel, and News Corp, which owns newspapers including The Times (London) and the Wall Street Journal. The Murdoch empire also owns publishing house HarperCollins and Sky News, a cable-TV news channel.

Mr. Murdoch has said he will continue to engage with his companies as he takes on the role of Chairman Emeritus at both firms in November. In a memo to employees, the 92-year-old, whose family fortune is said to be worth $19 billion, wrote: “…the time is right for me to take on different roles. Our companies are in robust health, as am I. Our opportunities far exceed our commercial challenges. We have every reason to be optimistic about the coming years — I certainly am, and plan to be here to participate in them.”

Mr. Murdoch’s son, Lachlan, takes over at a commercially challenging time for Fox News, a votary of conservative, right-wing politics, in a pre-American election year. Dominion Voting Systems had sued Fox News Networks and its parent company Fox Corp for having peddled lies about the 2020 presidential election, which Donald Trump lost but refused to accept. This April, Fox handed out a $787 million payout to Dominion. At a time when traditional news outlets are struggling, the settlement with Dominion is not insignificant, even though, according to Pew Research Center data, Fox News saw a 5% increase in revenue in 2022 at $3.3 billion, from $3.1 billion in 2021.

The Murdoch news empire has had its share of controversies and scandals. As Mr. Murdoch built his empire, he went on an acquiring spree, buying newspapers right, left and centre, bringing in a culture of tabloid journalism and conservative reporting, and growing his companies into behemoths on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and also hometurf Australia. Spreading his reach to films, he also bought 20th Century Fox, which he later sold to Disney for over $71 billion.

One acquisition, particularly, blew up spectacularly in his face in 2011 after a phone hacking inquiry showed that News of the World, then the U.K.’s largest selling Sunday newspaper, had illegally accessed voicemails of hundreds of people, including a murdered girl student. When The Guardian reported this, the entire Murdoch U.K. newspaper ecosystem was mobilised to “call the truth fake, and to promote fake news as the truth”, Alan Rusbridger, then editor-in-chief of The Guardian, wrote in his book, Breaking News. Mr. Murdoch controlled the damage by abruptly shutting down an over 100-year-old newspaper, albeit one which had begun to live dangerously, tilting towards sex and other salacious scoops. Its sister newspaper, the Sun, still owned by News Corp, has spent substantial amounts in settling lawsuits brought forward by targeted celebrities, caught in not-so-convenient moments.

The Australia-born Rupert Murdoch inherited his father’s business and strode into media in the 1950s. He was 21 years old and studying at Oxford when he got to run The News of Adelaide with a princely circulation of 75,000. Ambitious and impatient for expansion, in the late 1960s, he bought the U.K. newspapers, News of the World and the Sun, and began to control a larger part of the media in Britain with the acquisition of The Times and The Sunday Times in the 1980s. In the meantime, he also ventured into the other side of the Atlantic, to the U.S., in the 1970s, acquiring newspapers and at least one tabloid, the New York Post, which he later sold and re-acquired.