How Rupert Murdoch surpassed his father, and created a democratic nightmare

This is the first instalment in a new series, The Murdoch Century, examining the legacy of News Corp and Rupert Murdoch.

Until the 1990s, there was little in Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate that the anglophone world hadn’t seen before.

Press barons wielding political influence were a standard feature of politics in America and the UK. So too were openly partisan newspapers. The use of gossip and scandal to sell papers long predated Murdoch. The reliance on soft-core porn to boost tabloid sales — a key feature of Murdoch’s entry into the UK market in the late 1960s — was pioneered by rival outlet The Mirror. And the ability to convince governments to grant media companies regulatory favours — particularly by allowing them to dominate emerging media — was a prerequisite for successful companies around the world.

Indeed, Rupert wasn’t even the first in his family to do many of these things. Having long cultivated politicians, his father, Keith, recognised no boundary between his actions as a journalist and his efforts to manipulate political leaders during World War I, whether for a good cause (exposing the tragic incompetence of the British leaders at Gallipoli) or an evil one (trying to wreck the career of John Monash).

Keith despised media competition, and worked assiduously to buy out competitors. He campaigned against Labor. He hated the then-new ABC. His alliance with anti-Semite Charles Bean against Monash, Australia’s greatest soldier, perhaps even presaged Rupert’s disgusting comments about “Jewish-owned press” nearly a century later.

Rupert, however, turned out to be a better media mogul than his father, or Lord Northcliffe, the increasingly gaga media baron of the 1910s who mentored Keith; or Lord Rothermere, the Nazi-loving Daily Mail owner who supported Hitler all the way to 1939. Murdoch perfected the tabloid model. He didn’t let his personal ideology get in the way of his political activities. And he proved a genius at debt-fuelled expansion of his holdings, even if it nearly cost him the whole thing in 1991.

Moreover, unlike his predecessors and rivals, Rupert saw new media technologies not as a threat to his incumbency that needed to be controlled, but as a means to disrupt other incumbents — especially pay TV, which he believed could (via buying major sports) deliver him a broadcasting network that would undercut dominant free-to-air broadcasters.

It was a strategy that failed in Australia, because the free-to-air broadcasters were even more influential and capable of manipulating politicians than he was on issues such as anti-siphoning and digital television, and which was only partly successful in the UK. But it was a huge success in the US, and established Fox News as one of America’s most powerful broadcasters.

Murdoch’s real stroke of genius, however, was to realise the unfulfilled potential of using television to exploit white grievance and victimhood, an emerging market in the 1990s that other media, notably radio, had previously sought to exploit, especially after the Federal Communications Commission in 1987 had rescinded the “fairness doctrine”.

This wasn’t a market created by Murdoch and Fox News, but by the economic and social consequences of the neoliberal revolution ushered in by governments around the anglophone world in the 1980s (with Murdoch’s support), which offshored blue-collar jobs, empowered corporations, encouraged globalisation and freedom of movement of people and capital, reduced social safety nets, and promoted an individualist economic narrative that linked every citizen’s worth purely to their economic value, delegitimising other forms of social bonds.

At the same time, a complementary ideology of social equality — which curbed the traditional privilege afforded to white, religious, heterosexual males, and reduced discrimination against women, people of colour, people with disabilities and LGBTQIA+ people — reinforced a sense of grievance among whites that the social and economic status that they had grown up to expect was no longer theirs by right.

By 2008, when the financial crisis and the resulting recession had generated hostility even among Republicans to the Bush administration, and the emergence of a fiscally fundamentalist Tea Party movement, the victory of a Black Democrat in the presidential election of that year became the catalyst for an overtly racist form of right-wing activism.

Fox News was there at every step — often promoting New York real estate millionaire and serial bankrupt Donald Trump along the way. From the Tea Party, to birtherism, to racist attacks on Barack Obama, including suggestions he was a terrorist, through to Fox News’ full-throated support for Trump during his ill-fated presidency, white anger had a home at Fox.

The rest — including Fox News’ direct culpability in encouraging the January 6 2021 insurrection — is sordid history. At each stage, Fox News has become more extreme (as some of its former guests have admitted), polarising Americans, promulgating conspiracy theories and spreading anti-Semitic lies, while growing its revenue to more than US$14 billion a year.

It has helped to deliver the Republican Party into a cult led by a would-be fascist dictator, who has openly vowed retribution if he is returned to office and who wants the termination of the constitution — and after a brief flirtation with the useless Ron DeSantis, Fox News has re-embraced Trump, acting as his chief defender in the range of indictments levelled against him by prosecutors.

Rupert Murdoch may claim to want Trump to become a “non-person”, but his addiction to the revenues of polarisation, conspiracy theory and extremism will guarantee Fox News will continue its enabling of a figure dedicated to destroying US democracy. Fox News was Murdoch’s stroke of business genius. A shattered democracy is the price the world may well pay for it.