War is Rupert Murdoch’s natural state. When he launched the Fox Broadcasting Company, in October 1986, he went to war against the hegemony of CBS, ABC, and NBC. With Fox News he crossed swords with CNN’s Ted Turner. At Sky, his satellite-TV system in the U.K., he went up against the BBC. He’s battled China, the F.C.C., the print unions in Great Britain, and, recently, most of the journalism community in his takeover of
The Wall Street Journal. He relishes conflict and doesn’t back down—one reason why he’s won so many of his fights and so profoundly changed the nature of his industry.
Now he’s going to war with the Internet.
Rupert Murdoch’s digital-technology savvy is a source of hilarity in his family. Photo Illustration by Darrow.
It hasn’t been a good year for Murdoch—the largest publisher of newspapers in the worst year in newspaper history. His purchase of
The Wall Street Journal is widely seen as one of the worst moves of his career—News Corp. has already taken a $3 billion write-down on the purchase. His beloved
New York Post, always a money loser for him, is now suffering such great losses that Murdoch is considering a partnership with or even sale to the
Daily News, the
Post’s arch-enemy. His once highly profitable newspaper groups in the U.K. and Australia are faltering. News Corp.’s share price has been among the hardest hit of any major media company.
And yet, Murdoch, at 78, would double-down in a heartbeat: he strategizes constantly about how he might buy
The New York Times. But first he might have to save the newspaper business itself. As it happens, he, unlike almost everyone else in the business, believes newspapers are suffering not at the hands of technological forces beyond their control but at the hands of proprietors who are weaker than he is.
After fulminating for a year about how people on the Internet should pay for news, he made it official. Announcing in August the biggest losses his company has ever sustained, he added that he’d had enough and if people wanted to read his newspapers they could bloody well pay for them.
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