Rupert Murdoch

December 2012

Murdoch Madness

By Monthly Wire

The saga of the Murdoch empire has always held a hypnotic appeal for the Monthly’s writers. So much political influence and control of information rests in the hands of this sprawling, secretive multinational outfit that we ignore their machinations at our peril. In the wake of the UK Leveson inquiry’s damning report, we look back on how it came to this. The biggest story in politic

August 2012

August 2012 Editor's Note

By John van Tiggelen

In this month’s cover essay, ‘A Dark Victory’, Robert Manne analyses how the push for urgent global action on human-induced climate change was defeated. Manne focuses on the United States, where nothing has been done nor, in all probability, will be done, whether or not the Democrats win another term. Climate science in the US has become as politicised as gun control; effectively, this

Rupert is finally reaping what he sowed

Murdoch & Company

By Robert Manne

For very many years Fleet Street newspapers employed private detective agencies in their search for ever more salacious stories. They provided them with valuable information obtained through bribing public officials including police, conducting surveillance, and hacking into computers and mobile phones. Many London papers were involved in these activities. However, the leaders of the pack were Rupert Murdoch’s two most important tablo

Murdoch’s Tweets of Doom

Rockin’ Rupert

By Peter Conrad

Tweeting, as the Beat poets might have said, is for the birds – though what kind of bird exactly? Most users of Twitter sound like fatuously chirping budgies. But Rupert Murdoch’s fluffy plumage moulted long ago, and the tweets he has been posting since 31 December resemble the hoarse emissions of a buzzard or a baleful raven, uttering prophecies of doom

Lachlan Murdoch and News Corp

The Reluctant Son

By Paola Totaro

Seven years ago in New York, the heir apparent to one of the world’s most powerful media conglomerates walked out on the family business. Lachlan Keith Murdoch, eldest son of Rupert, and already the deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation, was fed

David McKnight’s 'Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation of Power'

The Politics of News

By David Marr

Australian journalists have a sad history of going off to Washington to be ruined. They leave home the hope of the side but after a visit to the boiler room and a peek into the furnace they return enthralled by American ambitions and dream of becoming players

The Power of Rupert Murdoch and the Australian’s Editor-in-Chief

The United States of Chris Mitchell

By Sally Neighbour

Talk to any journalist, commentator, politician or public figure in Australia, and it seems they all have a view of Chris Mitchell, editor-in-chief of the Australian newspaper, now widely regarded as the most influential news outlet in the country – one th

Nicholas Shakespeare on Tasmania

The Quiet Peninsula

By Nicholas Shakespeare

Joan Masterman’s matchless four-day walk, the Freycinet Experience, turns 20 this year. For her traditional end-of-season party, she has invited the guides, lodge co-ordinators and office staff, plus Gil the bus driver and Shep the skipper, to fit into cloth

Rupert Murdoch’s Populist Creations

The Fox News Show

By Guy Rundle

It was the usual Palin performance – the sentences tripping over each other, somewhere between natural leader and cheerleader. It’s the style that has wowed supporters across the continent but this time subsequent reaction among mainstream conservatives was curiousl

Rupert Murdoch & Kamahl

By Shane Maloney

Rupert Murdoch was 27 when he met Kandiah Kamalesvaran, a sensitive young Tamil on the dodge from the immigration authorities. Born in Malaya, Kamalesvaran had arrived in Adelaide in 1953, five years earlier, to complete his matriculation. He was now enrolled

From the Chrysalis

By Don Watson

FIRST PUBLISHED IN JUNE 2010. It was a bad night for neo-cons, neo-liberals and neo-Hobbesians, the last being those wiseacres in and around the now-crumbled Bush administration who had been inclined to justify the “muscular unilateralism” of recent Americ

A Short History of the Media Future

Mash-up

By John Birmingham

The formal library, in contrast, has none of this. Occupying the centre of the original house, its one nod to modernity is a rather groovy white lampshade hanging in the centre of the room. The vast and intricate web of optical fibre and wiring, which forms a sort of ne

Rudd and the Murdoch Press

Comment

By Mungo MacCallum

Political leaders find it particularly irksome. It was painful enough to be called into the media mogul’s Sydney headquarters, worse still to be invited to his rural estate – ‘Cavan’, near Canberra – to don gumboots and compliment him on his livestock. But to be summoned halfway around the world – to New York or, the ultimate humiliation, to one

The Corporate Fallacy

Comment

By Noel Pearson

In the same month, Macfarlane told an international conference of banking supervisors in Sydney that it was “simplistic to insist on the totally free movement of capital in all countries and in all circumstances” and said, “We need to devise a system for maximising the benefits to be gained from international capital while limiting the risks.” A month later, he told the Committee for the E

Michael Wolff’s 'The Man Who Owns the News'

Vanity Fare

By Gideon Haigh

In the mid 1960s, Fred Friendly, friend of and producer to the legendary newsman Ed Murrow, visited his boss at CBS, the no-less legendary William Paley, and fell to arguing about the network's profitability. "How much money did CBS make last year?" demanded F

The future of journalism as a public trust

War of Words

By Eric Beecher

"I don't want Rupert Murdoch to decide what belongs in the Wall Street Journal news pages. The essence of a great newspaper is independence, even from its proprietors and shareholders, and Murdoch, in the final analysis, hasn't come down on that side."- Peter

Wendi Deng Murdoch

By Eric Ellis

Deng Wen Ge - she changed her name to Wendi in her mid-teens - was born in Shandong around the time that her future husband was buying London's News of the World. One of three children, she grew up in neighbouring Xuzhou as a Subei ren - a vernacular term for the robust

Editor's Note

By Sally Warhaft

‘Is that the truth, or is your News Limited?' Last month, while this magazine celebrated its second birthday, Australia's pre-eminent media group, Fairfax, spiked a story profiling Wendi Deng Murdoch that one of its editors had commissioned. We don't yet know all the facts behind the Fairfax decision, but we do know that Rupert Murdoch owned a 7.5% share at the time the story was disowned.Austr