Is This The Same Rupert Murdoch Who, in the US, Started With One Sleazy Tabloid in San Antonio, Texas, in 1973 And Who Now Is The CEO Of The World’s Largest Media Conglomerate?

When Murdoch bought the San Antonio newspaper there was no Fox Network, for that matter there was no CNN, he was just that Australian tabloid publisher (The London Times didn’t come for another three years) and he was considered to be doing no less than defacing American journalism with all that sex, sensual crime reporting and entertainment dirt that the Express printed.

He followed that initial US investment by buying the New York Post three years later (which he later sold and then bought back in 1993), the Boston Herald-American in 1982 (for just $1 million) and The Chicago Sun Times a year later for $90 million (sold three years later for a $65 million profit). But you still couldn’t talk about him in polite company.

He got into local television, buying seven stations in major US markets from Metromedia for $2 billion, he started the Fox networks, he bought 20th Century Fox, even owning the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team for a while, and at the same time making investments in China, Italy, Australia and the UK turning himself into the respected global mogul he is today. In America, making “real” money and being the best at what you do earns respect, and thus in today’s America when Rupert Murdoch speaks, people listen.

No one else bid $5 billion for Dow Jones. He’s absolutely convinced he will make a global success of the brand in print and online. He hints broadly that he wants to open up the Wall Street Journal’s successful web site completely to the advertising model even if it means giving up that $50 million in annual subscriptions, and there is no one out there saying he’s wrong (except from within Dow Jones itself where there is great pride in the subscription model, but pride and $3 just about buys a cup of coffee these days!).

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The OJ Simpson Book Reminded Americans Of Rupert Murdoch’s Sleazy US Tabloid Beginnings – Something The Most Respected of American Media Barons Had Hoped Had Been Forgotten -- And Now The UK Jailing Of A Reporter And His Editor’s Resignation For Violating Prince William’s Privacy Has Tongues Wagging There, Too.
Rupert Murdoch had one big complaint back in the 1970s when he began buying into US media, starting with the racy San Antonio (Texas) Express tabloid, “I don’t get respect.” Thirty years later he is probably the most respected of all the American media barons. Today when Rupert Murdoch speaks, people everywhere listen and follow!

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He has shown time and time again he is patient in letting new projects grow. He is talking about investing some $200 million in his new Fox Business Network in the next couple of years and he says he is thinking on terms of years rather than months before it turns a profit. . He’s already invested some $900 million in the Fox News Channel that within four years took over top spot in cable TV news from CNN, and he now expects that channel to now earn about that figure annually, putting a value on the network of some $10 billion.

In Europe he was losing hundreds of millions of dollars with his Sky Italia satellite venture but he has been patient, the business has been turned around, and today he says that that service is earning around $250 million annually. In 2005, Murdoch paid $580 million for MySpace, saying his company had been too slow in taking advantage of Internet opportunities. He was roundly criticized for paying far too much but now, two years on, the site is profitable and News Corp’s Internet business is said to be approaching around $1 billion annually.

So with all of this good news Murdoch was very perky last week at the annual shareholders meeting where he boasted that given current stock market capitalization based on share prices that News Corp had overtaken Time-Warner to be the world’s largest media conglomerate. On Monday’s close, Time Warner was valued by Google Financial at $67.65 billion whereas News Corp was valued at $66.75, but then what’s $900 million anyway!

(Talking of Google, if it is to be considered a media entity, then it is far larger than News Corp. and Time-Warner put together – Google valued at $203.12 billion whereas the other two combined are at $134.4 billion. You can take another company their size and Google is still larger than the three combined!)

In the past Murdoch has criticized Wall Street for undervaluing News Corp, perhaps because of its newspaper holdings, but now things have finally changed. “Since January 1, we have outperformed all other media stocks, and indeed over the past five years we have seen our stock grow faster than both the general market and our peers. And it is with some pride that I tell you that last week our market value exceeded all of our traditional peers for the first time ever,” he told shareholders.

And the reason he wanted Dow Jones, and is investing so much in the new business channel? “There is a real hunger – not just in the US but across the globe – for financial news. The opportunities are immense and senior management has formulated a long-term plan to integrate the unique properties of Dow Jones within our complementary assets and overall corporate and digital strategy.”

In other words, given time, the Midas touch is going to work globally on financial news, too.

But there was one event that happened last week that soured things somewhat, allowing those who still don’t completely trust Murdoch to say, “I told you so”. CNBC, the prime target of the new business channel, had bought advertising space on the home page of Marketwatch.com, owned by Dow Jones, to be displayed on the day of the Fox launch. But the ads never showed and were instead replaced by ads for the Fox business channel. Sure, Marketwatch can control what ads appear when, but a class act for which Murdoch would want to be remembered? Hardly.

Murdoch seemed to understand this was bad PR when he explained he was “a bit shocked” at the removal of the ads and he said News Corp did not ask or demand that the CNBC ads to be removed. Could well be that someone at Dow Jones thought he/she would earn brownie points for boosting the Fox channel on its big launch day and that it might not have been good internal politics to allow the CNBC ads to run.

There’s no reason not to take Murdoch at face value, and for the sake of argument let’s accept it was an internal Dow Jones move, but if Dow is doing things like that now, before Murdoch even takes over the company which is not due for another couple of months, then no matter what people might say about Murdoch being kept at arm’s length on editorial matters it all rather begs the question of whether editors might just really ask themselves rather quietly, “What would Rupert think about this story?”

It was a silly move to remove the ads, it got tongues wagging, and it was yet another perfect example of just because one has the power to do something doesn’t mean that it should be done.