The making of the Fox News empire

0:00In just about a week, Rupert Murdoch is going to launch a new publication, the California Post. In digital and print, no less, it's been described as a New York Post for the left coast. If Mr. Murdoch seems unbothered by reports of the death of media, perhaps that's for a reason. Murdoch Media isn't dying. Former Fox News personalities are currently running the Departments of Defense and Transportation. One is the border czar, one is the director of national intelligence, and Donald Trump, you may recall, is in the White House. Rupert Murdoch knows what he's doing. He has been one of the most important kind of media owners, not only for what he owns, but also for the way he's used it.

0:39He has had this fascinating, but for many people poisonous, impact on political discourse, on politics more generally. Today on Today Explained, a rerun of a show we ran last fall. My co-host Sean Ramos for him on how Rupert Murdoch remade the world. Do you remember?

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2:14Do you like the feeling of power you have as a newspaper proprietor, being able to sort of formulate policies for a large number of newspapers in every state of Australia. Well there's only one honest answer that of course and that's yes. Of course one enjoys the feeling of power. I think Rupert is a very good and tough businessman. We've only seen one side of Mr. Murdoch at the present moment. We won't stand people like him. We don't like people like him. He's too powerful, he's got too much money. People like him spit on people like us, treat us like dirt, kick us.

2:52Is Rupert Murdoch a Nepo Baby? Murdoch is absolutely a Nepo Baby. If the term Nepo Baby was in existence in 1931, yes, he is a Nepo Baby. My name is Des Friedman and I am a Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths University of London. My name is Matthew Rickardson and I'm a Professor of Communication at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. One of our former prime ministers, Malcolm Turnbull, who tangled with Rupert Murdoch, has described him as Australia's deadliest export. His whole presentation is of this kind of scruffy, rebellious outsider figure shaking his fist at the establishment and the elites.

3:39The reality is that when he was born in 1931, his father was the managing director of a big newspaper group in Australia. They lived in possibly the wealthiest suburb in Melbourne in Australia, went to Oxford University, and then his father dies in 1952 and leaves him one afternoon newspaper in Adelaide, which is another city here in Australia. His father, Keith, really pioneered tabloid journalism in Australia. My name is Graham Murdoch. No relation. And I'm an emeritus professor at the University of Loughborough in the UK. Keith Murdoch realised that newspapers had the power to bring down politicians.

4:28So Rupert inherited not just newspapers, but actually a whole kind of philosophy, if you like, of what newspapers could do and how they operated. He's very clear from very early on that he wants to learn everything about running newspapers and then very quickly from about 1954 he starts expanding. And he always had the reputation for being quite ruthless. He was trying to get a deal done and this politician was being obstructive. So he said to him, look, I could either give you favourable publicity or I can pour a bucket of shit on you every day. What's it to be? Not surprisingly, the politician decided he'd rather have the favourable publicity.

5:25It's kind of illustrative of the sort of idea that you can make and break reputations. and that was really part of the sort of family philosophy. The main ambition was to make his father proud and to do better than his father, to internationalise the father's operation and he was willing to throw everything at it to get there. He moves into England in the late 1960s. When he came to Britain, he bought the News of the World which was this, you know, humongous, best-selling Sunday tabloid, a huge commercial success. Murdoch took over the News of the World in January. Since then, its circulation has risen by more than half a million.

6:10This old family business just off Fleet Street is now his power base in the newspaper world. Was buying into the News of the World your own idea or was it suggested from someone else? It was entirely my own idea. It had printing presses, but they weren't used for most of the week, which was uneconomical. So he began looking around for a daily title and he fixed on The Sun. Which at that point is an ailing newspaper and he turbocharges that. Murdoch's plans for The Sun are still uncertain. It seems that it'll be a spicier version of the Daily Mirror. Depends what you call by spice and sex and salaciousness.

6:48We're obviously not going to avoid the subject but it's not going to be a dirty paper, of course not. He immediately converted it into a tabloid, became famous for having these semi-nude models. Topless women on page three. Tabloid newspapers have been sensational for a long time and for him that is the key message. That's, you know, those kinds of stories will drive circulation. The most famous or infamous example of this some years later is when he publishes the fake diaries of Adolf Hitler. He's advised these diaries are fake by a historian. He famously says, fucking publish. Fucking publish.

7:32And he's, you know, he's questioned about that. His answer is twofold, which, well, first is, well, remember we're in the entertainment business and, you know, I'll take the additional hundreds of thousands of copies in circulation that we got from this. The Sun, it became enormously popular, enormously influential, both through the size of its audience and through its ability to shape politics. His rise in the UK coincides with the rise of Margaret Thatcher. And they share a kind of notion they're both outsiders. She's a grossest daughter from a provincial town, not part of the old English establishment.

8:19And the old English establishment also very hostile to Rupert. But that becomes an advantage because with Thatcher, he finds a kind of a fellow traveler. They share a kind of neoliberal sort of philosophy of free markets and antagonism to public ownership. And I mean, Murdoch's papers were very much in support of that Thatcher agenda. He already owns two of the most popular newspapers and he wants to buy more. an opportunity comes up to buy the Times and the Sunday Times. And under the law at the time, there's a requirement that this matter is referred off to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.

9:07Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, she ensures that that doesn't happen so that he is able to buy the Times and the Sunday Times. The classic kind of paper of record in the UK, because he wanted to have that entree into the elite. He wants the prestige, he wants the power, and he wants the audiences. If you look at Rupert's career, he's always had the popular newspaper that could address, you know, the masses. But you also have an elite newspaper, so you're speaking to the insiders, but you're also speaking to the mass of the people. That's what gives him his influence, that he can pull the strings at both levels, if you like.

9:52Mr Murdoch, we've called this programme Who's Afraid of Rupert Murdoch? And it seems that many people are afraid, principally because they can't believe that you won't interfere and alter the character of the newspapers you've bought, the Sunday Times and the Times. What do you say to that? Well, I certainly didn't buy them to change them, and I certainly have the right to insist on excellence. It was alleged that in the Australian election, when Fraser beat Whitlam, your papers actually distorted the news in favour of your candidate. In both occasions, you had industrial trouble. We, in fact, had trouble with a number of left-wing journalists because we took their distortions out of their stories.

10:32We were not the only newspaper saying that the government should change. The Falkland Islands and their dependencies remain British territory. When Margaret Thatcher and her government launched the war in the Falklands, Murdoch's newspapers give a lot of editorial support for that. Gotcha! Our lads sing gumbo and whole cruiser! Headline, The Sun. Maggie sends in the troops. Headline, The Sun. The paper that supports our boys. This was central to cementing the relationship to Murdoch and Thatcher. If you were asked to name the two key people who reshaped Britain in this more neoliberal vein in the 1980s.

11:15It'd be hard to think of two other people, the Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch.

11:24These stories you're telling us about Rupert's time in the UK in the 70s and the 80s, they establish, I think, three major themes. One, a ruthlessness. a willingness for a newsman to lie if it sells more papers or does good business. And then three, you know, not just a desire to inform the public about politics, but to drive politics himself. That is a good summary. And you can see the fruits of this, if you like, the bitter fruits of this. decades later in the form of the phone hacking scandal in the United Kingdom in the kind of mid-2000s. The newspapers were declining in revenues and readership.

12:16So that kind of forced them to be even more militant in looking for sensation. Newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, that is mostly the son of the news of the world, hacked into the phones of members of the royal family, celebrities, but also, and this is crucial, also ordinary people, not famous people. It's discovered that they've hacked the phone of this dead teenage girl, Millie Dowler. The face of Rupert Murdoch, after he apologised privately and publicly to the family of Millie Dowler. I was appalled to find out what had happened. And I apologised and I had nothing People are revolted. It creates a huge public reaction.

13:04Shame on you! Shame on you! In the view of the majority of committee members, Rupert Murdoch is not fit to run an international company like BSkyB. You know, the Murdochs could not control the revulsion. They could not kind of put a lid on it. They were forced to do something that Murdoch has almost never done in his career, which is to close a newspaper. He closed the news of the world instantly. It folded overnight. And then, of course, an official government commission of inquiry. Murdoch sat down in front of a parliamentary committee. He looked old. It was an amazing performance. He forgot all the details when they were put to him and he said...

13:48I would just like to say one sentence. This is the most humble day of my life. Pretty soon after that, once he got out of the committee room, he magically regained his memory and regained his posture and his poise. And of course, he has gone on to live his life in full.

14:11Rupert, he's undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the media, certainly the last 50 years, not only for what he owns, but also for the way he's used it. Australia was the training ground. The UK was where he could really find his feet and wield political power. Many, many millions of newspapers sold every day, which gives him the capital but also the influence. All of those lessons are to be applied in the US and ultimately the rest of the globe.

14:47Rupert Murdoch in America, when Today Explained returns. Support for this show comes from Vanta. Vanta uses AI and automation to get you compliant fast, simplify your audit process, and unblock deals so you can prove to customers that you take security seriously. You can think of Vanta as your always-on AI-powered security expert who scales with you. That's why top startups like Cursor, Linear, and Replit use Vanta to get and stay secure. Get started at Vanta.com slash Vox. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Vox. Vanta.com slash Vox. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other?

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17:00Rupert Murdoch's first foray into the American media isn't on TV. It's not in New York. It's in San Antonio, Texas, of all places. Well, I mean, yeah, but then it very quickly moved to New York. Start spreading in the news So he bought the New York Post in... Mid-1970s. ...to establish a base. He gets access to all sorts of, at the political level, gets access to heavy hitters in the commercial world, in the political world, in the cultural world. You know, the New York Post historically had backed Democrats. When he buys the New York Post, They campaign vigorously for Reagan to become the president.

17:43Phones run hot after big debate. Reagan wins TV poll two to one, the New York Post. He is in sync with Ronald Reagan ideologically and with the sort of Republican Party values. It's a big city, but it's a narrow elite. Trump's relationship with Murdoch does go back to the 1980s and to the New York Post. Murdoch had a very low opinion of him. This is a man who'd lost money running a casino. But good gossip column is another one of Murdoch's, you know, must-haves in his formula for newspaper success. Page Six is most definitely a very successful gossip column. Trump is one of its key sources, you know.

18:24They kind of have that symbiotic relationship where they're constantly pumping him up and he's constantly feeding them stories because he's a bit of a gossip magnet himself. Marla boasts to her pals about Donald, quote, best sex I've ever had. The brashness of Trump is very different to the much more considered, strategic, studious, long-term thinking of Murdoch. It is not like it's an immediate marriage. But he realises pretty quickly that he can make a lot more money in television. And that's when, you know, he buys 50 % of 20th Century Fox and that's the beginning of the Fox network, of the legacy we are now very familiar with.

19:11He is the guy whose company bankrolled.

19:17The Simpsons, ideologically, is not the kind of thing you might think would sit that easily with a small C conservative like Rupert Murdoch. He has made several cameo appearances where he was introduced as... River Murdoch, the billionaire tyrant. He's willing to take a hit for the greater good of the company. You know, this is a man who will do anything to increase the ratings and the audiences. The billionaire tyrant. He's also buying up film studios. With Titanic as a movie that his studio financed, it could have ruined him, the gamble that he took on Titanic, and instead it made him. Was it over a billion dollars that Titanic took?

20:01He's got those mediums which make a lot more money and he's also doing similar things in Australia and in the UK. He develops a global media empire is what he does. But I think his ambition is always to come back to news. The Simpsons doesn't get you into the White House or the front or the back door of Number 10 Downing Street. Being a news mogul does. The other piece of the puzzle in helping him develop in America is the regulatory environment. There was this thing called the Fairness Doctrine, which came up after the Second World War. What that said was that if you were going to cover contentious affairs on television, you had to present both sides of the story.

20:52Reagan was all about deregulation, getting rid of as much regulation as you can So the Fairness Doctrine goes, and what happens then is that unleashes or unlocks the door for the rise of people like Rush Limbaugh. Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program, a program exclusively designed for rich conservatives and right-minded Republicans and those who... You know, the idea of balance and Rush Limbaugh don't exist in the same sentence, you know. If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it's Caucasians. It opened the space for overtly partisan television, as you didn't have any longer to give the other side of the story.

21:33Roger Ailes, who was the key founding person for Fox News, and Murdoch and Ailes, they look at what the success that Rush Limbaugh is having and they look to see if they can transplant that into television. And that opened the space for Fox News. By this stage, in terms of cable news, you've got CNN, which began in about 1980. We're going to report the news, whether it's Afghanistan or Botswana or Moscow or whatever. Ailes and Murdoch, they realised that instead of having lots and lots of correspondence everywhere, they'll have the bare bones. You know, you'll do the reporting of the news, but it won't be a lavish suite of foreign correspondence.

22:18it's much, much cheaper. And you will bring in guys primarily from radio, like, you know, Bill O 'Reilly and Sean Hannity and so on, to provide opinions about the news. You know, what it means, how to think about it, etc. The number that really scares me, African Americans on food stamps, is up by 58%. How do they need to rethink ludicrous? All of corporate America, in my opinion, needs to rethink their responsibility to their country. And so you put those people on in the evening, Bill O 'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and they bloviate on demand. You know, they don't just have opinions, they have big opinions and theatrical opinions.

23:02Tonight, I can report the sky is absolutely falling. We are all doomed. The end is near. The apocalypse is imminent, and you're going to all die, all of you. At least that's what the media mob and the Democratic Extreme Radical Socialist Party would like you to think. Tabloidisation, that's what is applied to Fox News. It changes the media landscape in the sense that the predominant thing being, tell me what to think about the news, make me angry or upset or whatever about the news. It's an enormously profitable business. You know, you've ceased being a news or journalism outfit at that point and you've become something quite different, which bears a much closer relationship with propaganda.

23:46Murdoch has always run his media empire in, you know, different parts of it, work with different parts of an audience, the upmarket respected newspapers versus the downmarket ones. The Wall Street Journal was on Rupert Murdoch's radar for a long time. This was a newspaper that was unbuyable for him, that the family who owned it said, not in a million years will we sell to a man like Rupert Murdoch. And yet, within a matter of months, they had sold to Rupert Murdoch. And when you're Rupert Murdoch and you have both Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, again, it positions you in such a, you know, you have that powerful role.

24:29Who is really going to go against you? Do you think Rupert Murdoch surpassed his own expectations? Oh, undoubtedly. Undoubtedly. Look, who knows? I'm not in his head, so I don't know. But if he could have looked into the crystal ball and seen himself in, you know, from 1952 to 2025, I think it's very hard for him to, would have been very hard for him to conceive of being where he is now. He certainly transformed the British media, the Australian media and the US media. he has had this fascinating but for many people poisonous impact on political discourse on politics more generally. Democrats have finally realized what what cost them the election in 2024 and the answer is being a-hole.

25:19Are you legal or illegal? You're illegal? Yeah. Welcome to America. Thank you. You can stay. All right thank you thank you so much. For now. Now we can see how much damage the company has done to journalism, to democracy. It's like Victor Frankenstein and his monster. You know, they've created a monster which has now gotten away from them. And there's actually two monsters. The first monster is the Fox News audience. And the second monster is Donald Trump.