Rupert Murdoch Was the Symptom of a Rotten Public Culture That Will Outlast His Departure
Rupert Murdoch is stepping down next month after decades of promoting reactionary political causes. His toxic reputation is well deserved, but the factors shaping conservative media bias were always broader than Murdoch himself and will survive his departure.
Rupert Murdoch attends his annual party at Spencer House in London, June 22, 2023. (Victoria Jones / PA Images via Getty Images)
Rupert Murdoch recently announced that he will be stepping down as chairman of his planet-spanning media empire in November. Murdoch started off as a newspaper magnate in his native Australia and finished up as the owner of Fox News, one of the biggest cable networks in the United States. But it was in Britain that he established himself as a major player.
Murdoch’s Sun became the country’s best-selling newspaper and left an indelible mark on British political discourse in the neoliberal era. His Sky television network was the foundation stone for Murdoch’s shift from print to broadcast media and transformed global soccer with its lucrative investment in the English Premier League. Ironically, Murdoch built the British side of his media empire from the ashes of a once great left-leaning newspaper.
Scandal Sheets
The Daily Herald was originally a strike sheet in 1911, then a (rare) pro-suffragist, pro-Irish, and antiwar daily in 1912–14, before eventually becoming a hugely popular working-class paper through the mid-twentieth century. But the Herald had lost its trade-union ownership share, its original name, and most of its readership by the time Murdoch bought the paper in its new incarnation as the Sun in 1969. Soon it would lose any traces of its left politics, too.
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