http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2011/07/31/rupert-murdochs-motley-empire-fortune-classic-1984/?section=magazines_fortuneMurdoch had greater success achieving size, reach, and power -- things that associates say matter a lot to him. He routinely uses his newspapers to promote his political causes. His papers have been strident supporters of President Reagan and New York Mayor Edward Koch, and relentless attackers of politicians who offend his sensibilities, including Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman.
News Corp. publishes more than 80 newspapers and magazines in Britain, Australia, and the U.S. The newspapers include the Times of London, the oldest and one of the most prestigious English-language dailies, the Sun of London, the largest and one of the east prestigious English-language dailies, and the Daily Mirror, the largest afternoon paper in Australia. The company's other holdings include two Australian TV stations, four book publishers, a half interest in Australia's largest private airline, and parts in two oil and gas exploration consortiums.
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In the future envisioned by Murdoch, the line between entertainment and news will increasingly blur. His critics claim he's never known the difference anyway. Murdoch, 52, started in 1955 with a tired daily inherited from his father in the Australian city of Adelaide. He has applied a rigid formula of scandal, sports, cheesecake, and crime to most of the papers acquired since. Murdoch's tabloids luridly depict a world in which fiendish criminals prey on women and children, evil immigrants menace the natives, and most government affairs are too tedious to note. By the time he moved into England in 1969 to buy the Sunday News of the World, Murdoch's Australian company owned nearly a dozen papers. Most had been bought on the cheap with borrowed money and turned around with Dickensian cost controls, strident promotion, bingolike contests, and the tabloid formula.
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Murdoch stole quietly into the U.S. in 1973, buying two marginally profitable papers in San Antonio for $18 million. The next year he splashily launched the Star, a knock-off of the sensational weekly National Enquirer. Then came the acquisitions of the New York Post; New York magazine; the Village Voice, a far-left New York weekly; and the Boston Herald.
...more...
it was apparent as early as 1984 - if only anyone had really cared ...
sigh