City profile

Rupert Murdoch

“The last of the old-school press barons” marked his 90th birthday this week, said the Irish Examiner. It’s probably safe to say “the world’s post offices” weren’t “swamped by birthday cards”. Although Murdoch is “one of the most significant figures of his time”, his career has been blighted by his indifference “to the common good”. Even so, the odds are that he enjoyed becoming a nonagenarian more than his 80th birthday, when “British detectives were knee-deep” in the nascent News Corp bribery and phone-hacking scandal.

A decade on, “things are going rather better for the Australian-born tycoon”, said The Economist. The hacking scandal has “receded”; Fox News is still America’s most popular (if also its most despised) cable channel; and his “choicest assets” have been “sold to Disney at the top of the market”. Murdoch is still making deals: he recently “forced tech giants to pay for linking to his content”. But the outlook is clouding. Cable TV is in terminal decline, and Fox is facing a potentially costly legal problem (Fox is being sued for $2.7bn by Smartmatic, an election-software company, for airing claims that it rigged the election). Hanging over everything is the unresolved succession question – a “decades-long saga which HBO, a rival network, cheekily dramatised”. Now that James and Elisabeth Murdoch have opted out, their older brother, Lachlan, reportedly has “stars in his eyes” about rebuilding the empire. He may not get his way. On Murdoch’s death, control of the family trust will pass to all four of his eldest children.