Murdoch and his most amazing decade ever

RUPERT Murdoch’s Fox News in America is celebrating its anniversary of 25 years of unparalleled growth and success.

Extraordinary and impressive as the Fox News story has been in its own right, the even more extraordinary fact is that it was the culmination of a decade of breathtaking entrepreneurial businesscreating risk-taking across three continents by Murdoch.

It was a business riskand-success saga of such mammoth scope, the like of which has never been remotely equalled by any other business person, certainly in Australian corporate history or indeed that of the world.

It had started in 1986 with Murdoch’s audacious move to take over the Herald & Weekly Times, the company that had been built and run by his father Sir Keith until his early death in 1952 from a heart attack.

Given the impression today of Murdoch’s News Corp – publisher of this paper – as the dominant mainstream media player in Australia, aside from the taxpayer-funded ABC monolith, back in 1986 Murdoch was in fact very much the struggling outsider. Back then, media in Australia was dominated by three groups.

The HWT, grown lazy and somnolent through three decades of easy domination in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, was easily the biggest and richest media group in Australia. Then came Sydney’s family-controlled John Fairfax, riding superrich on its “rivers of gold” classified advertising, and Kerry Packer’s all-dominant Nine FTA-TV network and its equally rich portfolio of magazines headed by the Women’s Weekly.

Murdoch’s News Corp was a distant fourth. And to win the HWT he had to fight off both Fairfax and the decade’s wiliest entrepreneurial wheelerdealer, the late Robert Holmes A Court.

Yet at the very same time, Murdoch was embarked on what was probably his most ambitious and riskiest move of all – establishing a fourth FTA-TV network across America to take on the powerful incumbent trio of NBC, CBS and (their) ABC, all of which had been entrenched since the 1940s.

This was and is Fox Broadcasting – an FTA-TV network like Nine and Seven, very different from and separate to Fox News, which came a decade later on pay-TV. Yet, almost without drawing breath, Murdoch would move in 1989 to launch the satellite Sky Television service in the UK – again, competing with the entrenched power of the BBC and its sole FTA-TV competitor, ITV. But, it also had to fight head-to-head with British Satellite Broadcasting, which had won the official licence to start pay-TV in the UK.

In each case it was against entrenched and far more powerful and profitable incumbents.

And all three of them succeeded; and not only succeeded, but forced massive change across the media landscape. The risk was breathtaking; Murdoch had to also survive Paul Keating’s 18 per cent interest rates and the recession we had to have.

British Satellite Broadcasting had to sue for peace and merged with Sky, with Sky and Murdoch coming out in control.

Fox in America changed forever sports broadcasting in particular. Oh yes, and in 1993 Murdoch also launched pay-TV in Australia with Foxtel. And then came Fox News in 1996 – taking headon the entrenched seemingly impregnable position of CNN, which had become almost a generic term for cable news.

To me, the truly astonishing aspect is that when Murdoch launched on the most extraordinary decade of entrepreneurial innovation and breathtaking risk-taking and, most of all, success that the world has ever seen, he had already been building his News Corp for 34 years, starting back in 1952 with just that one newspaper in Adelaide.

And he’s still there.