Young Rupert
the making of the Murdoch empire
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
For half a century, the Murdoch media empire and its polarising patriarch have swept across the globe, shaking up markets and democracies in their wake. But how did it all start?
In September 1953, 22-year-old Rupert Murdoch landed in Adelaide, South Australia. Fresh from Oxford with a radical reputation, the young and brash son of Sir Keith Murdoch had arrived to fulfill his father’s dying wish: for Rupert to live a ‘useful altruistic and full life’ in the media.
For decades, Sir Keith had been a giant of the Australian press, but his final years were spent bitterly fending off rivals and would-be successors. When the dust settled on his father’s estate, Rupert was left with the Adelaide-based News Ltd and its afternoon paper The News — a minor player in a small, parochial city.
But even this inheritance was soon under siege, as the left-wing ‘Boy Publisher’ stared down his father’s old colleagues at the city’s paper of record, The Advertiser, and a conservative establishment kept in power by a decades-old gerrymander.
Led by Rupert’s friend, ally, and editor-in-chief Rohan Rivett, the fledgling Murdoch press began a seven-year campaign of circulation wars, expansion, and courtroom battles that divided the city and would lay the foundations for a global empire — if Rupert and Rohan didn’t end up in custody first.
Drawing on unpublished archival material and new reportage, Young Rupert pieces together a paper trail of succession, sedition, and power — and a fascinating time capsule of Australian media on the cusp of an extraordinary ascension.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australian journalist Marsh debuts with a perceptive account of the first 30 years of media mogul Rupert Murdoch's life. Born in Melbourne in 1931 to Sir Keith Murdoch, a conservative newspaper magnate, Rupert became enamored with socialism while in grammar school and, while studying at Oxford University, "waged public battles against press monopolies and the old dinosaurs who ran them, argued passionately for socialism and the power of the union, and bristled at a political and media class captured in a feedback loop of power and patronage." After Sir Keith died in 1952, Murdoch inherited his father's media holdings and returned to Australia, where he partnered with editor Rohan Rivett and transformed the Adelaide-based tabloid the News into a lucrative powerhouse. In Marsh's telling, Murdoch grew more conservative as he came to view the wages of his papers' unionized workers as an impediment to financing the acquisition of new outlets and building his media empire, culminating in the firing of Rivett in 1960 for his prolabor sympathies. Thoroughly reported and novelistic in detail (secretary "Betty Gillen... walked into the editor-in-chief's office, a bundle of letters in her hands and tears welling in her eyes. ‘It's going to be a terrible shock to you,' " Gillen says, bringing Rivett news of his dismissal), this provides keen insight into the business magnate's formative years.