Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch (born March 11, 1931) is an Australian-born American businessman, media tycoon, and investor. He is the Executive chairman of News Corp, a worldwide media conglomerate, and chairman of the board of Fox Corporation.

Murdoch in 2006

Quotes

• Fuck Dacre. Publish.
  • Response to The Sunday Times editorial staff who asked whether they should continue to publish the paper containing the Hitler diaries referring to Lord Dacre (also known as Hugh Trevor Roper). He had previously authenticated them, but now declared they were fakes.
  • Robert Harris, Selling Hitler

• After all, we are in the entertainment business.
  • Remarks after the Hitler diaries were exposed as forgeries.
  • Robert Harris, Selling Hitler

• News — communicating news and ideas, I guess — is my passion. And giving people alternatives so that they have two papers to read (and) alternative television channels.

• Can we change the world? No, but hell, we can all try.

• In this country, Fox News has gotten a big, big audience that appreciates its independence. There's passion there, and it's pushed. … It has taken a long boot time, but it has now changed CNN because it has challenged them — they've become more centrist in their choice of stories. They're trying to become, using our phrase, more fair and balanced.^{[citation needed]}

• I have to admit that until recently I was somewhat wary of the [global] warming debate. But I believe it is now our responsibility to take the lead on this issue.

• The greatest thing to come out of this [the war in Iraq] for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in any country.

• Well, except for ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, the Washington Post, and about another 100 newspapers, I find little evidence of liberal bias in the media.
  • Asked about liberal bias in the mainstream media.^{[citation needed]}

• Keith Olbermann is trying to make a business out of destroying Bill O'Reilly. He's done certain things to Bill O'Reilly that I believe were way over the line. I think that's bad behavior. But it's okay for him to criticize Bill. And Bill shouldn't be so sensitive. He should ignore that.
  • Asked about Bill O'Reilly's main on-air rival MSNBC host Keith Olbermann

• They’ve started it. We’ve had bitter, personal attack on some of our people. They tried to destroy our credibility as a network. But it is only natural that the people can stand who were personally attacked and their children were personally attacked should fight back and I support them. I support my people completely.
  • Asked about feud between News Corp. with GE and MSNBC

• While it's impossible to be completely prepared for a downturn of this magnitude, we began priming ourselves for a weakening economy earlier last year. We have implemented strict cost cutting measures across all our operations. We have reduced headcount in individual businesses where appropriate and we've scaled back on capital expenditures. Even in plush times, we have never been a company that tolerates fat. So in times like these, we are better positioned to weather this cycle than our competitors.
  • About News Corp. 6.4 billion quarterly lost in 2008-09

• People are reading news for free on the web, that's got to change.
  • Comments made on April 2, as quoted in "Murdoch Calls Google, Yahoo Copyright Thieves — Is He Right?" Wired (April 3, 2009)

• Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things electronic.

• What a fucking idiot.
  • About Donald Trump, as quoted in "Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President" (January 2017), by Michael Wolff, New York magazine

• The current American political debate is profound, whether about education or welfare or economic opportunity.  It is crucial that conservatives play an active, forceful role in that debate, but that will not happen if President Trump stays focused on the past. The past is the past, and the country is now in a contest to define the future.
  • Rupert Murdoch Tells Trump to STFU About 2020 Vanity Fair (November 17, 2021)

• I was very nervous. I dreaded falling in love – but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I'm happy
• We're both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together
  • Murdoch, 92, announced his engagement to Ann Lesley Smith, 66 in a New York Post interview, as cited in "Rupert Murdoch announces engagement to Ann Lesley Smith" The Guardian (20 March 2023). The intended marriage, which would have been his fifth, was called off within a few weeks.

Quotes about Murdoch

before 2014

• Media conglomerates like Murdoch’s News Corp. are among the most powerful corporations on the planet. His papers beat the drums for war while distracting with gossip and glitz.
  • Amy Goodman "Radio for the People" (2007)

• Murdoch runs his media empire in the US as an unvarnished political operation.
  • Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan "The questions hanging over Murdoch, USA" (2011)

2014–2016

• I once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union. "That's easy", he replied. "When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice."
  • Anthony Hilton "Stay or go - the lack of solid facts means it's all a leap of faith", Evening Standard (London, 25 February 2016)
  • In a letter to The Guardian a few months later Murdoch wrote: "There is much fake news published about me, but let me make clear that I have never uttered those words.". He also stated in the same letter: "I have made it a principle all my life never to ask for anything from any prime minister". During his testimony to the Leveson Inquiry in April 2012, he made a similar statement, but this was disputed shortly afterwards by the former British prime minister John Major who said Murdoch "never asked for anything directly from me", but "he was not averse to pressing for policy changes".

• It seems hard to believe today, but as recently as 2008, tackling climate change still had a veneer of bipartisan support, even in the United States...in 2007, Rupert Murdoch-whose Fox News channel relentlessly amplifies the climate change denial movement-launched an incentive program at Fox to encourage employees to buy hybrid cars (Murdoch announced he had purchased one himself). Those days of bipartisanship are decidedly over.
  • Naomi Klein This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014)

• Rupert Murdoch, a right-wing billionaire, is one of the most powerful people on the planet. His News Corporation owns enormous amounts of media throughout the world, including the major newspapers on three continents-North America, Europe, and Australia. In the United States, Murdoch's major holdings include Fox television, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, TV Guide, and Barron's. At a time when scientists speak in an increasingly urgent tone about the planetary crisis of climate change, Murdoch works in tandem with the fossil fuel industry in rejecting science.
  • Bernie Sanders Our Revolution (2016)

2023–present

• Few people bear more responsibility for Trump than Murdoch. Fox News gave Trump a regular platform for his racist lies about Barack Obama's birthplace. It immersed its audience in a febrile fantasy world in which all mainstream sources of information are suspect, a precondition for Trump's rise. (Many people have described losing loved ones to Fox’s all-consuming alternative reality.) After Trump lost in 2020, Fox helped spread the defeated president’s falsehoods about a stolen election, which both contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection and cost Fox nearly $800 million in its settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.
  • Michelle Goldberg "The Ludicrous Agony of Rupert Murdoch", The New York Times (21 September 2023)
  • Rupert Murdoch had stepped down as Chairman of News Corp and Fox News in favor of his elder son Lachlan.