Rupert Murdoch – Part One – Empire of The Sun

About this episode

Hello and welcome to season 10 of Origin Story. Thanks for listening and supporting our work. We kick off with the world-shaking, century-spanning story of Rupert Murdoch. No single person has ever dominated, and changed, the media landscape like Murdoch. Starting out with an inheritance of a single newspaper in Australia, within three decades he had built a global media empire through his relentless desire to win and had become the most envied, feared and hated man in the business. In part one we cover the period from 1931 to 1989. Despite being the Oxford-educated scion of Australia’s most famous journalist, Murdoch always felt like an outsider, at war with a faceless enemy called “the establishment”. As a young man, he became a major force in Australian newspapers through a combination of brute force, cunning and seemingly impossible deals. In 1968, he came to Britain to snap up the News of the World and the Sun and revolutionised tabloid newspapers with his killer instinct for what readers really wanted, however ugly. Moving to America, he applied the same populist impulse to the New York Post and inspired outrage: one critic called the paper a “force for evil”. Murdoch had