What Rupert Murdoch Owns, and How He Built His Media Empire | Hacker News Reader

What Rupert Murdoch Owns, and How He Built His Media Empire

nytimes.com

38 pointsmooreds21 comments

If there's an example of another human who has had more influence on the worldview of more people, I don't know who it could be. Murdoch might be some kind of media genius or just right place right time, but either way his influence is, sadly in my view, unprecedented.

Are we excluding religious founders? Even still, in no particular order and not exhaustive: Marx, Freud, Rand, Nietzsche, Skinner, Locke, Socrates, Darwin.

Many of these people also have the power of durability. We shall see if Rupert Murdoch's legacy endures.

You think? Maybe indirectly, as in those people influenced people to make decisions who in turn made things like political policies but none of these people had the direct popular influence in terms of raw numbers that Murdoch did, I would argue.

I mean if direct influence is the metric -- Fox has low millions according to Google. What do you think, 5 million people in a year under Murdoch's "direct" influence? Looks like Taylor Swift sold 4.35 million concert tickets in her latest tour. So who has more influence? Hard to say, in my opinion. We'd have to start unpacking the content of the information being propagated. How much of the information is novel? How receptive to new information is the audience? What is more impactful a news segment or a lyric? Seems impossible.

Or going about this another way, who was more influential: Hearst/Pulitzer or Freud? In my view, Freud flipped the world on its head meanwhile the other two are simply "yellow journalism."

5 million fox viewers is not how the power behind the throne is measured.

It sounds awful to put it this way, but all US citizens, Uk citizens, Australian live in his aftermath.

The Fox News model is now replicated globally, because it is so politically successful.

You're underestimating the reach of Fox News by a couple orders of magnitude. I think you misinterpreted an instantaneous measurement as an annual number.

"Tucker Carlson Tonight" was averaging 3.2 million live viewers every single night. If the average viewer watched his show once per week, that's 15 million different households watching per week. Clips from the show also get watched on Youtube, social media, blogs, etc. And that's just one show.

Fox News is the defacto news source for the majority of Republican-voting Americans. They play a massive role in deciding which stories get coverage and how the narratives about those stories get defined.

I would say that the real-time nature of Murdoch's power is at least, if not more, unprecedented.

> If there's an example of another human who has had more influence on the worldview of more people, I don't know who it could be.

Meta, Alphabet, Bytedance, etc (possibly twitter/x) individually have far greater reach and influence than Murdoch's properties.

Yes, but Murdoch’s properties reflect his worldview far more explicitly than those do (except for Twitter now).

Glad we can listen to one propaganda machine, NYT, talk about the media empire of a different propagandist, Murdoch

The NYT stole his playbook of constant fear mongering and division. I'm not sure they have the standing to criticize it without looking hypocritical. Ads don't click themselves I suppose.

The article skates over the loathing traditional Fleet Street press had for Murdoch:

    In 1969, he stepped into the British media market, buying The News of the World and The Sun.

    Mr. Murdoch acquired The Times and The Sunday Times in Britain in 1981, controlling a bigger chunk of the British media market.

He was regarded as destroying from the inside quality investigative journalism and replacing it with Tits 'n Arse page three girls and celebrity driven clickbait.

It's not that he invented either, he just weaponised the approach and took it to eleven. And then some.

Dennis Potter's final interview ripped into Murdoch, he revealed with glee how he'd named his growing tumour, the cancer that killed him, "Rupert".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Potter#The_media_and_Ru...

https://archive.is/N6tFS

Surprisingly nothing about their subsidiary’s (alleged) paytv hacking operations where they released hacks for competitor’s satellite TV services, and even against some of their own Paytv security products’ customers (to sell them more electronic counter-measures and card swaps).

http://murdochspirates.com/ (yeah, it’s one of the original reporter’s hand-written html and no ssl, but lots of court documents hosted there).

https://www.wired.com/2012/03/murdoch-tv-hacking/

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/rup...

https://www.reuters.com/article/business/corrected-update-1-...

Also torpedoed good internet for Australia, to prevent streaming services from knocking his cable tv out.

Amused by the early bit:

"The News of Adelaide, a newspaper in southern Australia"

Adelaide is the capital of the state of "South Australia". Saying Adelaide is in "Southern Australia" is not 100% wrong but obviously an error that has cropped up in the editing.

It was all worth it for the Simpsons, Family Guy and Always Sunny.

I'd happily trade those three shows for the hyperpolarization.

Murdoch is a symptom of that illness, not its root cause. The root cause is the Deep State (aka the “ruling class” if you’re not a fan of the term) for whom it is more convenient to have people bicker about bullshit issues that do not impact them instead of asking why real earnings have been flat for the last few decades while cost of shelter, education and healthcare has gone exponential. If not Murdoch it’d be someone else. Zuck and Pichai have absolutely zero scruples wrt promoting hyperpolarization on their platforms - anger drives engagement and clicks.

Which is why it's good that at least we got thee of the best comedy series out of old Rupert plus the inspiration for Succession.

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