Although once part of the Herald chain, News Ltd’s Adelaide afternoon paper the News and its Sunday paper the Mail were soon embroiled in an all-out circulation war with the Herald-aligned Advertiser.įacing this larger, better-resourced rival, Rupert seized any opportunity to strike back and within weeks of his arrival ran a front page story accusing his father’s old firm of making a cynical “bid for press monopoly” by pressuring his mother to sell the News and the Mail to the Advertiser. But to Rupert, the family firm was under threat.Īfter his mother sold the family stake in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail to the Herald to clear Sir Keith’s debts, Rupert moved from Oxford to Adelaide, home of News Ltd, to make his start. To these men, Keith offloading Herald holdings like the Adelaide-based News Ltd to his family had been outrageous theft. To his critics, he was a “cuckoo” in the Herald nest, quietly selling assets of a publicly traded company to his own private family trust.īut after his death, Murdoch Sr’s old colleagues at the Herald’s Melbourne headquarters wasted no time clawing Keith’s side hustles back into the fold. To his admirers, Sir Keith was one of Australia’s great pressmen, a truth teller and a patriot. Over 40 years Murdoch Sr had climbed his way up from a penny-a-line freelancer to the editor and chairman of the Herald and Weekly Times, a company he helped grow into Australia’s biggest news empire – the original “Murdoch Press”, albeit one the family never actually owned. Sir Keith had exhausted his final years, his wealth and his influence piecing together an inheritance for his young son, who he hoped would lead a “useful altruistic and full life” in the media. Since his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, had died in October 1952, Rupert had been in a sink-or-swim fight to retain his family’s place in Australia’s media set and the 1958 hearings of the Australian Broadcasting Control Board (ABCB) was just the latest skirmish. There is no attempt to build an empire or anything like that. “Do you think that impulsiveness, combined with your comparative youth and your fears for the future are qualities that are to be looked for in an application of that kind?” asked Antony Larkins QC, a Sydney silk acting for one of his licence rivals, Frank Packer.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |