![]() ![]() The “phone-hacking” scandal led to prison sentences and public inquiries, and it was the mere tip of the iceberg of tabloid methodological excess. The most notorious case involved a teenager who had gone missing and was later found dead. In 2011, it emerged that investigators working for the Sunday paper had fished for stories in poorly secured voicemail accounts. Nonetheless, Murdoch’s two formerly popular and profitable tabloid titles, the Sun and the News of the World, are today best known for their moments of shame - in the case of the latter, the scandal that killed it. It was a raging success, replacing the newsier, Labour-leaning Mirror as the country’s most-read daily. The novel discovery imposed on Murdoch’s revamped Sun was that, in 1970s Britain, every day could be as filthy as Sunday. He had already bought the News of the World, the leading exemplar of the peculiar entertainment-oriented sensationalism of the British Sunday paper, sexy enough to have been banned in independent Ireland for a big chunk of the twentieth century. Ironically, Rupert Murdoch built the British side of his media empire from the ashes of a once great left-leaning newspaper. Soon it would lose any traces of its left politics, too. But the Herald had lost its trade-union ownership share, its original name, and most of its readership by the time Murdoch bought the paper in its new incarnation as the Sun in 1969. The Daily Herald was originally a strike sheet in 1911, then a (rare) pro-suffragist, pro-Irish, and antiwar daily in 1912–14, before eventually becoming a hugely popular working-class paper through the mid-twentieth century. Ironically, Murdoch built the British side of his media empire from the ashes of a once great left-leaning newspaper. ![]() His Sky television network was the foundation stone for Murdoch’s shift from print to broadcast media and transformed global soccer with its lucrative investment in the English Premier League. Murdoch’s Sun became the country’s best-selling newspaper and left an indelible mark on British political discourse in the neoliberal era. But it was in Britain that he established himself as a major player. Murdoch started off as a newspaper magnate in his native Australia and finished up as the owner of Fox News, one of the biggest cable networks in the United States. Rupert Murdoch recently announced that he will be stepping down as chairman of his planet-spanning media empire in November.
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