Rupert Murdoch – Part Two – Decline of the Digger

Hello and welcome to season 10 of Origin Story. This week we conclude the story of Rupert Murdoch, the media titan people love to hate. After a brush with bankruptcy in 1990, Murdoch came roaring back with a new focus on television around the world. In 1996, he launched Fox News under the baleful command of Roger Ailes, which became a key driver of the polarisation of America. For a period, his celebrity-loving new wife Wendi Deng and attraction to New Labour seemed to pull Murdoch himself in a more liberal direction but his innate conservatism, and the profit monster of Fox News, won out. In the 2010s, Murdoch looked truly vulnerable for the first time. Damaged by the phone-hacking crisis at his British tabloids and multiple scandals at the increasingly extreme Fox News, he downsized his empire and wrestled with a succession psychodrama of his own making. After pitting three of his children — Lachlan, Elisabeth and James — against each other for years, he finally chose an heir but the bitterness he generated in the process has had seismic ramifications for his business. Murdoch is 95 and the global edifice he has spent seven decades building looks shakier than ever. Along the way, we dig into Murdoch’s strange personality, his pugilistic deal-making, his unique parenting style, and his subtle way of exerting political influence over his outlets even when he’s half a world away. Why did one bank in Pittsburgh almost ruin Murdoch? How did Fox News go from laughing stock to kingmaker, and what has it done to America? How did the question of inheritance come to tear Murdoch’s family apart? In what ways have the personality and prejudices of one man changed the shape of the world we live in? And what happens to his kingdom after he’s gone? • Support Origin Story on Patreon to help the podcast AND get merch and extra material too. Reading list • Neil Chenoweth – Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Media Wizard (2001) • Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie – Stick It Up Your Punter! The Uncut Story of the Sun Newspaper (2013) • Harold Evans – Good Times, Bad Times (1983) • Robert Harris – Selling Hitler (1986) • Simon Jenkins – The Market for Glory: Fleet Street Ownership in the Twentieth Century (1986) • Andrew Marr – My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism (2004) • Andrew Neil – Full Disclosure (1996) • John Preston – Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell (2021) • William Shawcross – Murdoch (1993) • Gabriel Sherman – Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family — and the World (2026) • Michael Wolff – The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch (2010) Articles and podcasts • Anonymous, ‘The Battle for New York’, Time (17 January 1977) • Ken Auletta – ‘The Pirate’, New Yorker (6 November 1995) • Julian Barnes – ‘Union Blues’, New Yorker (14 April 2003) • McKay Coppins – ‘Growing Up Murdoch’, Atlantic (14 February 2025) • Clyde Haberman — ‘Roger Ailes, Who Built Fox News Into an Empire, Dies at 77’, New York Times (18 May 2017) • Hendrik Hertzberg – ‘Topless Tabloids of Gotham’, New Yorker (15 February 1999) • Joseph Lelyveld – ‘Murdoch Savors His British Coup’, New York Times (2 March 1986) • Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg – ‘How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade the World’, New York Times (3 April 2019) • Jane Martinson – ‘“We’re clearly heading towards collapse”: why the Murdoch empire is about to go bang’, Observer (22 February 2025) • Andrew O’Hagan – ‘How the Murdoch Family Built an Empire — and Remade the News’, New Yorker (2 February 2026) • David Shaw – ‘Making of a Megamogul’, New York Times (26 May 1985) • Gail Sheehy – ‘A Fistful of Dollars’, Rolling Stone (14 July 1977) • Slow Burn: The Rise of Fox News, written and presented by Josh Levin, Slate (2024) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production www.podmasters.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices