A finely balanced assessment of the media mogul’s sprawling empire – written by his right-hand manLike him or loathe him, Rupert Murdoch remains one of the world’s most fascinating characters. He is the subject of more than a dozen biographies and is the central figure in at least a score of other books, most of which are highly critical and suffer from their authors having little or no personal knowledge of the man. The Murdoch Method should therefore be viewed as a book apart, because Irwin Stelzer spent the best part of 30 years in close contact with the media mogul.It is tempting to deride Murdoch’s current status by inserting “old” before both the words “media” and “mogul”. But at 87, he continues to exert influence through his chairmanship of two giant companies, News Corp, the newspaper and book publishing conglomerate, and 21st Century Fox, the sprawling film and TV entertainments group. While building them, Murdoch has generated continual controversy. Among the charges are business ruthlessness, political meddling, editorial interference, hostility to regulation and cultural vandalism. Nor should we overlook the UK scandal of phone-hacking at the News of the World, which led to the paper’s closure, and the US scandal of sexual impropriety at Fox News, which led to its chief executive being ousted and the subsequent firing of one of its main presenters. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2018-08-01 00:00:00 UTC ]