The Murdochs: Sir Keith, Dame Elisabeth, Rupert and James...

[Goodrum]

Dame Elisabeth Murdoch AC, DBE (born 8 February 1909) is an Australian philanthropist.

She is the widow of Australian newspaper publisher Sir Keith Murdoch, and the mother of international media proprietor Rupert Murdoch. When Keith Murdoch was knighted in 1933, she was styled Lady Murdoch. She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1963 and styled as Dame Elisabeth Murdoch.

Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KSG (born 11 March 1931) is an Australian American media mogul and the Chairman and CEO of News Corporation.

Beginning with one newspaper in Adelaide, Murdoch acquired and started other publications in his native Australia before expanding News Corp into the United Kingdom, United States and Asian media markets. Although it was in Australia in the late 1950s that he first dabbled in television, he later sold these assets, and News Corp's Australian current media interests (still mainly in print) are restricted by cross-media ownership rules. Murdoch's first permanent foray into TV was in the USA, where he created Fox Broadcasting Company in 1986. In the 2000s, he became a leading investor in satellite television, the film industry and the Internet, and purchased a respected business newspaper, The Wall Street Journal.

Rupert Murdoch was listed three times in the Time 100 as among the most influential people in the world. He is ranked 13th most powerful person in the world in the 2010 Forbes' The World's Most Powerful People list. With a net worth of US$6.3 billion, he is ranked 117th wealthiest person in the world.

James Rupert Jacob Murdoch (born 13 December 1972) is the son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and currently serves as Chairman and Chief Executive of News Corporation, Europe and Asia, overseeing assets such as News International (British newspapers), SKY Italia (satellite television in Italy), and STAR TV (satellite television in Asia).

He sits on the News Corporation Board of Directors and is a member of the Office of the Chairman. He is also non-executive chairman of British Sky Broadcasting, in which News Corporation has a controlling minority stake.

He was formerly an executive vice-president of News Corporation, the controlling shareholder of BSkyB, and served on the boards of directors of News Datacom and of News Corporation.

James Murdoch is a British citizen by birth and a naturalized U.S. citizen. He would have lost Australian citizenship when his father became a U.S. citizen, but he is eligible to reclaim Australian citizenship, and may or may not have done so.

He is the fourth of billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch's six children, and the third with Scottish-born Anna Maria Torv.

As a youngster James was regarded as the brightest of the Murdoch children, but was also considered something of a rebel.

He first came to public notice as a 15-year-old intern at the Sydney Daily Mirror, but made headlines in the rival The Sydney Morning Herald after he was photographed asleep on a sofa at a press conference.

Murdoch attended Horace Mann School in New York City and graduated in 1991. He then studied film and history at Harvard University, where Murdoch edited underground magazines and drew a comic strip for the college's famed satirical magazine, Harvard Lampoon. He dropped out of university in 1995 without completing his studies. With university friends Brian Brater and Jarret Myer, he backed the establishment of Rawkus Records, an independent hip hop record label. The company was bought by News Corporation in 1998.

[Goodrum]

Dame Elisabeth:

One's Chief Obligation: is to think about other people and how one can help them..

Apart from raising her children, Dame Elisabeth has devoted her life to philanthropy. Before her marriage she worked as a volunteer for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She joined the management committee of the Royal Children's Hospital in 1933, serving as its president from 1954 to 1965.

A 2003 article in the Melbourne newspaper The Age said: "Few can rival Dame Elisabeth's enormous contribution. Her interests are so many they need to be alphabetically catalogued: academia, the arts, children, flora and fauna, heritage, medical research, social welfare. Many of Melbourne and Australia's most cherished institutions, from the Royal Children's Hospital to the Australian Ballet and the Botanic Gardens, have benefited from her involvement. But Dame Elisabeth also devoted herself to less popular causes: prisoners, children in care, those battling mental illness and substance abuse."

Dame Elisabeth retains a substantial stake in the Murdoch family's media businesses and uses the proceeds to fund her extensive donations to charity.

She is known to have disapproved of the behaviour of some of his British tabloid newspapers and, as a result, Rupert is reputed to have reined in some of their sexual content.

[Goodrum]

Dame Elisabeth a Provider Guardian, down to earth, expressive, loyal, a wonderful host, devoted to helping people in life, modest lady, 'work' is love, and loves her work, lifelong contributor to all areas of society, cooperative, concerned about health and welfare of people:

(Personology, page 125)-

Supplying consistes in seeing to it that others are furnished with the necessities of life..

Rupert for some reason I thought him an Inspector Guardian, the Warren Buffett of media:

He was not a man to rest on the laurels of his inheritance and soon became a significant player in the Australian media market. He bought various media concerns like The Daily Mirror and Festival Records. His speciality was to take loss making media, turn them around, and use the resulting profits for further acquisitions.

His business acquisitions spread to Britain through the acquistion of News of the World, The Sun, The Times and the Sunday Times and to the US through The New York Post. He seemingly didn't mind the tabloid image as long as it was highly profitable business. During 1986-87 he had a fever pitch battle with the unions in Britain due to the introduction of the Wapping plant that used newer production methods and a lot less workers. He prevailed and the strangle hold the unions had on the industry, was broken.

In 1985 he also had become a naturalized citizen of the United States since laws only allowed Americans to own television stations in America. He went on to acquire Fox Network and 20th Century Fox.

During the nineties he expanded to satelite through the acquisition in Asia of Star Television with an audience from the Middle East to Japan, BSkyB in Britain, as well as the Foxtel pay network in Australia. In 1996 he introduced Fox 24hr News Channel as direct competitor to Ted Turner's CNN

Blair also notes that Paul Keating, then prime minister of Australia, felt Murdoch was "a bastard, but one you could deal with".

What did the man who led Labour to victory in 1997 make of the media mogul? "I thought Rupert an enigma, and the more I got to know him, the more I thought so," Blair writes. "In the end – and I am aware of the shrieks of disbelief as I write this – I came to have a grudging respect and even liking for him. He was hard, no doubt. He was rightwing. I did not share or like his attitudes on Europe, social policy or on issues such as gay rights, but there were two points of connection: he was an outsider, and he had balls.

"The 'outsider' thing was crucial to understanding him. He remained both immensely powerful and, at certain quite elemental points, anti-establishment. He would admire Mrs Thatcher, but not necessarily the Tory party with all its baggage, airs and graces. That gave me something to work with."

Blair's predecessor, John Major, was rather more measured and formal in his appraisal of Murdoch.

"I have never found Murdoch an unpleasant man; in person he is reserved, almost shy, and far from the bullying press baron of legend," he wrote in John Major: The Autobiography.

David Blunkett also found the News International chief a less formidable figure in person than many might assume.

"I had dinner with Rupert Murdoch at the Hampstead home of Les Hinton [chief executive of News International UK]," he writes in The Blunkett Tapes: My Life in the Bear Pit. "[He] was perfectly decent to deal with – very reasonable, although I accept that he may not be so in business matters."

A hint of that famous steeliness comes out later in the book, though, when Blunkett recalls being invited to Wapping and offered a drink and a column on the Sun by Murdoch.

"I accept. What immediately goes through my head is … you don't refuse Rupert twice."

[Goodrum]

He is more attentive than expressive, more the monitor than providing and way more enterprising than enquiring.

...So attentive to minute detail that they have little to say..

(Personology page 120)

Rupert has been known to ring his staff and barely say a word, but still know everything that is happening and expect to have that conveyed..

About him:

For the first three months of our interviews, he never addressed a word to or even looked at my research assistant, Leela de Kretser, who was at each of the sessions, and ignored her questions—perhaps because it’s not necessary to acknowledge a girl, or possibly because it was embarrassing for him that she was, at the time, a pregnant girl. (She had the baby. He eventually warmed up.)

But his odd lack of seductiveness or felicitousness—contributing to his aura of villainy—became after a while alluring in itself. There’s no spin, because he really can’t explain himself. Rather, what you see is what you get. He’s transparent. The nature of the beast is entirely evident.

One morning when Leela and I arrived at Murdoch’s office for another interview session, we found the 77-year-old News Corp. chairman and C.E.O. hunched over the phone reporting out a story. He’d been out the night before and gotten a tip. Now he was trying to nail it down. His side of the conversation was straight reporter stuff: Who could he call? How could he get in touch? Will they confirm? Barked, impatient, just the facts. Here was the old man, in white shirt, singlet visible underneath, doing one of the same basic jobs he’d been doing since he was 22, having inherited the Adelaide News in Australia from his father. And he was good at it. He was parsing each answer. Re-asking the question. Clarifying every point. His notepad going. He knew the trade. Of how many media-company C.E.O.’s could that be said? This wasn’t a destroyer of journalism—this was a practitioner..

[Goodrum]

And just on James, from Tim Arango:

James Murdoch is trying to succeed at the company his father built, but he is a very different character: more blunt, more bureaucratic and less able to smooth ruffled feathers. He has his father's aggressiveness but not his tactical sense or temperance..

Rupert, his father being an Inspector Guardian.

Somewhat of a rebel, as described on wiki, but rebel can be just someonethatis autonomous, self reliant-ish, not necessarily raving Artisan rebel-esque.

Just didn't want to jump in knee jerk with Artisan, he may well be a rebel, technology loving 'arrogant' Rational? Maybe Mastermind?

[Goodrum]

However - and here's where James Murdoch and his London team score the big win - there are few hard questions about phone hacking in the NYT piece. Tantalisingly for non-Murdoch Brit reporters, Rebekah Brooks makes a rare public appearance. The normally silent chief executive of News Int says that over at News International these days "we think about the newspaper business like a subscription business," which is her way of saying that James Murdoch has a different relationship to newspapers than his father.

From Arango's NYTimes piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/busin ... anted=1&hp

In the private room at Wheeler’s of St. James’s, father and son politely argued about the lesser of the public controversies swirling around the Murdoch empire: the firing of Andy Gray, the chief soccer pundit for their Sky Sports network, for making sexist comments.

“Can we stop firing people for making a joke?” Rupert Murdoch asked.

James Murdoch defended the decision to fire Mr. Gray and later stood up, tapped a glass and reminded the gathering that it was 25 years ago that his father had busted London newspaper unions, a seminal event in both British labor history and the historical narrative of the Murdoch media kingdom, the News Corporation.

[Goodrum]

JAMES MURDOCH declined to speak on the record for this article. He put forward numerous people who know him well to speak on his behalf, and he asked others, including longtime friends from his childhood in New York City and time at Harvard, not to speak. (One of his best college friends, after first agreeing to speak, e-mailed with the note: “Sorry for not getting back to you earlier. As you probably figured out, the P.R. people at News Corp are handling this.”) Many others spoke without first seeking James’s permission.

Through nearly two dozen interviews, on and off the record, with people who have worked directly with him or are close to him personally, a portrait emerges. It suggests an aggressive, ambitious executive who has cemented his stellar reputation in the pay-television business in Asia and Europe, who at times has made assertive plays for expanding his power base within the company, who has nurtured a brand of conservative politics that often puts him at odds with the profit center that is Fox News, and who has shown an eagerness to play in the corridors of power in ways noisier than his father’s more subtle maneuverings.

“There’s an intensity to him,” said Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, who has worked for James. “The guy’s got intensity wrapped around energy.”

That James works from a standing desk in his office in London — sitting is less efficient in getting work done — adds to the image of him as a tightly wound executive, as do his black belt in karate and his hobby of competitive cycling. So does the way he offers his business card to visitors: with a two-handed thrust, as they do in Asia, where he once ran the company’s regional television business out of Hong Kong. And so does the episode, well told in the British press, of him showing up last April at the office of The Independent, a rival paper, to berate its editor for running advertisements critical of the Murdoch empire’s supposed influence in British elections.

Another business acquaintance, Saad Mohseni, an Afghan media mogul who has worked with James in establishing Farsi1, a joint venture to beam satellite television into Iran, said: “He expresses himself. He swears if he needs to; he gets aggro.”

[Goodrum]

While James Murdoch has little interest in having his words distilled through a journalist’s pen, he is not shy about offering unfiltered views of the world. In 2009, he gave the prestigious MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival — a talk that is still recalled for its broad attack on the BBC and the public subsidies it enjoys. It was a clarion call for free markets that cited Darwin, Tolstoy and the international banana market.

James took particular aim at the effect that free news from the BBC online was having on other news outlets. “Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the Internet,” he said. “Yet it is essential for the future of independent journalism that a fair price can be charged for news for people who value it.”

In the fall of 2009, James decided to have The Sun — which has had enormous historical influence on British parliamentary elections — switch allegiances from the Labour Party, led by Gordon Brown, to the Conservative Party and David Cameron. The paper made the endorsement early in the election cycle, just as Labour was holding its party conference. It was an aggressive move that rankled even his father, who had been close to Mr. Brown.

[Goodrum]

“The phone-hacking story and this transaction have no connection at all but in the political context and in the context of the narrative of the Murdochs in the U.K.,” said Claire Enders, a media analyst in London who owns her own firm, Enders Analysis. Ms. Enders is a vocal opponent of the Sky deal, and wears her political stripes prominently. “I’m a liberal,” she said. “I’m a pacifist. I’m a feminist.” She also gave up her American citizenship in protest of the Iraq war.

“We have had 30 years of Murdochs in this country, 30 years of closeness with prime ministers, ministers and senior M.P.’s,” she said.

...
those who know James Murdoch often note that he does not relish the newspaper culture the way his father does. He seems to take no delight in the company of reporters and in the sort of gossip that permeates the newspaper world and that his father both traffics in and relishes.


“James shows no sign at all of liking journalists,” said Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a former reporter at The Guardian in London who covered the Murdochs. “In fact, it’s quite the opposite.”

[Goodrum]

I am thinking he is a Mastermind:

James Murdoch has a singularly different take on the profession that defines his father. Rupert Murdoch wanted to make journalism sell. James’s job is to make it pay. “That ethos has seeped into the company with everything we do,” Ms. Brooks said. The company, she said, now pays little attention to circulation figures, but instead speaks in the language of pay television. The preferred metric is average revenue per user.

“When James came over from Sky, he said, can you give me the data on your readers?” Ms. Brooks recalled, adding that now “we think about the newspaper business like a subscription business.” That means News International goes deep into market research of the sort James learned to conduct while running Sky. When Ms. Brooks was promoted from editor of The Sun to chief executive of News International, James insisted that she attend the London School of Economics, a request that she said never would have been made by Rupert Murdoch.

Are they not about greater efficiency? The Great Contenders? Research, data, better systems?

In a 2009 interview with Der Spiegel, the German magazine, James said, “We are always the outsider, as a challenger who tries to be better and more efficient than the established players.”