How the Murdoch Family Built an Empire—and Remade the News

St. Bride’s, situated in an alley just off Fleet Street, is known as the journalists’ church. Having weathered not a few disasters—the Great Fire of London, in 1666, the Luftwaffe in 1940—it now advertises itself as “A Space for Silence,” offering an hour of contemplation each weekday afternoon, yards from the world’s most famous newspaper street. On a recent rain-soaked day, I arrived to find only one umbrella in the porch bucket and a church filled with lit candles and the chill of old sermons. In the left aisle was a book of remembrance honoring media workers who died in the line of duty, titled “Truth at All Costs.” Just behind it, wooden pews displayed commemorative plaques. “Sir Keith Murdoch,” one read. “A great journalist.”

Murdoch, the son of a Scottish clergyman, was, for a while, a managing editor of the United Cable Service, an Australian overseas news agency. Based in London in 1915, he was posted to Turkey to cover that front of the World War. On September 23rd, he wrote to the Australian Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, fearfully anticipating a winter offensive and the imminent slaughter of thousands of young men. Murdoch’s detailed report—later known as the Gallipoli Letter—exposed the way incompetent British officers were herding Australasian soldiers to their deaths. “I shall talk as if you were by my side,” he typed on the first page, marked “Personal.” He described visiting positions in Suvla Bay, wandering for miles through trenches, interviewing whatever leaders and officers he could. Many young men, he reported, were sent to the front lines without water, and were dying of thirst. Others were treated just as cavalierly. “To fling them, without even the element of surprise, against such trenches as the Turks make, was murder,” he wrote. Of the British officers leading the campaign: “The conceit and self-complacency of the red-feather men are equalled only by their incapacity. . . . Appointments to the general staff are made from motives of friendship and social influence. Australians now loathe and detest any Englishman wearing red.” Toward the letter’s end, one can feel a particular passion for clarity: “This is not a wild statement. It is truth.” Later, from London’s Arundel Hotel, Murdoch forwarded his letter to the British Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith. “If it adds one iota to your information,” he wrote in an accompanying note, “or presents the Australian point of view, it will be of service in this most critical moment.”

Murdoch remained in London to learn what he could about popular journalism from Lord Northcliffe, “the greatest figure who ever strode down Fleet Street,” in the words of his great rival Lord Beaverbrook. Northcliffe owned the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail and, by 1915, was the chief proprietor of the Times of London. “God made people read,” he famously said, “so that I can fill their brains with facts, facts, facts—and later tell them whom to love, whom to hate, and what to think.” He believed in profit rather than in public service, and the mixture he sold was both heady and popular: crime, sex, money, health tips. An enthusiastic humiliator of underlings, Northcliffe expected office boys to stand when he entered the room. Signing his correspondence “Lord Vigour and Venom,” he spied on senior staff and had their telephones tapped. “He used his newspapers as instruments of political power and political blackmail,” Hugh Cudlipp, a Welsh newspaperman of a later generation, wrote. Murdoch valued the monomaniacal Northcliffe as a friend, but worried, he said, about his habit of making employees feel like “the puppets of his will.” Yet, when Murdoch returned to Australia to revamp the Melbourne Herald, he promptly earned the sobriquet Lord Southcliffe.

Crime and gossip were Murdoch’s métier. By buying up newspapers and radio stations, he assembled Australia’s first media conglomerate. His son Rupert, born in 1931, grew up enchanted by the clatter of typewriters in the Herald newsroom, internalizing the electricity of the place. A senior master at Rupert’s school, Geelong Grammar, later remarked that he had never met a teen-ager so adept at manipulating others. Rupert wanted to join the Herald right after graduation, but his father insisted that he go to Oxford. After a rebellious spell as “Red Rupe,” he is said to have accompanied his father on a trip to America, during which the Murdochs briefly met with Harry Truman at the White House. Sir Keith began to form a better opinion of his son. “I think he’s got it,” he told his wife, Elisabeth. Before the verdict could be tested, he died of a heart attack, at the age of sixty-seven. Ever since, Rupert has spoken sentimentally of his father’s journalistic integrity, believing he was following his example in resisting both the prejudices of the establishment and the diktats of the liberal élite.