Llewellyn King: Murdoch profits richly by mining resentment, tribalism and sex

Rupert Murdoch.

Rupert Murdoch stands astride the Atlantic. He is the most successful newspaper publisher in the United Kingdom and the proprietor of Fox, the most successful cable news channel in the United States.

While he has many other spectacular holdings in the U.K., the United States, Australia and Asia, those are the two pillars on which the empire stands now that he has sold 21st Century Fox Entertainment to Disney.

I believe the two pillars are linked by what amounts to the Murdoch formula: find a chauvinistic, nationalistic vein and mine it.

Murdoch blew on the embers of resentment and stoked the fires of tribalism through The Sun, his big British moneymaker, and Fox News, his American gold mine.

He understood this social stratum, whether it was in working-class Britain or spread across what we now call the Red States in America. This audience felt ignored, put upon and unloved. Its traditional champions on the left — the unions, the Labor Party and the Democratic Party — had condescended to it, but not celebrated it.

Murdoch articulated its frustrations and gave them voice not where you would expect it on the left, but on the right.

A new and exceptional book by Irwin Stelzer, The Murdoch Method, lays out how Murdoch did this and how he holds his empire together. Stelzer should know. He has been a friend and consultant to Murdoch and his many enterprises for 35 years.

Stelzer, whom I have known for 45 years, is worthy of a book in his own right. When he met Murdoch, he had already achieved success enough for many a man. He founded National Economic Research Associates and sold it well. Then, after a stint with Rothschild in New York, he enjoyed running an energy program at Harvard. Then came Murdoch.

Stelzer worked so closely with Murdoch that a rival newspaper in London described him as “Murdoch’s man on earth.” And he was.

He was sometimes the go-between for British prime ministers and leading American figures, from Richard Nixon to Richard Cheney. Stelzer made Murdoch’s case to the mighty, and he crunched numbers. Money and the power of media made this world go around.

As the title suggests, Stelzer explains in his book how Murdoch manages so diverse a company as News Corp. and how he created and grew it from the newspapers he inherited from his formidable father, Sir Keith Murdoch, in out-of-the-way Adelaide, Australia.

What emerges is a portrait of man who thinks of himself as an outsider, a loner: a practitioner of a kind of minimalist management out to war against theestablishment and its elites.

Murdoch, both as a publisher and a businessman, has been incredibly courageous. He flipped The Sun from timid left to truculent right. He also stripped the brassieres off the models on Page 3. Chauvinism, sex and celebrity gossip was what Murdoch offered, and the public could not get enough. He also broke the British print unions in a near-military move to a secret printing site in Wapping, East London, in January 1986.

In America, Murdoch pretty well failed with newspapers he purchased in San Antonio, Boston and Chicago. He has not exactly succeeded with The New York Post, but he keeps it going as a personal indulgence. He is doing well with The Wall Street Journal. But Fox News is the jewel in his American crown.

Stelzer’s Murdoch and his method is one of a small executive staff: excellent executives who are very well paid and prepared to answer a call from their boss day and night. He let really gifted people, like Roger Ailes, of Fox, run their enterprises until there was a scandal and then, bang, the locks were changed, and settlements were paid. Murdoch is generous and ruthless.

Murdoch and Stelzer were in a way made for each other, although they did argue and sometimes Stelzer lost, only to find out just how wrong he was — as when he opposed the creation of the Fox Business Network.

Stelzer acknowledges he does not like everything Murdoch does; and he should not. Murdoch has treated the world as a playground where you make money by making damaging mischief — so you hire people like Sean Hannity and tolerate the inanity. Or you court the Clintons, but back Trump.

Stelzer has been on a wild ride and he takes you along in clear, readable prose.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: Murdoch created the formula with which Ailes built Fox News

In the beginning, there was Rupert Murdoch. He created the formula.

Then he met Roger Ailes and installed him as head of what would become America’s most successful cable news channel, Fox News Channel, also known as Fox News.

And so the formula of conservatism and sex, pioneered on a newspaper in Britain, came to television and the rest, as they say, is history.

In 1969 Murdoch bought an ailing British newspaper called The Sun. He bought it from the Daily Mirror Group, then the publishers of the most successful tabloid in Britain, The Daily Mirror, and its sibling The Sunday Mirror (where I once worked). The Daily Mirror was firmly left-wing and The Sun, if anything, more so. It had started life as The Daily Herald and was owned collectively by the trade union movement.

The new owners, who used an old formula — the working class as exploited, downtrodden and hopelessly dependent on the largesse of their employers — failed to attract or excite readers.

Murdoch, fresh from Australia (although he had worked earlier as an editor in London), looked around and saw something quite different. He saw a new worker, who owned a car, took vacations in Spain (thanks to jet travel), and did not feel oppressed.

The British workers — especially working men — had thrown off the past and were now much more like the workers of Australia and the United States. It was also a period of sexual freedom.

These workers would be Murdoch’s target.

Overnight, without warning, he turned The Sun from far-left  whining to triumphant far-right throatiness. Murdoch had realized that the working man had become a man of property.

As for sex, Murdoch would go further. British tabloids had always published “cheesecake” — pictures of busty, young women in bikinis. Murdoch took off the tops: Every day, on Page Three, he published a photo of an English rose blooming in a bikini bottom. It was bold and it was brave and it worked.

The Sun, with its new brawny politics of nationalism, anti-European attitude, right-wing enthusiasm and topless beauties, was a triumph. It began a meteoric rise, almost entirely at the expense of the forelock-tugging Daily Mirror.

The formula was born: right-wing nativism and sex.

When Murdoch came to the United States, he found the society was less louche and he could not put nudity into his newspapers. Also, there was a tradition of editorial duality: Although the politics of newspapers was not concealed, readers wanted to think that the news was impartial. Murdoch bought newspapers in San Antonio, New York, Boston and Chicago, and he started a weekly supermarket tabloid.

None succeeded and gradually Murdoch sold off these properties, except for The New York Post. Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth, told me that he was the first to admit that he had misunderstood the U.S. market. That is probably why when he bought The Wall Street Journal in 2007, he was careful to respect that property and to change it incrementally — for the better.

But the formula was not dead. When Ailes applied it to television, it worked all over again. Except this time, the result was even more spectacular in political power and profit.

Fox News is the voice of raucous conservatism, all served up with sex appeal.

Ailes clearly has had a fascination with beautiful, blond women reading the news — and other channels are going that way.

Ailes has done more than apply the formula: He has applied it with brio. He has given the news pace. It moves along and little inventions, like “Around the World in 80 Seconds,” are part of that energizing.

I visited with Ailes when Fox News was just beginning its ascent. He was thrilled with the fact that it had just drawn slightly ahead of CNN Headline News. I do not think he realized then how potent the formula would be and what heights his creation would reach.

Llewellyn King is host of White House Chronicle on PBS.  Based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., he is a longtime publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant. This originated on InsideSources.