FAIR

02/09/2026

Air Mail: The Last Great Media Mogul

Gabriel Sherman (Air Mail, 1/31/26): ” Murdoch fostered a corporate culture where loyalty was often prized over ethics or the law.”

At SUNY Old Westbury, my teaching position became full-time, and among the courses I developed and taught was one I titled “Politics of Media,” focusing on racism and sexism in media, and on who owns media. Thus, I have studied Murdoch. This has included his activities in his home country of Australia, to which I was invited to give a lecture on investigative reporting to a university journalism program.

“I believe,” Gabriel Sherman (Air Mail, 1/31/26) recently wrote, “his most influential properties—Fox News, the New York Post and the Sun—have poisoned public discourse in the US, the UK and Australia.”

Sherman, who has written much about Murdoch through the years, said on Air Mail that Murdoch has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to keep the New York Post alive. He aggressively expanded the Wall Street Journal after buying it in 2007. This week, at 94, he launched the California Post—a West Coast edition of his New York tabloid, complete with “Page Six” and an ambition to set the news agenda of America’s most populous state.

Sherman’s just-published book is Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family—and the World.

Importantly, this Murdoch family fight concluded with Rupert’s eldest son Lachlan—who as Sherman relates “shares his father’s conservative politics”—inheriting the Murdoch media empire.

‘Not a fit person’

I have written (CounterPunch, 5/2/12) about how a committee of the British Parliament in 2012 declared that Murdoch is “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.” There was a phone-hacking scandal at his British tabloid News of the World at the time—in its wake, the tabloid went out of business—and also then Murdoch was attempting to take control of the British satellite system, British Sky Broadcasting.

The committee said Murdoch:

“turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications. This culture, we consider, permeated from the top.
The strategy of Murdoch, always arch-conservative in his politics, has been to start or take over and use media to further his political viewpoint.”

He became a US citizen in 1985, because the broadcast licensing system in the nation for TV and radio stations requires that only US citizens hold a major interest in a station. Also required is that owners be of good character. He took US citizenship to create a media empire based in the media capital of the world, the US.

The holdings in the empire are vast. A very limited list includes: Fox News Channel, Fox Broadcasting Company, Fox TV stations (29 in the US), New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, Barron’s, MarketWatch and HarperCollins Publishers. In Britain, he owns the Sun and the Times of London (once considered the most prestigious newspaper in the Western world); in Australia, the Australian, Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph. The list goes on and on.

“At Murdoch’s media companies,” writes Kerwin Swint in his book Dark Genius, “his operations are often used for expressly political purposes.” The New York Post is not profitable in a financial sense for Murdoch, but it has been invaluable to him as a battering ram for political causes and vendettas…. He has skillfully used his media properties to advance political agendas, and conversely, has used those political assets to advance his media properties.

As I wrote on Common Dreams (7/13/11) in 2011: “Murdoch has made a travesty of what journalism is supposed to be about. And he has institutionalized this on a global level.”

And now he is spreading his media corruption to California.