The key ideas

The Murdoch Method: Notes on Running a Media Empire

Irwin Stelzer, 2018

In 1952, Rupert Murdoch was a twenty-one-year-old student at Oxford when his father died and left him one newspaper in Adelaide, The News. He went home to Australia and got to work. Sixty years later his companies printed tabloids and papers for the elite, broadcast by satellite, made films and decided which story millions of people would see first.

Irwin Stelzer advised Murdoch for many years, and he takes apart what made him who he is: a love of risk, a distrust of the establishment and an unusual way of running a company. He walks through the turning points, from buying British newspapers and the Fox film studio to the phone hacking scandal, and shows how a media empire grew out of a single paper.

Who it is for

For anyone who wants to understand how media owners gather influence, steer attention and turn the news into political leverage.

I'm a catalyst for change. You can't be an outsider and be in business for 30 years without leaving a few scars around the place.

What this book is about

It's easy to picture media power as one man holding a newspaper, a TV channel and the political agenda in his hands. But it almost never looks like a single button. It is built up over years: out of ownership, out of an audience's habits, out of well-chosen fights and out of access to the people who make decisions. That is the puzzle of Murdoch. He didn't just report the news. He built a system that, again and again, decided which news people would see first.

This book is not a biography, and it is not a guide to becoming more ruthless. It looks at the public story of Rupert Murdoch: how one Adelaide paper became an international media conglomerate, why a loud editorial line can be a commercial tool, and why even the strongest system doesn't cancel the cost of a mistake. We checked the facts against open sources, and when an example is ours, we say so.

Idea 1. Influence starts with where attention goes, not with opinion

Murdoch did not inherit a ready-made empire. In 1952, when his father died, twenty-one-year-old Rupert got one newspaper in Adelaide, The News. Everything else he built himself. In 1969 he bought The Sun in London and relaunched it as a tabloid within two days: shorter, sharper, more emotional. In the first year its circulation doubled, and by 1978 it had overtaken the long-time leader, the Daily Mirror.

The point is not the size of the circulation. Murdoch understood early that media don't sell text or airtime. They sell a place in the reader's head: what a person notices in the morning, what they talk about during the day, which problem they decide is urgent. So owning the channel of delivery gives you more than the right to print a story. It lets you choose, day after day, where the shared conversation begins.

A common mistake is to think influence comes from one lucky story. In fact it builds up through repetition: the audience keeps coming back to a familiar source and takes its choice of topics as the natural order of the day.

How to use it: when you judge any media outlet, look not only at what it thinks, but at which topics it makes visible and which it never notices.

This example is ours, not a case from the biography. A person opens one news app in the morning. They don't have to agree with its conclusions, but they already have a ready-made list of what counts as important today, and they spend the rest of the day thinking inside that list.

Whoever hands out the first minutes of attention doesn't control thoughts directly, but decides which questions people discuss at all.

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About the author

Irwin Stelzer is an American economist and business consultant who advised Rupert Murdoch for about 35 years. In this book he describes the Murdoch method from the inside, neither as a hatchet job nor as flattery.

All books by this author: Irwin Stelzer

Terms from the book

  • The Times
  • Fox
  • distribution
  • Murdoch: Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-American businessman who built an international group of newspapers, TV channels and film studios out of one Adelaide paper.
  • The News: The Adelaide newspaper Murdoch inherited in 1952 when his father died. His business started with it.
  • The Sun: A British newspaper Murdoch bought in 1969 and relaunched as a tabloid within two days. Its circulation grew fast, and by 1978 it had overtaken its rival, the Daily Mirror.
  • Daily Mirror: A British mass-market tabloid, for many years the rival of The Sun in the race for the biggest circulation in the country.
  • Wapping: An area of London where Murdoch moved the printing of his papers to a new plant in 1986. It let him leave the old print unions behind and led to a labour dispute that lasted about a year.
  • News Corp: The media company that grew out of Murdoch's business. After the assets were split in 2013, it kept the publishing and news businesses.
  • News of the World: Murdoch's British Sunday tabloid, closed in 2011 over the scandal of illegal access to voicemail.
  • BSkyB: A British satellite broadcaster in which Murdoch's group was a major shareholder. Its bid to buy the whole company was withdrawn in 2011, at the height of the scandal.
  • Dominion: An American maker of voting equipment. In 2023 Fox paid it 787.5 million dollars to settle a defamation suit.
  • media conglomerate: A large group of companies that brings different kinds of media together: newspapers, television, film, digital services and publishing.
  • tabloid: A mass-market paper with short pieces, big headlines and stories built to grab quick, emotional attention.
  • editorial line: A paper's settled position: which topics and judgements it treats as important, and how it presents them.
  • political access: The chance to be heard where decisions are made, and to shape which issues politicians have to take into account. It is not the same as formal power over them.
  • vertical integration: When one company controls both making a product and the channels that deliver it to the customer.
  • influence: The ability to steer attention, change decisions or reframe a conversation without giving a direct order. In this book it is a resource to keep apart from proven power.

All terms

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