The story of Rupert Murdoch's attempt to establish himself as the most powerful media figure on the planet. Even while battling cancer, Murdoch took his greatest gamble - floating the world's biggest satellite platform on Wall Street.
If you want to understand how modern media has changed the world, this is the one book you must read. Rupert Murdoch is the man everyone talks about but no one knows. He’s everywhere, a larger-than-life media titan who has spent a lifetime building his company, News Corporation, from a small, struggling newspaper business in Australia into an international media powerhouse. Rupert Murdoch charts the real story behind the rise of News Corp and the Fox network: the secret debt crises and family deals, the huge cash flows through the offshore archipelagos, the New York party that saved his empire, the covert government inquiries, the tax investigations, and the bewildering duels with Bill Gates, Ted Turner, Gerry Levin, Ron Perelman, Newt Gingrich, cable king John Malone, Michael Eisner, Tony Blair, and televangelist-turned-diamond-miner Pat Robertson. Murdoch’s story, however, is more than just how one man built a global business. Rupert Murdoch is both a biography of Murdoch the man (including the divorce from his wife, Anna; his remarriage to a woman young enough to be his granddaughter; and the struggle between his two sons for eventual control of the family holdings) and a “follow the money” investigation that reveals how he has managed to have such a huge impact on the communications revolution that promises to utterly transform life in the twenty-first century. The investigation concentrates on Murdoch’s three great campaigns: in the 1980s, when his determination to launch an American television network overturned the media industries of three countries; in 1997, when Murdoch took on every broadcasting group in America; and the process of reinventing himself since then, culminating in his bid to win DirecTV from General Motors. This is the saga of the man who has stalked, infuriated, cajoled, threatened, and spooked the media industry for three decades, whose titanic gambles have shaped and reshaped the media landscape. Win or lose, Murdoch is the man who has changed everything. And Neil Chenoweth is the right person to tell the story: In 1990 he wrote a magazine article that prompted a secret Australian government inquiry into Rupert Murdoch’s family companies, and he’s been on the Murdoch case since then. Chenoweth reveals what no person ever has about the man (and the company) who is probably the most significant media player of them all.
Murdoch's Flagship provides the first in-depth overview of the Australian, mapping its uneven and uncharted progress across its first three decades. While the Fairfax and Packer media groups have received detailed historical coverage over the years, Rupert Murdoch's News Limited and the Australian have not been given the same systematic attention by historians. Denis Cryle draws on a vast amount of secondary print material, his own extensive interviews with past and present staff and a detailed reading of the Australian's newspaper files to capture the vitality of the newspaper over three seminal decades.
Rupert Murdoch is one of the most powerful men in the world today. As chief executive of News Corporation, he controls a global media empire which boasts some of the major players in newspapers, television, publishing and the movie business. In the English-speaking world, and increasingly in 'untapped' but potentially lucrative markets such as China, he wields an influence as political kingmaker second to none. How did he do it? How did this empire, a loose 'archipelago' of media islands large and small, come to be so successful and influential? Building on many years' research and featuring many previously undisclosed revelations, THE MURDOCH ARCHIPELAGO is the most definitive survey yet of Murdoch's life and times; how power flows from influence; and whether this should (or if it can) be regulated.
Structured around the fourteen days in 2011, from the moment the News of the World's hacking of the phone of a murdered 13-year-old schoolgirl was exposed, The Fall of the House of Murdoch is a riveting account of the scandal that closed the world's best-selling English-language newspaper, forced one of the most powerful families in the world to appear before Parliament and finally prompted Murdoch's departure from the UK newspaper world he dominated for three decades. But the book covers more than just Hackgate. It is a forensic expose of News Corp's culture, through the early days in Australian media, the purchase of the News of the World, the Sun and the Times group, the Wapping move to the move into satellite broadcasting and the creation of the Fox Network. Exhaustively researched and fully sourced, The Fall of the House of Murdoch is a morality tale for our times, a family drama played out on a world stage and required reading for anyone seeking to understand the hidden connections that bind politics, business and culture together.
Corporations and Cultural Industries: Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and News Corporation, by Scott Warren Fitzgerald, provides an introduction to the political economy of international media corporations. This text fills a fundamental gap in the critical media studies field, expanding on the relative paucity of academic studies. To ground the discussion, Fitzgerald focuses on the growth of three specific media conglomerates: Time Warner, Bertelsmann and News Corporation. Adopting an approach rooted in critical political economy, the book explains the corporations' growth through an engagement with broader social theories: the wider conditions of capital accumulation (especially theories of corporate competition and financialization); issues of institutional logic and corporate strategies; and the role of states as regulators, mediators of opposed interests, and facilitators of corporate expansion. The first section presents debates in social theory, addressing issues that pertain to cultural industries and dimensions in which they both challenge and extend these wider social theories. The second section presents detailed case studies of the three contemporary media 'mega companies' across the range of operations they coordinate, both within and outside the cultural industries. By analyzing the specifics and complexities of different media industries, Corporations and Cultural Industries examines how financialization processes re-gear the internal operations of media corporations in a manner that pits one sector against another. This book provides an in-depth study that can be used as stand-alone teaching resources or as a valuable supplement to a variety of media courses.
What happens when one of the biggest media groups in the world sets up its own private security force? What happens when part of this operation goes rogue? News of the World is not the first Murdoch company to be accused of skullduggery. Murdoch's Pirates is about the dark deeds of a secret division of News Corp, based in Jerusalem, operating in a combustible world of ambitious ex Scotland Yard men and former French and Israeli secret service agents, who have one thing in common - they have all left their previous employment under controversial circumstances. NDS produces smart cards for use by pay TV operators; this is a fiercely competitive field and one of the ways you get business is to demonstrate that the smart cards produced by your rivals can be easily pirated. Unless you are very careful, sometimes those pirated versions make their way out into the real world, where they can really damage your competitors' businesses. Murdoch's Pirates reads like a thriller, set in the arcane world of hackers and pirates. There are mysterious deaths, break-ins and wild chases. Some of the individuals involved may well be amongst the brightest minds on the planet, but sometimes their rivalry can get out of hand and their impulsive behaviour can defy logic. Chenoweth recounts this clandestine war with his customary lucidity, drollery and brio.
Nine? Eleven? Bah! Bosh! Give us tens, and in plenty! At last, a book that has never before existed, by the only author to have written it. Gideon Haigh's The Tencyclopedia-a tribute to the thrall of the decimal. Here, grouped as never before, Ten Affairs, Aunts, Masses, Mice, Methods, Plans, Principles and Penises. Here, as you have never seen them, Ten Indian Traffic Signs and Ten Flags That Feature Weapons. Here, as you have never read them, a History of Airline Food in Ten Paragraphs and a History of Chopper Read in 10 Chapters. Ten Tens in the Tencyclopedia 1. Ten Anagrams of American Presidents 2. Ten Avatars of Vishnu 3. Ten National Flags That Feature Weapons 4. Ten Slurs of the Dutch 5. Ten Indian Traffic Signs 6. Ten Fictional Mice 7. Ten Works Not Written by Coleridge 8. Ten Bildungsromans 9. Ten Philanthropic Enterprises of Andrew Carnegie 10. Ten Pirates
Empires of Entertainment integrates legal, regulatory, industrial, and political histories to chronicle the dramatic transformation within the media between 1980 and 1996. As film, broadcast, and cable grew from fundamentally separate industries to interconnected, synergistic components of global media conglomerates, the concepts of vertical and horizontal integration were redesigned. The parameters and boundaries of market concentration, consolidation, and government scrutiny began to shift as America's politics changed under the Reagan administration. Through the use of case studies that highlight key moments in this transformation, Jennifer Holt explores the politics of deregulation, the reinterpretation of antitrust law, and lasting modifications in the media landscape. Holt skillfully expands the conventional models and boundaries of media history. A fundamental part of her argument is that these media industries have been intertwined for decades and, as such, cannot be considered separately. Instead, film, cable and broadcast must be understood in relation to one another, as critical components of a common history. Empires of Entertainment is a unique account of deregulation and its impact on political economy, industrial strategies, and media culture at the end of the twentieth century.
In 2012, Britain and the Commonwealth celebrate the 60th anniversary of Elizabeth II's accession to the throne. The royal family have overcome a number of obstacles in its recent history, yet today it appears to be riding on a wave of popular affection. But has Elizabeth II's reign been a good thing for the UK? Or have the style, rituals and underlying culture of the modern monarchy held Britain back from its potential in the 21st century world? In this groundbreaking and thought-provoking new book, Stephen Haseler argues that the class structure which the monarchy has continued to encourage has retained outdated, yet seemingly entrenched, attitudes which have negatively affected Britain's economy, capacity to innovate and international stature. He provides an alternative political and social history of modern Britain which will be a provocative yet entertaining and informative read in the Queen's anniversary year.