Show Notes
Hello and welcome to season 10 of Origin Story. Thanks for listening and supporting our work. We kick off with the world-shaking, century-spanning story of Rupert Murdoch.
No single person has ever dominated, and changed, the media landscape like Murdoch. Starting out with an inheritance of a single newspaper in Australia, within three decades he had built a global media empire through his relentless desire to win and had become the most envied, feared and hated man in the business. In part one we cover the period from 1931 to 1989.
Despite being the Oxford-educated scion of Australia’s most famous journalist, Murdoch always felt like an outsider, at war with a faceless enemy called “the establishment”. As a young man, he became a major force in Australian newspapers through a combination of brute force, cunning and seemingly impossible deals. In 1968, he came to Britain to snap up the News of the World and the Sun and revolutionised tabloid newspapers with his killer instinct for what readers really wanted, however ugly. Moving to America, he applied the same populist impulse to the New York Post and inspired outrage: one critic called the paper a “force for evil”.
Murdoch had a tabloid soul but craved broadsheet prestige. His purchase of the Times and Sunday Times in 1981 set off a series of dramas: the firing of beloved editor Harold Evans, the Hitler Diaries hoax and war with the print unions at Wapping. Ruthlessly unsentimental, he took the gambles and fought the battles that nobody else had the stomach for.
It was in the decade of Reagan and Thatcher, both of whom he loudly supported, that Murdoch expanded his empire in all directions: a movie studio, a publishing house, satellite television stations and more. Rivals like Ted Turner and Robert Maxwell loathed him but emulated him. Even when one of his deals failed, it changed the game. He built the world’s first cross-media, intercontinental dominion. But as the 1990s dawned, this precariously funded spending spree brought Murdoch to the edge of bankruptcy.
How did Rupert Murdoch’s Australian origins inform his worldview? What enabled him to consistently outwit his rivals and foes? How did he first change both the tone and the business of newspapers and then globalise the media industry? What led the New York Times to call him “the most vilified press mogul in the world today”? Why did his immense power never mute his underdog resentment? Why was it never enough?
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Reading list
• Neil Chenoweth – Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Media Wizard (2001)
• Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie – Stick It Up Your Punter! The Uncut Story of the Sun Newspaper (2013)
• Harold Evans – Good Times, Bad Times (1983)
• Robert Harris – Selling Hitler (1986)
• Simon Jenkins – The Market for Glory: Fleet Street Ownership in the Twentieth Century (1986)
• Andrew Marr – My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism (2004)
• Andrew Neil – Full Disclosure (1996)
• John Preston – Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell (2021)
• William Shawcross – Murdoch (1993)
• Gabriel Sherman – Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family — and the World (2026)
• Michael Wolff – The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch (2010)
Articles and podcasts
• Anonymous, ‘The Battle for New York’, Time (17 January 1977)
• Ken Auletta – ‘The Pirate’, New Yorker (6 November 1995)
• Julian Barnes – ‘Union Blues’, New Yorker (14 April 2003)
• McKay Coppins – ‘Growing Up Murdoch’, Atlantic (14 February 2025)
• Clyde Haberman — ‘Roger Ailes, Who Built Fox News Into an Empire, Dies at 77’, New York Times (18 May 2017)
• Hendrik Hertzberg – ‘Topless Tabloids of Gotham’, New Yorker (15 February 1999)
• Joseph Lelyveld – ‘Murdoch Savors His British Coup’, New York Times (2 March 1986)
• Jonathan Mahler and Jim R
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Hello Origin Story listeners. We’re launching season 10 in the second half of October and to mark that milestone we thought it would be fun to revisit some of our old episodes under the name Origin Story Revisted. Somehow we’ve recorded over 150 episodes so we’ve chosen four of our favourites to reissue with new introductions where we discuss making them and reflect on how subsequent events have changed how we think about these stories.
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Hello Origin Story listeners. We’re launching season 10 in the second half of October and to mark that milestone we thought it would be fun to revisit some of our old episodes under the name Origin Story Revisited. Somehow we’ve recorded over 150 episodes so we’ve chosen four of our favourites to reissue with new introductions where we discuss making them and reflect on how subsequent events have changed how we think about these stories.
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