Word: murdoch
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Sydney experience gave Murdoch a taste for combat ?and a lot of cash. By 1968 his holdings included newspapers, magazines and broadcasting stations worth an estimated $50 million. He decided it was time to invade London. For $20 million he outbid British Book Publisher Robert Maxwell to win a controlling interest in News of the World, a Sunday scandal sheet (circ. 6 million). A year later, he bought the ailing daily Sun (circ. 950,000) for the bargain-basement price of $500,000. The Sun was a paper aimed at high-minded Labor Party supporters then, but Murdoch imported...
...Still, Murdoch went cruising for another bruising. Says one friend: "Australia is a small society, and Britain is a decaying one. So he went to America." Murdoch started in San Antonio, one of only three major U.S. cities with competing afternoon dailies (the others: Baltimore and Philadelphia). In a single day he flew into San Antonio and, without even touring the plant of the Express-News, bought it for $18 million. His next effort was an unsuccessful bid for the Washington Star. "We knew it was very difficult to buy any large viable newspaper in the U.S., except for astronomical...
...America ..."). It almost was Murdoch's own Gallipoli. He lavished $6 million on TV promotion and went through five editors, finally turning more toward women's service features. Now known as the Star (circ. 1.6 million), it is marginally profitable...
Last year Murdoch was thinking about launching a new daily in New York or Boston when aging Publisher Dorothy Schiff, 73, told him she was thinking of selling her New York Post. Murdoch pounced, wrapping up the $30 million sale in three weeks of secret negotiations. Thus it was only a few weeks ago that a significant number of Americans first heard of the Australian and wondered where he had been all this time. Surprise: Murdoch had been living in the U.S. full time for nearly three years...
...whose newspapers cavort through the private lives of others, Murdoch is fiercely protective of his own. He rarely grants interviews or allows photographers to snap pictures of his four children: a daughter, Prudence, 18, from a first marriage and three children, Elisabeth, 8, Lachlan, 5, and James, 4, by his wife Anna, 32, a stunningly attractive, quick-witted former Sydney Daily Mirror reporter, whom he married in 1967. Six years ago, in London, Anna was the target of a kidnap attempt in which the wife of a Murdoch lieutenant was murdered. Murdoch did not stop his plebeian practice of taking...