Word: murdochs
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Only a few hours earlier, Rupert Murdoch had confided to a visitor that he has no particular fondness for Hollywood's social circuit. But a show- business mogul must put on a good show. So there he stood last month sipping Perrier at a Beverly Hills reception, flashing a smile and chatting comfortably with the likes of Jack Nicholson and Dino De Laurentiis. Stars and studio bosses had all turned out. The party, in honor of Murdoch and his wife Anna, was the perfect opportunity for everyone to size up the Australian-born newspaper tycoon who has become America...
...Murdoch aims to accomplish what no one has done in 40 years: forge a fourth American television network. The press lord has marched toward his goal with a zealous efficiency worthy of Citizen Kane. Murdoch began last March when he bought half of the 20th Century-Fox movie and TV studio. Then he agreed to pay an impressive $1.5 billion in May for six of Metromedia's big- city independent television stations, a chain that reaches one of every five U.S. homes. Finally, in September, Murdoch bought the other half of Fox. Now that he has acquired the pieces, Murdoch...
...revealed the scope of his ambition last month when he announced plans to merge his TV stations into a video conglomerate to be called Fox Inc. The company will have three divisions: the 20th Century-Fox film studio, a Fox station group comprising Murdoch's own six outlets and a Fox television network to sell programming to independent operators not affiliated with ABC, CBS or NBC. To clinch the deal Murdoch still needs approval from the Federal Communications Commission for his purchase of the TV stations. The agency's vote, scheduled for last week, was postponed because of protests from...
Those groups are not the only ones skeptical of Murdoch's epic vision. The Big Three networks contend that neither Fox nor anyone else can currently afford to provide the twelve to 18 hours per day of programming needed to compete with them. "What Murdoch has proposed sounds interesting, but it's not a network as we know it," contends M.S. Rukeyser, an NBC executive vice president...
20th Century-Fox Chairman Barry Diller, Murdoch's man on the spot in Hollywood, readily admits that it is "a bit grand" to believe that the new Fox Inc. in the next few years could assemble a network comparable to ABC, CBS and NBC. Instead Fox intends to form a loose confederation and build the business gradually, first offering perhaps an hour of programming per night. Says one Fox executive: "When you get to the point of selling a few nights of programming a few years down the road, you're looking very much like a network." Concurs FCC Commissioner...