Irish Examiner view: Milestone for tycoon who auctioned his influence

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch turns 90 on Thursday

Rupert Murdoch, former executive chairman of News Corporation, turns 90 on Thursday.  Picture: AP Photo/Jason Reed

On Thursday Rupert Murdoch will mark his 90th birthday. How a man, once among a tiny handful of the most powerful men in the world and rich beyond the perception of the vast majority of humanity might celebrate his 90th birthday could be an idea for a new reality TV series. 

Murdoch may not be as jaded as F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby was nevertheless, it may be hard to excite a palate so sated, for so very long, the absolute best this world can offer. Once again, victory exacts a cost.

Despite that, the last of the old school press barons — and so much more — may enjoy becoming a nonagenarian more than he enjoyed his 80th birthday. At that point, British detectives were knee-deep in a subsidiary of his News Corporation, then the world’s fourth-largest media company. They wondered if his journalists had hacked phones or bribed police. They had. Routinely. 

Several convictions later, and after the mercy killing of the 168-year-old scandal sheet, The News of the World, Mr Murdoch was grilled at a House of Commons hearing during what he called “the most humble day of my life”. It would not condemn you as a cynic if that description makes you reach for a pinch or two of salt.

Murdoch's 90th celebrations may be overshadowed in another way too. Compared to the great and unaccountable global power he exercised on his 60th birthday — when Mark Zuckerberg was a harmless six-year-old — he seems, compared to his own benchmarks, a waning force. His weapons of choice,  newspapers and cable TV, are ever-more marginalised. 

Yet, he has, in Australia, just forced tech giants, including Zuckerberg's Facebook, to pay for linking to content created by his companies. Another metric confirms how media sands are shifting. A decade ago Murdoch enterprises combined to be the world’s third-largest seller of advertising but today they don't make the top 10. Time and tide wait for no man, especially one about to enter his tenth decade.

It may however be premature to ask the obituary writers to update what they have probably already prepared. Those pieces will point out that just two years ago the great collector of media scalps changed his habits and sold most of the 21st Century film and TV business to Disney for $71bn. That deal was one of those that, according to one analyst, saw the holdings of the Murdoch family trust appreciate more than six-fold in the last decade.

His business achievements are spectacular — his personal wealth is estimated above €20bn — but his application of the power his media outlets conferred is, odious. He was an early supporter of Thatcher and Reagan, the leaders who set the terms for today's great concentration of wealth. More recently, his newspapers were stridently pro-Brexit so, as the simmering pot in Northern Ireland shows, his influence reaches even this small country on the edge of Europe. 

His support for Trump was one of the cornerstones of that single-term presidency. It is difficult to think that so many Americans might have succumbed to so many lunacies had his Fox News not been so relentlessly dishonest and malign. 

Yet, in the longer term, the comfort he offers climate crisis deniers may be his most significant legacy. That immorality has already cost him his relationship with his son James who quit the family business over its editorial tendencies. His daughter Elisabeth seems alert to these dangers as well as she has warned of the dangers of “profit without purpose” in the media.

As he prepares to mark a significant milestone, and as his four children from his first marriage consider how the Murdoch cake might eventually be divided, the world can only look on and wonder what the take-home lessons of his life might be. One is that the influence he unashamedly auctioned over the last half-century undermined democracies. 

Unless those democracies work together to limit in his unrelated heir — Mark Zuckerberg — Murdoch's influence may in time seem benign. There is a ray of hope though — humanity's informed self-interest is ever more alert to social media's toxins. A reality confirmed by one small example  - the paltry crowd who protested in Cork last weekend despite the social media call to arms.

Murdoch is one of the most significant figures of his time, but he achieved that status while indifferent to the common good, an idea he scoffs at with the conviction of a zealot with appallingly limited social ambition or conscience. The world’s post offices will not be swamped by birthday cards this week.