Rupert Murdoch, the tycoon who gives the audience the lies the audience asks for

Rupert Murdoch. Luis Grañena

This week the star chapter of the new season in the life of Rupert Murdoch has been cancelled.

In it, Murdoch would arrive on the seventh floor of the Wilmington courthouse, in the largest courtroom in the building, packed with journalists, and sit down for questioning before a jury of six men and six women.

The script was not quite written, but the lawyer was preparing to embarrass the tycoon to explain why his news network Fox News endlessly spread the hoax that Donald Trump was robbed of the 2020 presidential election. a lie that Murdoch himself did not believe, but that the great post-truth tycoon did not want to stop: the audience wanted to hear it.

It would have been an interesting chapter.

Canceling it has cost 787.5 million dollars.

More information

Fox pays $787 million to Dominion to avoid its defamation lawsuit

People will have to settle for watching

HBO's brilliant series inspired by the tycoon.

Although, in this case, reality is stranger than fiction.

Murdoch has more women (four), more children (six), more years (92), more scandals, intrigues and corporate operations (countless) than Logan Roy, his

fictional

There are episodes in his life that would seem unbelievable in a series.

Like when his newspapers reported his own death.

Or like when two men planned to kidnap his then-wife, Ann Murdoch, but ended up kidnapping and then murdering Muriel McKay, the wife of one of his managers, following him to his house after borrowing the Mogul's Rolls Royce.

He

became “the disreputable tabloid editor at the center of a macabre tabloid story,” wrote Michael Wolff in his biography

It was 1969. At 38, Murdoch already had extensive experience as an editor.

Born in Melbourne (Australia) in 1931, on March 11 (the same date the Daily Courant, the world's first daily newspaper, was published), his father, Keith Murdoch, was a war correspondent turned media magnate. regional press.

When his father died of cancer in 1952, Rupert Murdoch, an only child, took over News Limited, the family business.

He bought numerous regional newspapers from Australia and New Zealand in which he sensationalized, favoring events and sports.

He then launched

the country's first national newspaper, with a more serious approach.

It is a pattern that he has repeated in the United Kingdom and the United States: first sensationalism and then the search for respectability.

In 1969 he was in London because he had just bought the

and

That the same publisher of those products was made in 1981 with

was quite a shock.

Back then, newspapers were thriving businesses.

Murdoch crossed the Atlantic and bought the

tabloid in 1976, turning it into a tabloid, but in 2007 he ended up taking over the prestigious

The episode that best reflects the lack of scruples with which their media were conducted is the scandal of the wiretapping of members of the royal family, singers, actors, athletes, famous and not so famous by the News of the World,

meant the closure of the tabloid in 2011. Murdoch had to appear before a parliamentary commission and the day before those who were hacked were his newspapers

and

, which published the news of his death.

Before submitting to the interrogation, he sentenced: "This is the most humiliating day of my life."

In 2012 John Lisners published the book

but Murdoch was not dead and his empire had not fallen.

Fox News became the most watched news channel in the United States at the turn of the century.

It has been installed in a parallel world aimed at a conservative audience that wanted to be told that Barack Obama was Muslim, that the Democratic Party is the radical left led by degenerates and that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, but they were stolen.

Such lies often go unpunished, but hosts and guests of the network repeatedly quoted in their election hoax the Dominion company, which filed a $1.6 billion lawsuit and threatened Murdoch with another of the most humiliating days of his career. life.

With the payment of 787.5 million dollars, he has avoided submitting himself in public before the jury to a devastating interrogation.

The previous statements and the messages that he has had to contribute to the cause are already embarrassing for the tycoon (“We don't want to make enemies with Trump anymore,” he said in one).

Basically, they show that Murdoch did not believe the electoral hoax, the germ of the assault on the Capitol, and that even so he let the network air it to gain an audience.

Fox has paid, but hasn't apologized and moved on to the next lie.

There are dozens of books about the tycoon.

His professional biography is endless, but his personal one also gives rise to novels, movies, and series, and to speculation about his succession.

The last season has also been loaded.

In two weeks he has gone from announcing his fifth marriage to canceling the wedding.

Not even a year ago, he announced his divorce to his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, with an email: "Jerry, I have regrettably decided to end our marriage."

The separation agreement included Hall agreeing not to give any details or ideas to the

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