NEW YORK -- Rupert Murdoch has become the most famous media mogul in the world by making his adversaries offers they can't refuse.
From a pair of inherited newspapers in Australia, Rupert Murdoch has built the world's most far-flung and diverse empire of newspapers, film, television and Internet properties, stirring controversy with his brash populist journalism but always seizing the chance to expand.
His audacious bid to acquire the company that owns the Wall Street Journal, one of most America's most-respected and authoritative newspapers, could be the boldest move yet in a career that rivals the biggest media tycoons in history.
Murdoch has melded a collection of broadcast, print and film businesses on four continents and in the process became a billionaire and arguably the most powerful media executive in history.
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He stunned Fleet Street 25 years ago when, as a publisher of racy tabloids, he acquired the august Times of London. He added a group of six television stations in the largest U.S. markets that became the basis for the Fox Television Network, the only successful challenger to ABC, CBS and NBC in five decades.
In Britain he spent billions to develop Sky Television, a satellite TV service that began broadcasting in 1989 and is now the dominant broadcaster in Europe.
When Walter Annenberg was interested in selling his 17.5 million-circulation TV Guide, most major U.S. publishers were interested. But Murdoch beat them out, paying a premium price of $3 billion for America's largest circulation weekly — twice what analysts had estimated it would fetch.
The Wall Street Journal plan also follows his pattern of making an offer that owners of a target company cannot refuse. He is launching a bid at $60 a share, nearly twice Dow Jones' market value. But he is facing the staunchly independent Bancroft family, which has owned the paper for generations and is unlikely to respond quickly, if at all.
But Murdoch is known for persistence, not just for paying handsomely. When he took on the plan to build Fox into the fourth U.S. television network, the effort was written off as very risky or just plain hopeless. Bart Simpson and American Idol proved the critics wrong, and Fox is often among the top rated networks now.
The Wall Street Journal, mired in the advertising slowdown that is eating away the newspaper industry, nonetheless has valuable multimedia potential, through its existing properties and others that could be developed. Its partnership with GE's CNBC could easily be shifted to Fox's fledgling business channel.
Its MarketWatch and Dow Jones news, as well as the Journal, are among the leaders in Internet sites. Murdoch two years ago bought MySpace.com, one of the biggest Internet global communities. The $580 million he paid at the time seemed excessive. But now it looks cheap.
Murdoch was best known on Fleet Street as a cost-cutter and a union buster who let quality slip. Because of his reputation as an aggressive shaper of newspapers, Murdoch had to give written pledges when he bought London's venerable Times that he would not alter the character of Britain's oldest daily or The Sunday Times, with its reputation for investigative reporting.
The Journal, with its string of Pulitzer Prizes is the bible of the U.S. business world, and similar guarantees may be required.
Murdoch's own views might be a good fit with the newspaper's editorial pages. Acquiring the Wall Street Journal would give him the newspaper considered the voice of American conservatives and supply-side economics and an influential voice in Washington since the Reagan years.
Murdoch established his relentless style from the start, when he bought a series of Australian newspapers and boosted circulation with sensationalism and sex, while raising profits through cost cuts, largely by challenging newspaper unions.
He switched citizenship to the United States to comply with rules governing TV station control.
Murdoch's approach has always been to find overlooked value of some properties, often rebuilding or restructuring neglected media companies in novel ways, and taking big risks.
To finance these acquisitions, Murdoch at times has gone to the brink, piling on so much debt in the early 1990s he needed a a major restructuring to survive. Since then its stock has gone up more than tenfold.
Often he has proved his critics wrong, seemingly going to any length to meet his goal. The publisher once dashed out at midnight in his pajamas to an airport to argue with officials that a fog preventing a newspaper-delivery flight was only a light mist. He has poured hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to build up the money-losing New York Post, managing to keep it afloat as a scrappy rival to the Daily News and the New York Times.
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