Yelland: Turning to the Michael Wolff book (which I haven’t read in full…) Murdoch: I haven’t read it either
Yelland: …he gives the impression that a lot of your acquisitions – BSkyB, The Sun in the late 60s, the original Fox network, and The National Football League – all happened by chance. What do you say? Murdoch: BSkyB was pure vision. The Sun was pure vision. They said it was ridiculous at the time. But then they said only the Daily Mirror could sell like that. But we beat it.
I’m not sure you could put the NFL bid down to vision, but it certainly changed the game. Many people said we had overpaid at the time but we were right, dead right. We sensed that one of the owners of the NFL rights, one of the networks – CBS – was getting very tight about how they were going to bid for it next time. That deal absolutely made the Fox Network. You’ve got to realize that more than half our affiliates were little UHF stations like Channel 66 in Tucson. No one had ever heard of them, nobody ever went to them. But when the Dallas Cowboys were playing, the public had to watch them and they found the channels and that was the breakthrough.
Yelland: The Wolff book doesn’t talk about sport. It always seemed to me that sport was the power behind the expansion of broadcast here. The NFL, the Premiership in the UK, the Bundesliga for Premiere, the Italian league for Sky Italia and so on. It’s tribal, isn’t it? Do you think that’s understood sufficiently? Murdoch: Well, that’s just understanding what people want. You learn from newspapers that sport sells. It is the sport in the papers that makes people buy them. There’s a passion there. It is the great common denominator.
Yelland: Can I ask you about China? Murdoch: China will open up. Starting slowly, but it will. Starting in two or three years when the next regime comes in. There’ll be things you can do there. There are things you can do now but it is all censored. We have big activities for Dow Jones: news wires and things like that. Business news wires. I like China.
Yelland: How do you respond to questions about succession? Murdoch: It will look after itself.
Yelland: Are journalists too negative? Murdoch: Too many are pessimistic, pessimistic about their own trade. They are worried about their jobs, for example outsourcing sub-editing to other continents. It’s incredible what’s happening. So if they are worried about their job security it’s entirely understandable. I don’t think that applies to a paper like The Sun. With The Sun you have a degree of security because of its success… and the flame haired lady walking in the corridor!7
Yelland: Everything that’s ever written about you talks about you as powerful. Do you feel powerful? Murdoch: I think it’s hugely exaggerated. You can do things with the papers if you edit them. I think what I do is choose my editors. I choose my editors and then I watch them. What power have they got? They can set an agenda or they can turn up some scandal. But can they succeed in telling people how to vote? I don’t think they can. They can have views but it’s just part of the noise.
Yelland: Even the attack on the former British Labour leader Neil Kinnock in The Sun when it was edited by Kelvin MacKenzie? Did that not influence the outcome of the 1992 UK general election? Murdoch: Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. I don’t know. A paper like The Times can zero in on something, like it did on the recent business with the Speaker of the House of Commons and the police. The Sun can run an endless campaign like it has on a battered baby – and it can have an effect because it keeps at it.
Yelland: Can the world’s great media companies, including News Corp, survive the internet and even prosper from it? Murdoch: Of course all media companies should survive the internet challenge although they will have to make many changes. The internet is still in its young days, both our response to it and our use of it will have to evolve.
Yelland: What next for News Corp? Murdoch: Continued development of our great franchises.
Yelland: What is the achievement you are most proud of? Murdoch: Probably Wapping8. I think it has led to the preservation of a vigorous and competitive press, which really doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.
7 The Sun newspaper Editor Rebekah Wade 8 The east London print plant to which Murdoch secretly moved his UK newspapers in 1986, setting in train a revolution in the industry