Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Murdoch's Balls
With the WGA strike being on the nation's collective mind, I was reminded yesterday of one of my favorite media stories of all time. It’s the story of Rupert Murdoch using his giant testicles to risk his entire empire and break the British newspaper unions in 1986.
I’ll share it with you here. To bring you up to speed, Rupert had inherited a small local paper from his father (The Adelaide News) in the early 1960s. By 1969, he had leveraged that single paper to start/acquire a few more Australian papers and television stations and began expanding his empire to Britain, buying four of the largest newspapers in the UK.
I will let Edward Jay Epstein tell the rest, which I've excerpted (scanned) from his extremely informative (and highly recommended) book about Hollywood, “The Big Picture.”
So it's probably pretty safe to assume that if somebody from the Mogul side of the current strike caves in first, it won't be Murdoch.
Disclosure: Rupert Murdoch is my father.
Exciting at 12:20 PM. Link to this post.
Murdoch's Balls
With the WGA strike being on the nation's collective mind, I was reminded yesterday of one of my favorite media stories of all time. It’s the story of Rupert Murdoch using his giant testicles to risk his entire empire and break the British newspaper unions in 1986.
I’ll share it with you here. To bring you up to speed, Rupert had inherited a small local paper from his father (The Adelaide News) in the early 1960s. By 1969, he had leveraged that single paper to start/acquire a few more Australian papers and television stations and began expanding his empire to Britain, buying four of the largest newspapers in the UK.
I will let Edward Jay Epstein tell the rest, which I've excerpted (scanned) from his extremely informative (and highly recommended) book about Hollywood, “The Big Picture.”
So it's probably pretty safe to assume that if somebody from the Mogul side of the current strike caves in first, it won't be Murdoch.
Disclosure: Rupert Murdoch is my father.
Exciting at 12:20 PM. Link to this post.