Rupert Murdoch has influenced every facet of our modern media. The scion of a newspaper baron in Australia, Murdoch built a vast empire that now spans the globe. In the US, he owns the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and Fox News. He gave us The Simpsons, Page Six, and Bill O’Reilly.

And at 94 years old, he’s never been more powerful. Which is why a succession battle among his four oldest children had all the trappings of a Succession episode but with higher stakes, such as: Who gets a direct line into the Trump White House? 

Earlier this month we learned the answer to that question. Rupert’s son Lachlan, a man philosophically aligned with his father’s conservative ideals, will run the empire after Rupert’s death. 

But how was the empire created? How did the son of a somewhat obscure newspaper magnate in Melbourne go on to reshape the way we consume news and understand politics? 

Today, Explained spoke with several experts who have tracked Murdoch’s rise and dominance across the globe. In the first episode of a two-part series, we focus on how Murdoch transformed his father’s holdings into a world-beating company, and how he bent people in power to his will.

Today, Explained’s Sean Rameswaram spoke with Matthew Ricketson, a professor of communication at Deakin University; Des Freedman, a professor of media and communication studies at Goldsmiths, University of London; and Graham Murdock, professor emeritus at Loughborough University London. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

For more on our miniseries about how Rupert Murdoch took over the world, listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. And please check back later today for the second installment of the miniseries.

Is Rupert Murdoch a nepo baby?

Des Freedman (Goldsmiths, University of London professor): Murdoch is absolutely a nepo baby.

Matthew Ricketson (Deakin University professor):  If the term nepo was in existence in 1931, yes, he is a nepo baby.

One of our former prime ministers, Malcolm Turnbull, who tangled with Rupert Murdoch, has described him as Australia’s deadliest export. 

His whole presentation is of this kind of scruffy, rebellious outsider figure, shaking his fist at the establishment and the elites. The reality is that when he was born in 1931, his father was the managing director of a big newspaper group in Australia. He went to Oxford University, and then his father dies in 1952 and leaves him one afternoon newspaper in Adelaide, which is another city here in Australia.

Graham Murdock (Loughborough University London emeritus professor): His father, Keith, really pioneered tabloid journalism in Australia. Keith Murdoch realized that newspapers had the power to bring down politicians. So Rupert inherited not just newspapers, but actually a whole kind of philosophy, if you like, of what newspapers could do and how to, how they operated.

MR: [Rupert Murdoch is] very clear from very early on that he wants to learn everything about running newspapers and then, very quickly, from about 1954, he starts expanding.

GM: He always had the reputation for being quite ruthless. 

DF: The main ambition was to make his father proud and to do better than his father, to internationalize the father’s operation. And he was willing to throw everything at it to get there.

GM: When he came to Britain [in the 1960s], he bought the News of the World, which was this humongous bestselling Sunday tabloid, a huge commercial success. He began looking around for a daily title, and he fixed on The Sun.

He immediately converted it into a tabloid, became famous for having these semi-nude models.

MR: Topless women on page 3. Tabloid newspapers have been sensational for a long time. and for him, that is the key message. Those kinds of stories will drive circulation. 

GM: His rise in the UK coincides with the rise of Margaret Thatcher. And they share a kind of notion — they’re both outsiders. She’s a grocer’s daughter from a provincial town, not part of the old English establishment and the old English establishment, also very hostile to Rupert. They share a kind of neoliberal philosophy to free markets and antagonism to public ownership. And Murdoch’s papers were very much in support of that Thatcher agenda.

MR: He already owns two of the most popular newspapers. And he wants to buy more. An opportunity comes up to buy The Times and the Sunday Times. And under the law at the time, there’s a requirement this matter is referred off to the monopolies and merger commission.  Thatcher ensures that that doesn’t happen so that he’s able to buy The Times and The Sunday Times.

GM: The classic kind of paper of record in the UK, because he wanted to have that entree into the elite. If you look at Rupert’s career, he’s always had a popular newspaper that can address the masses, but you also have an elite newspaper so you’re speaking to the insiders, but you’re also speaking to the mass of the people. 

These stories you’re telling us about Rupert’s time in the UK in the ’70s and the ’80s ‚ they establish I think some major themes: one, ruthlessness, a willingness for a newsman to lie if it sells more papers or does good business, and then not just a desire to inform the public about politics, but to drive politics himself.

MR: That is a good summary and you can see the bitter fruits of this decades later in the form of the phone-hacking scandal in the United Kingdom in the mid-2000s.

GM: The newspapers were declining in revenues and readership. So that kind of forced them to be even more militant in looking for sensation.

DF: Newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, that is mostly The Sun and the News of the World had hacked into the phones of members of the royal family, celebrities, but also, and this is crucial, also ordinary people, not famous people.

GM: It’s discovered that they’ve hacked a phone of this dead teenage girl, Millie Dowler. People are revolted. It creates a huge public reaction.

MF: You know, the Murdochs could not control the revulsion. They could not kind of put a lid on it. They were forced to do something that Murdoch has almost never done in his career, which is to close a newspaper.

DF: He closed that newspaper, the News of the World, instantly. This is a newspaper that had been around for over a century. It folded overnight.

GM: And then, of course, an official government commission of inquiry

DF: Murdoch sat down in front of a parliamentary committee; he looked old. It was an amazing performance. He forgot all the details when they were put to him, and he said, pretty soon after that, once he got out of the committee room, he magically regained his memory and regained his posture and his poise. And of course, he has gone on to live his life in full.

Rupert Murdoch’s first foray into the American media isn’t on TV.

DF: So he bought the New York Post in… 

MR:  …the mid-1970s… 

DF: … to establish a base.

MR: He gets access to heavy hitters in the commercial world, in the political world, in the cultural world. 

Trump’s relationship with Murdoch does go back to the 1980s. And to the New York Post.

GM: Murdoch had a very low opinion of him. This is a man who lost money running a casino.

MR: But a good gossip column is another one of Murdoch’s must-haves in his formula for newspaper success. Page Six is most definitely a very successful gossip column. Trump is one of its key sources. They kind of have that symbiotic relationship where they’re constantly pumping him up, and he’s constantly feeding them stories because he’s a bit of a gossip magnet himself.

DF: The brashness of Trump is very different to the much more considered strategic, studious, long-term thinking of Murdoch. It is not like it’s an immediate marriage.

MR: But he realizes pretty quickly that he can make a lot more money in television. 

DF: And that’s when, you know, he buys 50 percent of 20th Century Fox. And that’s the beginning of the Fox Network, of the legacy we’re all now very familiar with.

The Simpsons ideologically is not the kind of thing you might think would sit that easily with a small-c conservative like Rupert Murdoch. This is a man who will do anything to increase the ratings and the audiences.

GR: He’s also buying up film studios.

DF: With Titanic as a movie that his studio financed; it could have ruined him — the gamble that he took on Titanic. And instead it made him — was it over a billion dollars that Titanic took?

But I think his ambition is always to come back to news. The Simpsons doesn’t get you into the White House or the front or the back door of Number 10, Downing Street. Being a news mogul does.

MR: The other piece of the puzzle, in helping him develop in America is the regulatory environment. There was this thing called the Fairness Doctrine, which came up after the Second World War.

GM: What that said was that if, if you were, if you were gonna cover contentious affairs on television, you had to present both sides of the story.

MR: Reagan was all about deregulation, getting rid of as much regulation as you can. So the Fairness Doctrine goes and what happens then is that it unleashes or unlocks the door for the rise of people like Rush Limbaugh. The idea of balance and Rush Limbaugh don’t exist in the same sentence, you know?

GM: It opened the space for overtly partisan television, because you didn’t have any longer to give the other side of the story.

MR:  Roger Ailes, who was the key founding person for Fox News, and, Murdoch look at what the success that Rush Limbaugh is having, and they look to see if they can transplant that into television.

GM: And that opened the space for Fox News. 

MR: Ailes and, um, Murdoch, they realize that instead of having lots and lots of correspondence everywhere, they’ll have the bare bone — so you’ll do the reporting of the news, but it won’t be a lavish suite of foreign correspondents. It’s much, much cheaper. 

And you will bring in guys primarily from radio like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and so on, to provide opinions about the news, what it means, how to think about it, etc. 

And so you put those people on in the evening and they bloviate on demand. They have big opinions and theatrical opinions. It changes the media landscape. It’s an enormously profitable business. 

DF: Tabloidization — that’s what is applied to Fox News.

MR: You’ve ceased being a news or journalism outfit at that point, and you’ve become something quite different, which bears a much closer relationship with propaganda. 

Do you think Rupert Murdoch surpassed his own expectations?

MR: Oh, undoubtedly. Undoubtedly. Look, who knows, I’m not in his head, so I don’t know. But if he could have looked into the crystal ball and seen himself from 1952 to 2025, I think it would’ve been very hard for him to conceive of being where he’s now.

DF: He certainly transformed the British media, the Australian media, and the US media. He has had this fascinating, but for many people, poisonous impact on political discourse, on politics more generally.

MR: Now we can see how much damage the company has done to journalism, to democracy. You know, they’ve created a monster, which has now gotten away from them. And there’s actually two monsters. The first monster is the Fox News audience, and the second monster is Donald Trump.

Miami has long had a reputation as a balmy party destination, a place where spring breakers, Lamborghini-driving showoffs, Cuban culture, and clubs coalesce.

But the South Florida city has undergone a major transformation over the past 15 years. It became an international hub for art with Art Basel. Its high-end food scene blossomed, becoming one of the best in the nation. And, somehow, it quietly became “Wall Street South.”

J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs both now have major footprints in the city, and several hedge funds have sprung up there as well. A slew of Silicon Valley companies set up shop in Miami after the pandemic, too, in search of lower taxes and fewer Covid restrictions. 

Maybe it’s not so surprising, then, that Miami, newly flush with major corporations, has seen a bigger office comeback post-Covid than almost any other American city, according to data from Placer.ai, a startup that measures foot traffic to offices. 

Yesterday, Today Explained kicked off a miniseries on work after the pandemic by looking at how American workers were leaving the country in search of work-life balance and finding it in Portugal, where the country’s unique digital nomad visa programs have led to a flourishing expat remote-worker community.  

For today’s installment, the Today, Explained podcast team returned stateside, venturing to Miami to find out more about why companies there are calling knowledge workers into the office once again, and what it can show us about the delicate dance that employers all over the nation face as they try to rebuild their corporate cultures.

Going back to office for the “culture” 

Four years after the pandemic, only about 35 percent of Americans with jobs that can be worked remotely still work entirely from home, according to a 2023 report from Pew. They tend to be knowledge workers – people whose jobs demand that they’re sitting at a computer the bulk of the time.  

So why are Miami’s knowledge workers going into offices instead of staying home?  

The very same industries that are pouring into the South Florida city — financial services and tech — are the ones telling workers that it’s time to invest in “culture.”

“I think people are actually opting in to work in this culture,” Alex DiLeonardo, chief people officer for Citadel Securities, told us when we visited the financial firm’s sleek headquarters in the Brickell neighborhood of Miami in September. 

DiLeonardo used a lot of HR speak, but what he described to us was a vibes-y idea among employers that collaboration and values are forged from human interaction. The best way they think they can foster that creative “culture”? To make workers come into the office. At Citadel Securities, that means in-office, five days a week. 

The idea of a workplace “culture” almost always shows up when a CEO calls people back to the office. Last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy informed employees that they would be required to return to the office five days a week. In a statement titled “Strengthening our culture and teams,” Jassy made this case for in-office work: “[C]ollaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another.”

That’s what Hasan Altaf was looking for when he recently graduated from college. “I think in the office, it’s just creativity, collaboration, everything,” he told us. 

Altaf, 22, is now a software engineer at Citadel Securities in Miami. During the pandemic, he spent eight months working an internship fully remote and said the whole thing felt kind of empty. “I felt disconnected with my team. [T]hey were just, like, faces on a screen. I never met them in person.” Now, he’s got an easy commute by metro, there are killer views of the ocean and city from the building, and he gets to absorb lessons from his colleagues in real time. “The juices are flowing here.” 

To be clear, not everyone is fully opting into office life: One expert we talked with told us only about 20 percent of the 100,000 workers he’s surveyed want to be in an office five days a week. Another 30 percent wanted to work from home 100 percent of the time. 

While people are back in the office at greater rates in Miami, in general, workers across the country want more flexibility.

Companies vs. the worker

Many workers have gotten a taste of a different kind of life over the past four years, and for the vast majority, working from home has afforded an unprecedented sense of work-life balance, according to Pew. 

Many of them resent giving up the flexibility of hybrid or fully at-home work in favor of ideating in an open-concept office in hard pants. A recent survey of remote workers found that nearly 60 percent said they would quit if asked to return to the office.   

And there’s evidence that flexible models might be good not just for workers but for companies,  too. 

According to a recent USA Today Blueprint survey, 58 percent of white-collar workers prefer a hybrid model (working from home at least three days a week). A McKinsey survey this summer found that 87 percent of workers would say yes to flexible work if it’s offered. 

This means a company that adopts a fully in-office policy team could see the plan backfire, according to Nick Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University who studies workplace trends. 

“[O]ne way this plays out is they have a ton of quits. They find it harder to hire,” Bloom said. “I know from talking to my own undergrads and MBAs, they don’t want to go in five days a week. So it’s going to be harder to hire them,” he said. 

A lot of firms get hung up on the idea of productivity, Bloom said. Companies, he argues, should measure their office policies against profitability. Not paying for an office is a huge cost saver. “It also turns out, if you’re hiring folks remotely, you can hire a lot better employee for your money because you’re not looking locally, you’re looking nationally or even globally.” The talent pool is the entire world.

Bloom recently published a study looking closely at this question of productivity. Working with a giant Chinese travel company, Bloom and his team compared two cohorts: The first worked in the office five days a week and the second was offered a hybrid schedule. They found that the hybrid workers were happier with their jobs and that fewer quit. They also found that performance reviews were not affected. People got their work done and they were happier. 

“Give me a good reason to come in every day”

Chatting up workers in Miami, we heard some complaints: “Give me a good reason to come in every day.” “I don’t need my boss babysitting my work.” “Commuting sucks.” 

A lot of people, though, were willing to meet the CEO culture warriors halfway and acknowledged that some time in the office was great for getting to know the people they worked with. They were also able to build trust with colleagues and learn by watching others do their jobs. For companies in the tech and financial spaces that are so vital to Miami’s rebirth, having workers meet them in the middle helps them navigate a number of issues beyond “culture,” too, including data privacy.  

Workers will be the ultimate judge of whether Citadel Securities and other companies with the strictest office policies are right for them. If they disagree, they might just choose to develop their careers elsewhere.

For DiLeonardo, these complicated choices are just part of the new world order of work — and maybe even a sign of how far work culture has come.

“As somebody who spent my entire career in the people space, I think it’s great that all of these different forms of working are causing organizations and societies to ask questions about how best to enable individuals to succeed in their different roles and their different careers,” he said.  “But I also think that leaves a ton of room for organizations to choose the kind of environment that they provide and be very clear in the social contract about what it means to work at this  company.”