Click to play videoNew Delhi: King of the tabloids and hard-boiled businessman Rupert Murdoch, 80, heads the world's second largest media conglomerate that includes top brands like Twentieth Century Fox, Fox Television, the Sun, the Wall Street Journal, Harper Collins, and MySpace. But Murdoch's great love has always been the newspaper business.
Rupert Murdoch said, "New times demand new journalism. Our challenge was to take the best of traditional journalism, competitive shoe leather reporting, good editing, a sceptical eye and combine it with the best of contemporary technology."
But the phone-hacking scandal that forced the media mogul to close Britain's oldest tabloid News of the World, now threatens all that he has worked for. And also includes a fall from grace, for a man ranked the 13th most powerful person in the world by Forbes in 2010.
Christopher Dixon, Media Analyst with Paine-webber, said, "There is no question that News Corp is at the leading edge of creating a global media empire across a variety of platforms. Whether they be in newspapers, whether they be in motion pictures or television. Clearly, News Corp is going to be at the cutting edge of becoming the first trans-global media delivery system."
Australia-born Murdoch inherited a newspaper from his journalist father at the age of 23. Within a few years Murdoch had purchased Sydney's Daily Mail, and in 1964 he launched Australia's first national paper, The Australian. In 1969 he acquired his first British newspaper - the News of the World, followed by the Sun - making sensationalism his success mantra, often writing the banner headlines himself.
"Well, we're changing the whole paper. We're changing the whole economy of it, of course. We are going to have an entirely different approach to the paper - we are going to try and sell it to the public. Which I don't think the Sun has been trying for a long time," said Murdoch.
Murdoch became the central figure in Britain's competitive newspaper market known as Fleet Street. Checkbook journalism - paying for stories - boosted his sales, but detractors referred to Murdoch as the 'dirty digger'. He also used his papers as a power base, openly backing British leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair and now David Cameron.
A combination of brilliant business acumen and politics helped Murdoch grow his $ 7.6 billion NewsCorp empire. Its ironical that a man who had never known defeat had to bow out saying "thank you and sorry".
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