Los Angeles:

Media magnate Rupert Murdoch has married for the fifth time at age 93, tying the knot with a retired molecular biologist a quarter century younger than him.

Murdoch and Elena Zhukova, 67, were wedded Saturday at the media mogul’s California vineyard and estate, called Moraga.

Photographs published in The Sun, the British tabloid owned by Murdoch, show the couple posing and smiling — he in a black suit and yellow tie and she in an off-the-shoulder white gown as she clutched a bouquet of lilies of the valley.

Jet-set guests at the nuptials included Robert Kraft, 82, the owner of the New England Patriots US football team, and his 50-year-old wife Dana Blumberg, news reports said.  

Murdoch had previously been married four times, most recently to model Jerry Hall, the longtime partner of Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger.

His roller-coaster personal life is often fodder for the tabloid newspaper industry that he helped foster on three continents.

Last year, Murdoch announced his engagement to dental hygienist-turned-conservative radio host Ann Lesley Smith, but called off the planned nuptials less than a month later.

Zhukova, who emigrated to the United States from Russia, is a retired molecular biologist. 

Her daughter, Dasha Zhukova, an arts patron and entrepreneur, was formerly married to the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.

Murdoch, who has six children, was first married to Patricia Booker, an Australian flight attendant, whom he divorced in the late 1960s.

He and his second wife, Anna Torv, a newspaper reporter, were together more than 30 years before divorcing in 1999. His third marriage to Wendi Deng ended in 2013.

The Australia-born Murdoch, whose media empire includes The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and other influential outlets, and his family have a network of about $20 billion, according to Forbes.

Murdoch handed over control of his global media empire to son Lachlan last November, shifting to an emeritus status.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

London:

Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid papers bugged Prince Harry’s landline phones and accessed the messages on the pager of his late mother Princess Diana, the British royal’s legal team told London’s High Court on Thursday.

Harry, the younger son of King Charles and the late Princess Diana, and more than 40 others are suing News Group Newspapers (NGN) over accusations of unlawful activities by journalists and private investigators on its tabloids, the Sun and the now-defunct News of the World, from the mid-1990s until 2016.

In a ruling last July, Judge Timothy Fancourt said Harry could take his claims of unlawful information gathering to trial, but his allegations of decades-old mobile phone hacking were thrown out for being filed too late.

In a hearing at the High Court on Thursday, Harry’s lawyers sought to amend his lawsuit in light of that ruling, and to add other, new allegations.

These include further claims that the Sun ordered private investigators to target his then girlfriend and now wife Meghan in 2016, and accusations of widespread bugging of his calls.

“The claimant also brings a claim and seeks relief in relation to the interception of landline calls, the interception of calls from cordless phones and analogue mobile calls, and the interception of landline voicemails, as distinct from phone hacking,” his lawyers’ said in court documents.

The claim also includes allegations relating to Diana who “was under close surveillance and her calls were being unlawfully intercepted by (NGN), which was known about by its editors and senior executives”.

NGN is objecting to the addition of what it called a “huge number of new allegations” for numerous reasons including that they were made too late, lacked evidence, and related to phone-hacking claims which had already been dismissed.

“They cover time periods falling outside the scope of the current pleading and the generic statements of case, and in many cases relate to allegations which have been well-publicised for as long as 30 years,” NGN’s lawyers said in court filings.

In 2011, NGN apologised for widespread phone-hacking by journalists at the News of the World, which Murdoch shut down following a public backlash. NGN has since settled more than 1,300 claims but the group has always rejected allegations of any wrongdoing by Sun staff.

On Wednesday, lawyers for Harry and the other claimants told the court that Murdoch and other senior executives were involved in the cover-up of widespread wrongdoing, and they had given false evidence to courts, parliament and a public inquiry.

NGN says some claimants are simply using the lawsuits, expected to go to trial in January next year, as a means to attack the tabloid press, and that allegations against its current and former staff were “a scurrilous and cynical attack on their integrity”.

Since stepping down from royal duties in 2020 to move to California, Harry has turned his focus onto battling the British press which he says has intruded into his private life since he was a child, spreading lies about him and those close to him.

In December he won a lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspaper over allegations of phone-hacking and unlawful activities, with the judge agreeing senior figures had been aware of what had been going on.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, 92, is engaged to 67-year-old Elena Zhukova, his team has confirmed. The former chairman of  Fox and News Corp has been dating the Russian molecular biologist since last April. This is Mr Murdoch’s sixth engagement, with plans for a June wedding at Moraga, his California vineyard and estate. The wedding comes less than a year after his brief engagement to conservative radio host Ann Lesley Smith, according to BBC.

Who is Elena Zhukova?

1) Elena Zhukova is a retired molecular biologist, specialising in diabetes research. Her contributions in this field include work conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles.

2) Originally from Moscow, Elena Zhukova moved to the United States in 1991, during the final years of the Soviet Union.

3) Ms Zhukova met Rupert Murdoch during a family gathering organised by his third former wife, Wendi Deng. Wendi Deng and Mr Murdoch were married for 14 years until their divorce in 2013.

4) Elena Zhukova was previously married twice, once to Russian oil billionaire, Alexander Zhukov. They have a daughter together, Dasha Zhukova, 42. Elena Zhukova describes her family background as part of the “usual, normal Moscow intelligentsia,” highlighting her roots and connection to the cultural and intellectual milieu of Moscow.

5) Rupert Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, supermodel Jerry Hall, in 2022. His past wives include Wendi Deng, Anna Murdoch Mann, and Patricia Booker, and he has a total of six children. Having retired from his chief role at News Corp last year, Mr Murdoch handed over the reins to his son Lachlan.

Despite his health concerns, the future of News Corp seems stable, governed by a family trust with Mr Murdoch and his four eldest children holding shares. Mr Murdoch is set to celebrate his 93rd birthday on March 11.

Rupert Murdoch, centre, attempts to speak to the media after he held a meeting with the parents and sister of murdered school girl Milly Dowler in London on July 15, 2011. Murdoch stirs mixed feelings in Britain, where he transformed the media over half a century. U.K. journalists and politicians both hailed and reviled the 92-year-old mogul after he announced he was stepping down as leader of his media empire.
| Photo Credit: AP

Some powerful media outlets are viewing Rupert Murdoch‘s announcement on September 21st — that the 92-year-old is stepping down as chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp — the television and newspaper empires he has built up over more than 70 years, with scepticism. For instance, the Economist has asserted that “Rupert Murdoch isn’t going anywhere just yet” and the magazine is of the firm opinion that as “chairman emeritus” he will still wield plenty of clout. While we are not sure of the future trajectory, we need to access his role as as a media Moghul seriously.

There are many defining scholarly works that help understand the far-reaching impact of Reaganomics and Thatcherism in the world of political economy. The impact created by Rupert Murdoch, with his global expansion in the information milieu, is similar to that of the Anglo-American impact of the early 1980s. Mr. Murdoch led the expansion of the media market at the cost of its credibility, trust and impact. The democratic deficits we face today have a direct relationship to the undermining of the editorial independence of free media. Many fail to understand the relationship between credible information and a vibrant democracy. What happens when we reduce news media to just an industry devoid of its socio-political obligations? Mr. Murdoch was at the forefront of reducing news media to just a business enterprise and yet his far-reaching influence has not been properly studied.

Also Read | Murdoch’s stepping down is not enough to restore trust in media

Sir Harold Evans, the legendary editor of London-based The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981, has documented the dark side of Mr. Murdoch , for instance, his empowering of managers at the cost of editors in his 1984-book Good Times, Bad Times. His revised introduction to the book’s later editions after the phone-hacking crisis is a clear indication that what happened later had its origins in the way he was permitted to renege on his solemn promises to the English parliament. The phone hacking case is not only about the unethical behaviour of the tabloid press, but it was also a single act that undermined the trust factor in news media itself, and Mr. Murdoch was central to this downward slide

It is pertinent here to recollect what Sir Evans wrote: “The experiences I describe in Good Times, Bad Times have turned out to be eerily emblematic. The dark and vengeful undertow I sensed and then experienced in the last weeks of my relationship with Murdoch correctly reflected something morally out of joint with the way he ran his company. In the decades that followed my year at the Times, the inside rot was matched only by the menace that came to represent the civil discourse and the whole political establishment.” Sir Evans’s writings help us understand the full import of his declaration that ‘Rupert Murdoch is the stiletto, a man of method, a cold-eyed manipulator’.

It is a fact that Leveson’s commission was constituted in the United Kingdom because of the excesses committed by the tabloids owned by Mr. Murdoch. In his final report, Justice Leveson said that the U.K. press had for too long “wreaked havoc in the lives of innocent people.” He criticised the transactional relationship between powerful newspaper owners, editors and politicians and called for more transparency in their contacts. It was the Murdoch press at the centre of this controversy.

Mr. Murdoch has stepped down at a time when the legacy media is under severe financial strain. But, the present digital information ecology seem to have internalised the model developed by him and it needs more than just a change in the person at the helm to restore trust in credible news.

New York:

Rupert Murdoch transformed media and politics on three continents, building a chain of newspapers he inherited from his father at just 21 into a lucrative and profoundly influential right-leaning empire.

A shrewd and often merciless businessman, the 92-year-old Murdoch announced he is stepping back from both News Corp and Fox, conglomerates which made him a billionaire and a fearsome political king-maker in his native Australia, his adopted United States, and Britain.

The two companies announced that Murdoch’s eldest son Lachlan, currently co-chair of both and chief executive at Fox, would become sole chair.

The elder Murdoch will become chairman emeritus at both, and he is not giving up his controlling shares, meaning he is not likely to completely step away from his powerful media portfolio.

– Political power –

Murdoch built a fortune estimated at $17 billion by Forbes with a disdain for snobbery and convention combined with a knack for finding new value in staid media outlets.

Born in Melbourne, Australia, Murdoch plunged into the news business suddenly when his father died at 66 in 1952, leaving him the struggling Adelaide News.

Murdoch turned the paper around, and then began a five-decade spree of acquisitions that took him to Britain — where, in short succession, he bought the News of the World, the Sun and the Times — and then the United States, where he added the New York Post, 20th Century Fox, and Dow Jones, owner of prestigious title The Wall Street Journal.

He made the Sun a top tabloid with scandalous headlines and large photos of scantily clad women on Page 3, but it was the politics that grated many the most.

Critics reviled the unabashed support his empire gave conservatives, as well as groups espousing unfounded right-wing conspiracy theories.

The Sun claimed to have swung Britain’s April 1992 general election in favor of the Conservative Party, while Fox News was credited with giving billionaire political novice Donald Trump the boost he needed to win the US presidency in 2016.

The relationship was reciprocal: Trump’s close cooperation with the channel helped boost Fox’s earnings hugely.

Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd of the Labor Party didn’t mince words, describing Murdoch as a “cancer on our democracy.”

Murdoch however seemed to relish his position as a target of the left.

“When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies — and I’m proud of the ones I have got,” he said in one interview.

– 24 hour TV news –

Murdoch also understood early that newspapers were not the future: in 1989 he launched 24-hour satellite TV channel Sky News in the UK and, seven years later, cable-based Fox News in the United States, a conservative foil to the new giant CNN.

While the TV news and related channels boosted his fortune, Murdoch has hung onto his newspapers despite the industry’s questionable profitability amid the rise of the internet and social media.

Financially, he scored big with the $71 billion sale in 2018 of film studio 21st Century Fox to Disney.

Murdoch said at the time he was “returning to our roots, which is news and sports.”

But over a decade, his News Corp stock has been flat, with investors not seeing huge profitability from the traditional media.

– Succession  –

Murdoch’s personal life and family have meanwhile generously fed the kind of news stories he reserves for politicians he dislikes.

That includes his four marriages and divorces — the third to a Chinese-American businesswoman, Wendi Deng, 38 years younger than him, and the fourth to Mick Jagger’s ex-wife, model Jerry Hall.

Murdoch abruptly called off a fifth marriage earlier this year, two weeks after his engagement, according to reports.

Meanwhile, speculation has simmered for decades over when he would retire and which of his children — Elizabeth, 55, Lachlan, 52, or James, 50 —  would inherit control of his media empire.

The has intensified in recent years amid reports that secretive Murdoch has experienced some serious health issues.

The New York Times reported that in January 2018 he fell while aboard his yacht in the Caribbean, suffering fractured vertebrae and a potentially life-threatening spinal haematoma.

His injury, and its potential impact on his business empire, was hidden for weeks.

All of that, and more, has been source material for the hit HBO show “Succession,” about aging, ruthless media mogul Logan Roy and his two sons and one daughter, all scheming over the future of their media conglomerate.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old media magnate who created Fox News, is stepping down as leader of both Fox’s parent company and his News Corp. media holdings.

Fox said in an announcement on Thursday that Mr. Murdoch would become chairman emeritus of both companies. His son, Lachlan, will become News Corp. chairman and continue as chief executive officer of Fox Corp.

Lachlan Murdoch said that “we are grateful that he will serve as chairman emeritus and know he will continue to provide valued counsel to both companies.”