Rupert Murdoch is an Australian-American global media mogul. He is the major shareholder, chairman and managing director of News Corporation (News Corp). Murdoch's father was Sir Keith Arthur Murdoch, a powerful Australian newspaper proprietor of Presbyterian family. His mother is Dame Elisabeth Murdoch (née Elisabeth Joy Greene), the daughter of a wealthy Irish family. Rupert attended Geelong Grammar, one of Australia's most elite private schools and was reading philosophy, politics and economics at Worcester College, University of Oxford, England, when his father died in 1952.

Rupert Murdoch returned from Oxford to become managing director of News Limited in 1953. Through his leadership, the staff and the circulation and advertising revenue began to grow. He began to direct his attention to acquisition and expansion. He bought the Sunday Times in Perth, Western Australia and, using the tabloid techniques of his father's mentor Lord Northcliffe, made it a success.

In 1956, Murdoch began publishing Australia's first and most successful weekly television magazine, TV Week, at Southdown Press in Melbourne, which also published Australia's oldest women's magazine New Idea.

A defining moment in Murdoch's life was the Stuart case in Adelaide when The News began a campaign to free Max Stuart, a young Aboriginal carnival worker, who had been convicted of the murder of a small girl on a beach near Ceduna, South Australia in late 1958. Stuart had been sentenced to death by hanging. The News was openly critical of the case and investigated it extensively. The death penalty was eventually commuted to life imprisonment.

Over the next few years, Murdoch established himself in Australia as a dynamic business operator, expanding his holdings by acquiring suburban and provincial newspapers in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and the Northern Territory, including the Sydney afternoon tabloid, The Daily Mirror, as well as a small Sydney-based recording company, Festival Records.

In 1964, Murdoch launched The Australian, Australia's first national daily newspaper, based first in Canberra and later in Sydney. The Australian, a broadsheet, was intended to give Murdoch a new respectability as a 'quality' newspaper publisher and greater political influence.

Murdoch expanded to Britain in 1968. He succeeded in beating rival publisher Robert Maxwell in securing The News of the World, which had been the most popular English language newspaper in the world. When the daily newspaper The Sun entered the market in 1969, Murdoch acquired and converted it into a tabloid format, which by 2006 was selling three million copies per day.

Murdoch acquired the London Times (and The Sunday Times) in 1981, the paper Lord Northcliffe had once owned. The distinction of owning The Times came to him through his careful cultivation of the owner who had grown tired of losing money on the property. During the 1980s and early 90s, Murdoch's publications were generally supportive of the UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. At the end of the Thatcher/Major era, Murdoch switched his support to the Labour Party and the party's leader Tony Blair. The closeness of his relationship with Blair and their secret meetings to discuss national policies was to become a political issue in Britain.

In 1986, Murdoch introduced electronic production processes to his newspapers in Australia, Britain, and the United States. This led to significant reductions in the number of employees involved in the printing process due to the greater role of automation. In England, the move aroused the anger of the print unions, resulting in a long and often violent dispute fought in London's docklands area of Wapping, where Murdoch had installed the very latest electronic newspaper publishing factory in an old warehouse.

Murdoch made his first acquisition in the United States in 1973, when he purchased the San Antonio Express-News. Soon afterwards, he founded Star, a supermarket tabloid, and in 1976, he purchased the New York Post. On September 4, 1985, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen, to satisfy the legal requirement that only US citizens could own American television stations. In 1987, in Australia, he bought The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd, the company that his father had once managed.

In 1996, Murdoch chose to enter the world of cable news with the Fox News Channel, a 24-hour cable news station. Following its launch, the heavily-funded Fox News consistently eroded CNN's market share, and eventually proclaimed itself as "the most-watched cable news channel."

In 1993, Murdoch acquired Star TV, a Hong Kong company founded by Richard Li for $1 billion and subsequently created offices for it throughout Asia. It is one of the biggest satellite TV networks in Asia. The deal did not work out as Murdoch planned, however, since it was restricted by the Chinese government from reaching most of China. It was around this time that Murdoch met his third wife Wendi Deng, who worked at Star TV Hong Kong. Later, Murdoch partnered with Chinese media pioneer Liu Changle to start Phoenix Satellite Television, in a deal in which Murdoch owned 45% of the company, Liu Changle 45% and CCTV Hong Kong 10%. Phoenix has become one of the most popular and profitable TV stations among Chinese around the world, particularly in China.

On July 20, 2005, News Corp. bought Intermix Media Inc., which held MySpace.com and other popular social networking-themed websites for $580 million USD. On September 11, 2005, News Corp announced that it would buy IGN Entertainment for $650 million (USD).