Do we like them?Do we like Rupert Murdoch?
Our score: 2 out of 10. A long run of harm through the outlets he owned and steered, with only a thin sliver of real good, such as a 2015 post defending immigrants.
Murdoch is the son of Sir Keith Murdoch, a newspaper man who owned two Adelaide papers. When Keith died in 1952, Rupert came back from Oxford to run the family firm, News Limited. He was in Adelaide by 1953 and the profits jumped fast, and by the end of the decade he was a bona fide media magnate.
From there it was seventy years of buying things: papers, TV licences and, in the US, Fox News. He finally stepped back in September 2023, becoming chairman emeritus of Fox and News Corp. In September 2025 the family fight over succession was settled, with Lachlan taking control of the trust through 2050 and Elisabeth, James and Prudence reportedly bought out for around $1.1 billion each, per anonymous sources.
The big stain is Fox and the 2020 election. Dominion's court filings put Murdoch under oath, and NPR's David Folkenflik reported his testimony showed him in the thick of conversations about how to keep Fox viewers from drifting away. Fox ended up paying $787.5 million to settle Dominion's defamation suit, without a full apology, rather than face a trial.
On the wider harm check, Media Matters argues Murdoch's outlets have pushed climate denial for decades, including Sky News Australia during the 2019-20 bushfires. PinkNews reported analyst research that Fox published more trans-related articles than any other outlet in 2025, and groups like GLAAD have long criticised Fox's trans coverage. That is the editorial output of outlets he owned, not his own words, but it is the pattern the harm test looks at.
Then there's the phone hacking. In January 2025 Murdoch's UK tabloid publisher apologised to Prince Harry and agreed to pay damages, admitting phone hacking, surveillance and misuse of private information by the News of the World and private investigators at The Sun. Murdoch closed the News of the World in 2011 and told a parliamentary hearing it was “the most humble day of my life”, but a former MP involved in the case called for a personal apology and none was reported.
He isn't a cartoon, though. In 2015 he posted that Mexican immigrants have lower crime rates than the native born, publicly telling Trump he was wrong. Beyond that, the good list we could verify is thin. His family's giving is mostly private and we found no solid record of personal causes, so we've left it off rather than guess.