"Rupert Murdoch Is the World’s Most Powerful Media Mogul"

Not for long. The chairman and CEO of News Corp., who likes to view himself as an anti-establishment rebel, is today the ultimate insider. No other media executive has as much personal clout with world leaders, in part because none so willingly uses his moguldom to reward friends and punish enemies. Murdoch has helped elect -- or defeat -- at least two British prime ministers, several New York City mayors, and numerous American presidents, among others. He is also the ultimate global capitalist, an Australian-turned-American whose real home is his jet. With News Corp.'s ability to beam satellite programming to 40 million subscribers across the Americas, Asia, and Europe, along with its Fox movie and TV studios and cable network, newspapers from Hong Kong to New York, several book publishers, and a burgeoning Internet division, no other media company can claim greater global reach. Nearly half of News Corp.'s $25 billion in revenues last year came from outside the United States.

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Even so, Murdoch's position as the king of media is slipping. For one thing, the satellite-television system he cobbled together after a 20-year struggle may soon unravel. Rupert recently announced that he was close to swapping assets with cable billionaire John Malone in order to buy back Malone's 19 percent stake in News Corp. -- a stake that uncomfortably rivals Murdoch's 30 percent hold over his own company's shares. The price is likely to be News Corp.'s dominant position in DirecTV. Such a deal would leave Murdoch without a digital distribution platform in the critical United States market.

For another, Wall Street analysts don't share the public's outsized view of Murdoch's might. At current share prices, they give News Corp. a total market capitalization of some $68 billion. That's on par with Disney, but still less than archrival Time Warner, whose market cap is roughly $81 billion. (Disclosure: Time Warner was my longtime employer and still helps pay my mortgage.) More importantly, none of the traditional media giants comes close to the value that moneymakers are placing on eight-year-old new media upstart Google, which is currently worth more than $150 billion. After a remarkable four decades of striving and reinvention, Rupert may soon be yesterday's most powerful media titan.

"Murdoch Puts Money Ahead of Ideology"

Not really. Sure, Murdoch has always made running a successful business a major priority. That means at times supporting tough-minded politicians who are winners, regardless of their party label. (Over the years, he's backed left-leaning leaders like Australia's Paul Keating and Britain's Tony Blair, as well as conservatives like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush.) When it comes to entertainment, that also means valuing market share more than ideological correctness. Take, for example, Fox's over-the-top cartoon Family Guy, which regularly mocks major religions and features a talking, martini-swilling dog, or its tasteless and ill-fated attempt to profit from accused murderer O.J. Simpson's hypothetical confession. Such programming may be the antithesis of the "family values" embraced by many of Fox News's traditionalist, red-state viewers. But so what? The cultural contradictions of capitalism are both ancient and legion, and the notion that Murdoch is somehow uniquely hypocritical in this regard is not just facile -- it's downright misleading.

Although most of his news outlets have openly advanced a broadly conservative agenda, Murdoch himself has been a consistent proponent of a particular type of conservatism. As he told me back in 1984, when I first wrote about Murdoch for Fortune, he has always been "very much for small business and the small man." This Murdochian little guy is a pragmatist, not a moral or intellectual conservative. He is typically anti-union and pro-market, likes a strong defense and strong leaders, and enjoys seeing the high and mighty taken down a few pegs. He's deeply suspicious of the power of pointy-headed bureaucrats, whether they reside in Washington, Brussels, or Beijing.

Think of it this way: Fox's famous cartoon dad, Homer Simpson, if he existed, would read London's Sun and the New York Post, ogle the cleavage on their respective Pages Three and Six, and nod vigorously over his Duff beer to the thunderings of their right-wing editorials. In short, there's no real paradox here. The feisty, tabloid sensibility of most of Murdoch's media empire is consistent with his populist conservatism and reinforces rather than undermines the politicians he supports.

"Murdoch’s Web Strategy Was Perfectly Timed"

As if. Having largely eschewed the Web during the 1990s, even Murdoch admits he was late to the party. Still, in typical fashion, he moved quickly from defense to offense. Soon after forming Fox Interactive Media in 2005, Murdoch spent some $1.3 billion to snap up a sports portal, a videogame site, and the mushrooming social network MySpace, where young netizens gather to gossip and share music and videos. That deal looks especially good now that MySpace's users have soared from 25 million to 130 million since its acquisition and Google has pledged to spend $900 million over 3.5 years to advertise on MySpace and other News Corp. Web sites. And in November, Murdoch showed he was serious about taking MySpace global by announcing a joint venture in Japan with local Internet champion Masayoshi Son.

This flurry of deal-making proved that Rupert can still kick his competitors' behinds. But it nonetheless leaves Murdoch facing an uphill march through knee-deep mud if he hopes to emerge anywhere near the top of the new digital landscape. The Web sites of his newspapers have shown no special gift for capturing traffic. Satellites, his main global distribution outlet with sizeable footprints in every continent except Africa and Antarctica, increasingly appear technically disadvantaged versus broadband cable or even phone lines.

More troubling, Murdoch simply lacks the financial firepower that Internet titans can muster. He got lucky with MySpace but couldn't even make the ante when he tried to buy Internet-based telecom start-up Skype (which eBay snatched up for some $4 billion) or online video portal YouTube (bought by Google for $1.65 billion). Last winter, Murdoch set a goal of lifting his current Internet revenues from $300 million to $1 billion in five years. In September, he also predicted that MySpace would take the market share lead in video from YouTube within a couple months. Hmm. Now that Google owns YouTube, how do those goals look? Modest in the first case and already failed in the second.

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