What if Rupert Murdoch never bought The Sun newspaper?

Read time: 5 mins

In brief…

• Murdoch purchased The Sun in 1969, and transformed it into the biggest-selling newspaper in the UK by moving it to right-wing, ‘titillating’ content.
• The News Agents say he wielded a concerning amount of political power, and would exercise this against politicians to yield results that would benefit his business.
• The Sun’s reporting was anti-gay, and angered entire parts of the UK with inaccurate reporting, making the British newspaper industry more “raucous”.

What’s the story?

"A worthy, boring, leftish, popular broadsheet"

That's not how many people see The Sun newspaper in 2024, but that's how one News Agents listener described the paper before it was bought in 1969 by Rupert Murdoch.

One year before, he'd acquired The News of the World.

At the time, Lewis Goodall says, the most popular newspaper in the UK was The Daily Mirror, describing it as "pompous, in that very traditional way".

"Murdoch felt that papers like this were talking down to people," he says.

"He felt that there was a space to be for a more demotic, more fun-loving kind of newspaper, something that was very much geared towards what people actually were interested in, rather than what they ought to know about."

The Sun cost Murdoch £800,000, he later remarked about the ease with which he was able to enter the UK's newspaper business.

Jon Sopel says he "transformed the landscape" of UK media, and did that by allying emerging technology with "popular journalism" – even if that involved topless women.

"Every day was a page three girl, a topless young woman for everyone's titillation," he says.

"It had very good sports coverage, it transformed the industry.

"You could give a tick to Murdoch for having transformed it, but then you saw the political power he wielded within Whitehall."

Murdoch’s political power

Like the newspaper's move from left to right, Murdoch himself started out as a supporter of the Labour Party, backing Howard Wilson for Prime Minister in 1970.

But Murdoch’s support  was often conditional, with Jon Sopel remembering when Murdoch, with the backing of then-editor Kelvin MacKenzie, threatened to pull support from John Major in the 1997 election unless he followed the will of the business mogul on the UK's relationship with Europe.

"MacKenzie rang John Major to say we're not supporting you in the '97 election, he went further and said, 'I've got two buckets of shit, and we're going to pour them both over your head tomorrow in the paper'.

"It was Kelvin McKenzie's way of being the enforcer for Rupert Murdoch."

But, as Emily Maitlis says, other actions of MacKenzie could be considered "far more egregious" than talk of buckets of shit.

"He was the editor during the Hillsborough tragedy, and was quick to blame it on the people of Liverpool," she says.

"That's why people in Liverpool still don't buy The Sun, and he has never recovered his reputation."

"That's not to say that Murdoch didn't do good things for journalism, because he did. This is the other side of it," he adds.

Murdoch's purchase of The Sunday Times was evidence of how "embedded" Murdoch was with Thatcher's government, with her overriding competition law to allow him to purchase so many British publications.

They were, Jon adds, "very anti-gay".

"There was also a social conservatism which was often quite ugly – speak to some of the people who were done over by The Sun just because they were homosexual," he says.

When Elton John and David Furniss married in 2014, The Sun's headline was "Elton takes David up the aisle", which Jon describes as an "ugly" gay sex joke.

And it wasn't just gay people who were targeted.

"There was a time in the '80s and '90s where it felt like minister after minister was being brought down," says Emily.

She says lives were "ruined" by the phone hacking that took place under Murdoch's watch, as  proven by numerous court cases over the years.

"They're still paying out millions of pounds to this day to people who have come forward to make phone hacking claims."

She says even when phone hacking did uncover wrongdoing, the tabloid's methods were still "utterly transformative and destructive" of people's lives.

How Murdoch transformed the way we watch sport on TV

On the plus side, The News Agents credit Murdoch with revolutionising sports coverage in the UK, in a time when people would only be able to catch highlights on the BBC's Match of the Day.

"There would be two cameras at the ground, there'd be a top shot and there'd be a ground level shot. The coverage was shit. Murdoch has absolutely transformed the way we watch sport.

“Sky News didn't exist. There was no 24 hour news service in the UK before Sky came along."

And while Emily says he would have done this without buying The Sun and the News of the World, Jon says it gave him the "foothold" in UK media to bring about this change.

What's The News Agents' take?

Lewis Goodall says Murdoch's influence on the UK is often too focused on election results and that transformative changes in leadership, such as Labour's win in 1997, would have happened with or without his backing.

Despite this, he says Blair and Alistair Campbell still worked to get Murdoch on side, such was his political influence.

"You don't want him against you," Lewis says.

"He's had such a big impact on the wider media entertainment landscape, it's like a slow drum beat of how it affects our politics. I think Murdoch's role, for example, in the slow legitimisation of Euro-skepticism in Britain is a big thing," he adds.

He says The Sun, which originally celebrated the UK joining the EU in 1973, turned euro-skepticism from a "fringe issue" to "the heart of Conservative politics."

"I think his big influence has been changes in our entertainment media generally, and slow political cultural changes over time.

"I also think he has made his newspaper culture a lot more raucous than it would have been."

Listen in full on The News Agents