In the UK, Murdoch’s losses show his monopoly adventures are winding down

Financial figures out of the United Kingdom are telling a sad truth about the Murdoch family media empire. It looks like Rupert’s long-term strategy of building monopoly markets by throwing money at a challenge isn’t working in the far more contested 21st-century world.

Murdoch’s latest loss is the £88 million (A$170 million) that NewsUK lost creating TalkTV, a British television equivalent of Fox (or Australia’s own Sky), before throwing in the towel last month after just two years of operation.

But wait, it gets worse. Per financial filings released this week, these losses only cover until the middle of last year. In its only full financial year of operations in 2023, the Murdoch adventure lost $103 million, on top of the $65 million it lost in the two prior months getting the venture off the ground.

This follows a lengthy process of clearing the defamation decks, with losses including what’s only been reported as “substantial damages” to migrants’ rights organisation Migrants Organise, after one of TalkTV’s resident provocateurs accused the not-for-profit of being “human traffickers”.

Further, last July, the UK regulator Ofcom announced an inquiry into breaches of impartiality rules at both TalkTV and its competitor for the right-wing market on the telly, GB News. Like GB News, TalkTV has been targeted for advertising boycotts by what the right’s key media voice The Telegraph has described as a “left-wing campaign group”.

TalkTV has always looked like a media mogul’s solution in search of an audience problem. With just a touch of schadenfreude, the Murdochs’ long-term critic, The Guardian, reported the closure with a note that the channel had a “disappointing start with ‘zero viewers’ during primetime broadcasts, meaning its audience was too small to register on the official rating agency”.

By December last year, it had crawled to 2 million viewers, well behind the dominant BBC News with 11.4 million. 

Things aren’t much better over at what was once the company’s global flagship, The Sun, with latest estimates putting its (now unreported) circulation at about 700,000 — behind its major tabloid competitor the Daily Mail, and well down from the 3.5 million it proudly reported back when it could (and did) claim that it was “The Sun Wot Won” elections.

This week’s financial reports for The Sun’s operating company, News Group Newspapers Ltd, show a loss in the 2023 financial year of about $127 million, following on from $242 million in 2022, as social media’s abandoning of news links cuts into the paper’s online audiences.

Its accounts include a provision for about $150 million for potential ongoing liabilities in the hacking scandal — or “allegations of voicemail interceptions” as the company’s accounts would have it.

The scandal has already cost the family’s companies more than $2 billion. The ongoing legal troubles feature Prince Harry, fresh from a win over Mirror Newspapers, with the latest bid to rope Rupert Murdoch and other executives personally into the case for misleading evidence. (A “scurrilous and cynical attack on their integrity”, according to News UK.)

Monopoly of its chosen markets has long been the traditional family route to success. It worked in Australia for Sir Keith, and for 40-odd years it worked for Rupert in the UK — dominating in tabloids through The Sun and The News of the World and building satellite broadcasting through Sky (now owned by Comcast).

The only enduring success lies in the digital subscription strategy for The Times and Sunday Times. Its operating company, Times Media Limited, shows profits of about $120 million over each of the past two years, coming close to offsetting the losses of The Sun. But it’s at the cost of a hard paywall that has meant sacrificing the influence that comes from setting the serious news agenda.

A hundred million here, a hundred million there. It looks like the rollicking adventures of the plucky “Dirty Digger” in the mother country his grandfather left in the 19th century to bring religion to the colonies could be winding to a close.