Harbingers of the Future: Rupert Murdoch's Takeover of the News of the World Organisation

Abstract

In 1968, the chairman of the News of the World (NOTW) Organisation, Sir William Carr, had been in place for 16 years and owned 32 per cent of the voting shares. However, he also had serious health problems, which were not helped by heavy drinking. Like his predecessors, he ran the paper very much as a family concern, and, as Michael Leapman [1] put it,

"saw nothing wrong in using its resources for his personal comfort and amusement. The family enjoyed company boxes at Ascot races and the Covent Garden opera. There were company golf courses in Surrey and Spain where Sir William played. The paper owned racehorses and a stud farm and sponsored a race at Goodwood. Carr would regularly host black-tie stag dinners at the company flat at Cliveden Place — one floor below his own plush quarters. All this affected profitability and the share price, and that was compounded by an unadventurous record of expansion." [2]

([1] The best and fullest accounts of Murdoch’s takeover of the News of the World Organisation are to be found in M. Leapman, Barefaced Cheek: the Apotheosis of Rupert Murdoch, London and Sydney: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983; and C. Bainbridge and R. Stockdill, The News of the World Story, London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993, to which the main narrative of this chapter is inevitably indebted.

[2] Leapman, pp. 42-3.)