Tuning In The Global Village : Powerful Signals: A Look at Four Global Media Moguls : RUPERT MURDOCH

A luncheon companion once asked News Corp. Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch to explain his master strategic plan. “Plan?” Murdoch responded. “I don’t have any plan. I’m an opportunist.”

Perhaps no global media baron attracts as much speculation and interest as Murdoch, who over the last 40 years has leveraged two provincial Australian newspapers into an $8-billion media colossus in television, film, newspapers, magazines, books and information services spanning three continents.

Murdoch’s empire includes the Fox film and TV studio and fourth network in the United States, a 50% stake in the multichannel satellite network BSkyB in Britain, newspapers from the racy (London) Sun to the highbrow Times of London, and the book publishing giant HarperCollins.

Although Murdoch avers no grand strategic designs, many consider him one of the few media visionaries in the Anglo-American world, a person who understands the growing importance of global television in the modern media firmament.

“The television set of the future will be, in reality, a telecomputer linked by fiber-optic cable to a global cornucopia of programming and nearly infinite libraries of data, education and entertainment,” Murdoch once reflected. The telecomputer, he predicted, “will revolutionize the way we are educated, the way we work and the way we relax.”

Murdoch’s penchant for the big gamble is part of the reason behind his success. It is also the root of much of his problem, namely a debt of $7.6 billion that nearly brought his company to its knees last year before his bankers allowed him to recapitalize.

Murdoch is now in the process of slowly shifting his company’s focus away from the slow-growth print medium and toward the high-growth area of global electronic communications and entertainment. Although newspapers, magazines and books will continue to be a major portion of News Corp.’s assets, the electronic media side of the company promises the largest returns.

With a 24-hour satellite Sky News channel in Britain--now reaching 3.3 million households--and the emerging Fox network in the United States, Murdoch is making long-range plans to combine the resources of the two as part of a worldwide electronic news organization that perhaps in a decade will rival CNN.

Murdoch also hopes that a minority stake he acquired in one of Spain’s private TV channels will also serve as a launching pad into the booming Latin American TV market. Analysts expect that Murdoch will eventually launch a satellite news and entertainment channel in the Far East, a move that, given the assets he already has in place, shouldn’t be difficult.