Even those who hate Rupert Murdoch the most have to admit that he's a visionary. And he's willing to put his money where his eyes are. Two cases in point are his purchase of The Wall Street Journal, earlier this year, and now the start-up of th Fox Business Channel, led by Cable Game champion Roger Ailes.
The Cable Gamer got a lot out of Tim Arango's Fortune profile of Murdoch, Ailes, and FBN, as seen in earlier posts, but here are the most important grafs of the whole piece:
The reason is that Fox Business, whose planning fell to Roger Ailes, the television genius who took Fox News from laughingstock to top-rated cable news network, is more than a challenge to just CNBC's monopoly here in the U.S.: It is the first brick in Rupert Murdoch's attempt to build a global business information Goliath.
Fox Business is launching as another key piece in this strategy, the Wall Street Journal, is entering the News Corp. fold. The $5 billion acquisition of Dow Jones by News Corp., which was announced Aug. 1, should be a fait accompli by November or December (if the perfunctory shareholder votes and regulatory approval go as planned).
Add the Wall Street Journal to Murdoch's $72 billion media conglomerate - which spans the globe from Hollywood's 20th Century Fox to the Asian satellite service Star and its European version, Sky - and it is easy to see how Willard and Gomez's barroom banter are the first steps toward an empire that could one day beam a Fox Business channel into China via Star or launch local channels in India and Eastern Europe. It is likely that will happen gradually over the next few years. "There have been inquiries but no negotiations yet," Murdoch told Fortune in a recent interview in his eighth-floor office at News Corp.'s Manhattan headquarters.
Murdoch believes that the time is now to launch a global business channel, as emerging markets are minting new investors and entrepreneurs every day. He wants to be the go-to programmer for these new capitalists. "There's this constant growth of wealth," he says. "You have 100 million people joining the world economy every year. This is the biggest development in the history of the planet almost - the speed at which this is happening. And while there certainly will be bumps, it's going to go on for another 30 years. Living standards everywhere are going to be better."
If Murdoch is correct--that we are on the edge of a global capitalist revolution, bigger than the one we've already seen in the last 30 years--then his purchase of the WSJ and his creation of FBN will look brilliant and profound indeed.
That's the thing about visionaries who wield real power, as Murdoch does: they have ideas, and they also have the power to put those ideas into action.
Stay tuned!
