Power, influence and scandal: Rupert Murdoch’s long lasting legacy in the U.K.

LONDON — In July 1995, Tony Blair was so popular in Britain that he was considered prime minister-in-waiting a full two years before his crowning election. Yet, he still thought it necessary to fly 25 hours to the other side of the world to make his case to one man: Rupert Murdoch.

Blair’s trip to Hayman Island, an Australian resort off the Great Barrier Reef — and return to London the next day — is emblematic of the singular, and critics would say pernicious, sway Murdoch has held over leaders in Britain and in his native Australia for decades.

“I wouldn’t have been going all the way around the world” if it “hadn’t been a very deliberate and, again, very strategic decision that I was going to go and try and persuade them,” Blair told a 2012  public inquiry into media ethics, recalling his Hayman Island trip where he addressed the media mogul’s News Corp. conference. “The minimum objective was to stop them tearing us to pieces, and the maximum objective was, if possible, to open the way to support.”

News Corp Chairman and CEO Murdoch and former British Prime Minister Blair depart a news conference in Washington (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters file)

After Murdoch, 92, announced Thursday that he would step down as chairman of Fox Corp. and News Corp., much of the debate in the United States has been over the influence Fox News has had on American politics, one that Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group that monitors conservative media, called a legacy “of deceit, destruction, and death.”

But long before he turned his attention to U.S. broadcasting, he had grown a modest Australian newspaper business into a print empire that bitterly divided opinion from Canberra to London. Murdoch’s domain also included a 39% controlling stake in the British broadcaster Sky, before it was bought by NBC News’ parent company, Comcast, in 2018.

The divisions are bitter and polarized. Supporters herald his love for journalism and credit him with saving the British newspaper industry by smashing powerful print unions in the mid-1980s.

“He’s got inky fingers; he loves newspapers,” said Guto Harri, who worked for Murdoch as the director of communications and corporate affairs for News U.K., the publisher of The Sun, The Times and Sunday Times, between 2012 and 2015.

“He will have been in the office earlier than you in the morning,” said Harri, who was also a senior press adviser to Boris Johnson, first when he was mayor of London and later as prime minister. “He will have read all the day’s newspapers, and then he would just start wandering round the building asking people questions, whether that was the editorial staff, finance or people who drove the delivery trucks. He was across the whole thing.”

Rupert Murdoch, Publisher of the National Star, 1975 (Naomi Lasdon / Newsday RM via Getty Images file)

Critics believe Murdoch debased rather than rescued the industry: The phone-hacking scandal, which saw the voicemails of hundreds of high-profile people intercepted by journalists, and eventually led to the shuttering of his News of the World tabloid in 2011; the topless “Page 3” girls who adorned The Sun until 2015; and a general disregard for press ethics, privacy and accuracy.

“I see absolutely no upside to Murdoch’s years in the U.K.,” said Steven Barnett, a communications professor at London’s University of Westminster. “I think he’s undermined journalistic standards,” said Barnett, a Murdoch critic who is on the board of Hacked Off, a group set up after the phone-hacking scandal that campaigns for press regulation.

He added that Murdoch had overseen “a culture of disinformation, bullying, misogyny, homophobia and racism” and having “an entirely negative impact on British culture and British democracy.”

Asked for comment on the criticism against Murdoch, News Corp. pointed NBC News toward this line in Murdoch’s Thursday statement: “Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class. Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.”

Rupert Murdoch with his son Lachlan Murdoch in New York in 2015. (Evan Agostini / Invision / AP file)

Few who encountered Murdoch deny he was a “big, bad b——,” as Blair’s spin doctor and media enforcer Alistair Campbell wrote in his memoirs, “The Blair Years,” recalling a conversation between his former boss and then-Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating.

In Australia, Murdoch owned more than half the country’s newspapers.

Back home, many revere what is easily the country’s most successful and influential global business story. “He has been in lots of ways a controversial figure, but an influential figure too,” Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers told ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

But there are plenty others, including former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who said Friday that Murdoch had “done enormous damage to the democratic world” — particularly the U.S. — and accused him of peddling “anger-tainment.”

In the U.K., the correlation between Murdoch’s blessing and political power is so striking that The Sun, one of the most read papers in Britain, has had a 100% record of backing winning candidates since 1979. The apotheosis of this came after the ruling Conservative Party won the 1992 general election when many had predicted defeat. The Sun’s front page declared “It’s The Sun Wot Won It” the next day, following years of ridiculing the opposition Labour Party.

Murdoch’s supporters say it’s entirely proper for prospective rulers to make their case to newspaper proprietors and editors, who represent millions of readers and thus the views of the country. Critics believe these tycoons are often advocating for their own interests, not those of their readers.

While Blair has always denied he had an unspoken agreement with Murdoch, one of his special advisers, Lance Price, wrote in his book “Where Power Lies: Prime Ministers v the Media” that “a deal had been done, although with nothing in writing,” which ensured that if “Murdoch were left to pursue his business interests in peace, he would give Labour a fair wind.”

The anxiety over Murdoch’s controlling influence has waned, alongside the decline of newspaper dominance and the rise of social media. But few believe his handing chairmanship to his older son, Lachlan Murdoch, will mean he’s out of the picture entirely.

“He’s made it pretty clear that he’s going to be keeping a beady eye on junior, so the idea of him stepping away and letting Lachlan run the show entirely as he wants to is I’m afraid for the birds,” said Barnett at the University of Westminster.

“It’s basically about money, it’s about self-enrichment and enrichment for the company,” he said. “And I suspect that he will be quite happy to keep steamroller over any sense of journalistic ethics that might interfere with that.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com