Success and scandal - How Murdoch's influence grew beyond newspapers

Seventy-one years ago, Rupert Murdoch inherited a single newspaper in Adelaide and turned it into the English speaking world's most powerful news provider, driving the politics of three countries - Australia, the UK and the US - to the right and surviving a string of scandals and controversies until his retirement, aged 92.

- Dan Sabbagh

An empire of newspapers

At 21, he took over the Adelaide News from his father, and by the 1960s had created Australia's largest newspaper group, whose titles made and broke the Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1972. Turning his attention to Britain in the late 1960s, he bought the News of the World and launched the Sun, which rapidly became the bestselling title with a formula of sex, celebrity and sport.

The Sun, whose page three topless photographs lasted 44 years, turned from Labour to supporting Margaret Thatcher. Murdoch bought the Times titles with a supportive government in the background and fought the print unions at Wapping - before switching his support to Tony Blair, eagerly backing him over the invasion of Iraq and sticking with him long after the war had been revealed to be a disaster.

When the polls turned again, the papers, always with the proprietor making the final call, backed David Cameron, and then Brexit, a once marginal cause kept alive by a handful of rightwing papers.

An attempt to diversify into TV in Britain nearly bankrupted him, but eventually, after an enforced merger, he turned BSkyB around and it came to dominate football coverage in the way his newspaper group loomed over Westminster. Murdoch did not control all of Sky, but he tried to merge it with his newspapers in 2011 - until a major scandal intervened.

A billion-pound scandal