By Stephen Evans BBC North America business correspondent

What is undoubtedly true, though, is that his enterprises give people what they want, rather than what important people think they ought to want.

Where tired and worthy newspapers and television stations struggle, Mr Murdoch's people move in, shake up and deliver journalism with popular appeal, and often also with some wit.

So in the newsrooms of the two big global journalistic forces - the BBC and CNN - executives might wonder what the competition will look like in, say, five or 10 years time.

Industry shake-up

Mr Murdoch is putting the final piece in his global jigsaw.

Murdoch's Fox News will have a wider audience

His News Corporation already has the Star TV service in China and India, plus BSkyB in Britain and a newly-acquired station in Italy giving him European access, as well as an operation covering Latin America.

Now he has the biggest satellite service in North America, DirecTV.

It's true he does already have a news channel in the United States - Fox News - but it is dependent on cable operators to get to homes.

DirecTV will take Mr Murdoch's programmes straight there.

He will be beholden to no-one, and will no doubt shake up the industry in the process through his highly competitive pricing and programming.

And it gives him the platform for a global station competing with CNN and BBC World.

Dramatic impact

In America, Fox News is rattling its rivals. Its style is brash and fast and - to a fast-growing number of viewers - compulsive.

One of its reporters, for example, took a gun with him to Afghanistan in order to personally shoot Osama bin Laden.

Fox News has done for American television what The Sun did for British newspapers: introduced sometimes witty but politically-charged, abrasive standards to a more sober market. It makes the British Sky News seem tame in comparison.

Its critics say it is biased to the right, a charge its executives reject.

Pleasing the masses

"Fair and Balanced" is the Fox slogan, though its executives are close to President Bush and many Republicans tend to like Fox better than what they'd call the "liberal media".

In the past, News Corporation publications have been accused of soft-pedalling on news that the Chinese authorities don't like for fear of offending those who control access to the huge Chinese market.

If Mr Murdoch eventually challenges CNN and the BBC as a global deliverer of television news, his critics may question whether commercial imperative, political belief or journalistic impartiality will be the dominant force.