Esquire magazine is running a Q&A with News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch, in which in the international media tycoon talks about his upbringing, what makes Murdoch Murdoch, his new crown jewel The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and a host of other subjects. Without further ado (warning: look out for some inappropriate language):
Murdoch on his political ideology and the crisis blowing through multiple financial institutions:
I’m not a knee-jerk conservative. I passionately believe in free markets and less government, but not to the point of being a libertarian. After this financial crisis, there are going to be some restrictions. I’m frightened they’ll go too far, but certainly there should be something.
On News Corp’s MySpace social network and competitor Facebook:
When we bought MySpace, we thought it had great possibilities. We didn’t realize it would grow as fast as it has, and of course it has given birth to imitators, which I guess they’re calling Web 3.0, or whatever, and given rise to what you’d call social networking.
We got a big wake-up call from Facebook last year. We put a lot of new things in this year. You can’t write off MySpace. It is a genuine social network where people go to look for friends, to make friends, to look for people with common interests. Facebook — I don’t want to put it down. It does interesting things and has some very able people there, but it is fundamentally a sort of directory. It’s opened up recently to let people bring in new applications. A huge number have tried to do this, but not that many have succeeded.
