Murdoch, the son of Sir Keith Murdoch (1886–1952), a famous Australian war correspondent and publisher, studied at Worcester College, Oxford (M.A., 1953), and briefly worked as an editor on Lord Beaverbrook's London Daily Express, where he first gained practical experience in the sensationalist journalism that would be a major influence early in his career as a publisher. His father having died, he returned to Australia in 1954 to take over his inheritance, the Sunday Mail and The News, both of Adelaide; he quickly converted the latter into a paper dominated by news of sex and scandal, often writing its banner headlines himself. The News's circulation soared, and he then went about instituting similar changes in papers that he bought in Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, and Brisbane.

By the time that Murdoch acquired his first British newspaper in 1969—the News of the World of London—he had put together a proven formula for boosting circulation, which entailed an emphasis on crime, sex, scandal, and human-interest stories with boldface headlines, prolific sports reporting, and outspokenly conservative editorializing. This formula was successful with both the News of the World and The Sun, a London daily that he acquired the following year.

In 1973 Murdoch entered the American newspaper business by purchasing two San Antonio, Texas, dailies, one of which—the San Antonio News (later the Express-News)—he transformed into a sex-and-scandal sheet that soon dominated the city's afternoon market. In 1974 he introduced a national weekly sensationalist tabloid, the Star, and in 1976 he purchased the afternoon tabloid New York Post, but in the late 1980s he sold both, profitably; he repurchased the Post in 1993. He also purchased the Boston Herald American from the Hearst Corporation in 1982 and changed the name to the Boston Herald (sold 1994). He bought TV Guide in 1988. Overall in the 1980s and '90s he bought and later sold a number of American publications—such as the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York City Village Voice, and New York magazine. Among Murdoch's diverse publications were a number of more conventional and respected newspapers, such as The Times of London and the Sunday Times (both acquired in 1981) and the Australian (a national daily that he established in 1964). Murdoch took residence in the United States in 1974 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985, based in New York City.

In the 1980s and '90s Murdoch amassed major holdings in other communications ventures, including radio and television stations and video, film, and record companies, as well as book publishing. In 1985 he acquired the Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation and bought several independent American television stations from Metromedia, Inc., consolidating both these ventures into a new company, Fox, Inc. (Fox Broadcasting Company), which has since become a major broadcast television network in the United States, rivaling ABC, CBS, and NBC. He bought the Australian news group the Herald and Weekly Times Ltd. in 1987. He thereafter purchased a number of book-publishing companies—including, in the United States, the prestigious Harper & Row Publishers (1987), the religious publisher Zondervan (1988), and the giant textbook and trade publisher Scott, Foresman & Company (1989), and, in the United Kingdom, the venerable William Collins PLC (1989); these companies and some operations in Australia and New Zealand were merged in 1990 as HarperCollins Publishers. In Britain in 1989 Murdoch inaugurated Sky Television, a four-channel satellite service, which merged with the rival British Satellite Broadcasting in 1990 to become British Sky Broadcasting.

This heady expansion burdened Murdoch's international media conglomerate with a heavy debt, which he reduced by selling off New York, Seventeen, the Daily Racing Form, and several other American magazines. In 1993 he purchased Star TV, a pan-Asian television service based in Hong Kong, as part of his plan to build a global television network. In 1995 the News Corporation entered into a partnership with MCI Communications Corporation, a major provider of long-distance telecommunications services in the United States. Murdoch subsequently looked to increase his company's Internet holdings, and in 2005 he bought Intermix Media, owner of MySpace.com, a social-networking site that had more than 30 million members. Two years later he made news with the announcement that the News Corporation was acquiring Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal (Wall Street Journal, The), for $5 billion.