Rupert Murdoch

Starr just knocked health care, the economy, the stock market, Russia and the budget out of the election. Way to go!In parlous times, America's new spiritual leader is Cardinal McGwire of St. Louis.Greenspan says more raising an eyebrow than anyone since the Lubavitcher rebbe.Rupert Murdoch will merge Manchester United with the LA Dodgers. At last we will see home runs kicked and headed.Pub Date: 9/11/98

LOS ANGELES -- The baseball world has turned upside down. The New York Yankees are now the quiet, professional team that has gained the grudging respect of everyone looking up at them in the standings. The Los Angeles Dodgers -- who used to fit that description right down to their matching T-shirts -- have undergone a personality change so profound, they might as well switch to pinstripes.New ownership has brought a strange new direction to one of baseball's most staid franchises. How else to explain the three weeks of turmoil that began with the blockbuster Mike Piazza deal and did not subside even after general manager Fred Claire designated disgruntled Japanese pitcher Hideo Nomo for assignment and pulled out of the Randy Johnson sweepstakes?

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- Baseball owners have tried before to hold back the clock, but their previous efforts to reduce the average length of major-league games have always come up long.Former Orioles manager Frank Robinson says this time it's going to get done, and he's scheduled to outline the industry's latest attempt to sell the game short at today's joint ownership meeting at the Renaissance Vinoy Resort.It's not the most pressing matter on the agenda -- the owners will vote today on the proposed sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers to media mogul Rupert Murdoch -- but it might be the issue that has the most direct impact on baseball fans in 1998.

Rupert Murdoch's Fox Group agreed to buy the Dodgers 40 years, almost to the day, after they and the Giants left New York for the West Coast.The Sun's Peter Schmuck probably spoke for most people outside New York when he wrote Sept. 5: "The late Walter O'Malley is considered the pioneer who turned Major League Baseball into a truly national pastime when he moved the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles."Nobody disputes that the major leagues needed to establish themselves outside the Northeast, and that San Francisco and Los Angeles deserved big-league ball clubs (well, I cling to the stereotype that Los Angeles fans will leave a double no-hitter in the seventh inning to beat the traffic to the beach, but let that go)

Hizzoner and President Bell are playing chicken with Bawlmer City.The coup leaders in Sierra Leone offered to sell it back for $46 million. True patriots would demand more.Rupert Murdoch will merge Fox Television with the Family Channel. That's hedging his bets on the cultural wars.Never saw a Tiger in a sand trap before?Pub Date: 6/13/97

A prudent Russia would rather join NATO than fight it.The Patuxent, Potomac, Patapsco and Baltimore municipal water system pour into the Chesapeake Bay.If city fathers believed in the free market they would just let anyone who wants to build a hotel here build it, and not pay any of them to do it.Rupert Murdoch is buying the Los Angeles Dodgers and will teach them cricket.Pub Date: 5/16/97

In a May 4 article in the Perspective section on political lobbying by the broadcast industry, a quote from Reed Hundt, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, was incorrectly attributed to Bob Dole. Hundt called the government's distribution of the new digital broadcast spectrum "the biggest single gift of public property to any industry in this century."Pub Date: 5/13/97The news you are about to read is news you may never see on television. nn nnIt's about an industry that has long had unrivaled clout on Capitol Hill, an industry that receives billions in corporate welfare, an industry whose gifts to - and influence over - Washington politicians dwarf the lavishly scrutinized Chinese or Indonesian efforts.

God may love all creatures great and small but he especially likes them tall -- and balding, and filled with the rigid, rumpled, fearful look of an ex-police inspector in over his head. And with mustaches. And with the name John Cleese.Carry on, Cleese!Cleese is back, eight years after "A Fish Called Wanda" with "Fierce Creatures," boasting the same cast (Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Palin and a double dosage of Kevin Kline) arrayed in roughly the same personality range as before, but utterly unconnected to the earlier shenanigans and reimagined in a completely foolish plot.

Roseanne says one of the reasons she decided to produce a sketch comedy show for Rupert Murdoch's Fox network is that she's "sick of white-guy college humor," which she feels typifies "Saturday Night Live" on NBC."You know, that whole sensibility that came out of the '70s with comedians like Steve Martin," she said in a telephone press conference this week."It's some guy standing up there smugly telling you about how cool he is."That, says Roseanne, is what her "Saturday Night Special," which premieres at 11 tonight on WBFF (Channel 45 for a six-week trial run)

The Fox network -- in what appeared to be a pre-emptive strike against ABC, CBS and NBC -- became the first major television network to embrace a ratings system for violence and sex.In a statement Thursday, Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch (above) said, "We have decided to implement the MPAA-like [Motion Picture Association of America] rating system for the TV programs on Fox."The three other major networks also indicated that they will consider adopting a rating system for the so-called V-chip that will alert viewers to whether TV shows contain explicit violence or sex.Until this week, the networks had vowed to fight any imposed ratings system, arguing that it violates their First Amendment rights.