Politics & Power Quote by Rupert Murdoch

Murdoch’s genius has always been in making ideology sound like temperament. “I’m not a knee-jerk conservative” opens with a preemptive flinch: he knows the caricature (the mogul as reflexive right-wing puppetmaster) and rejects it before anyone else can pin it on him. The phrase “knee-jerk” isn’t just a denial; it’s a branding move. It casts opponents as emotional and automatic, while casting himself as deliberate, data-driven, modern.

Then comes the careful stacking of commitments: “passionately believe” lends heat and moral certainty, but it’s attached to the respectable center-right duo of “free markets and less government,” ideas that read as pragmatic rather than doctrinaire in Anglophone business culture. The subtext is that his power is aligned with a philosophy that protects it: deregulation, lower taxes, lighter oversight. “Passionately” is doing double duty, signaling sincerity while normalizing a set of preferences that happen to suit owners of large media empires.

The final clause is the real tell: “but not to the point of being a libertarian.” That’s an escape hatch. He wants the legitimacy of small-government rhetoric without the social and moral baggage of libertarianism (drug legalization, nonintervention, radical civil-liberties absolutism) and without the anti-monopoly implications of true market purity. It’s also a hedge against the obvious critique: media titans thrive on state-adjacent infrastructures, regulation, and political access. Murdoch is positioning himself as neither reactionary nor extremist: a businessman’s conservative, flexible enough to navigate elections, audiences, and regulators while claiming an ideological spine.