The decline of the titan?

RUPERT MURDOCH, 75

* Australian-born American.

* Media magnate.

* Personal fortune of US$8 billion.

Any other 75-year-old who has successfully battled cancer and recently fathered a sixth child might have reason to ease up a little as he toasts his birthday. But it's a sure bet that Rupert Murdoch, whose impact and achievements are among the most far-reaching of his generation, was not talking about retirement as he blew out his candles in New York at the weekend.

He arrived in London yesterday for a formal reception at the Newspaper Publishers Association to honour his contribution to the media. What everyone, guests and competitors alike, will be looking for is the same thing: Clues that, just maybe, he is starting to slow down.

When he married again in 1999, friends cried: "Thank God for Wendi." The marriage appeared to rejuvenate him. He spent more time swimming and in the gym, and the couple were seen out on the party circuit.

But there have been rumours for some months now that maybe the Wendi effect is wearing off or even that the high-burn Manhattan lifestyle, with two daughters under 5, is tiring Murdoch out. The suggestion is that he is spending fewer hours in the office and travelling less.

What he has not shown is any sign of losing his sharpness of mind or his grasp of detail.

"He can take you on an intellectual tour of virtually every nation of the world," says Howard Rubenstein, his personal PR man for 30 years. "I had lunch with him and Henry Kissinger last year, and the conversation was back and forth, country by country, taking in politics, government and economics. It was one of the most interesting and extraordinary lunches. If you didn't know his age, you wouldn't think he was 60."

At 75, Murdoch has been the most influential figure in the British media in the past four decades, and a major influence on this country's politics, popular culture, sport and industrial relations. Even now, his far-reaching impact is difficult to assess properly.

He has won more elections than Tony Blair, transformed the newspaper industry by taking on the print unions at Wapping, destabilised the monarchy through his newspapers' revelations, transformed football into a game awash with cash and changed the face of British broadcasting with Sky TV, which dominates the pay-TV industry, having almost eight million subscribers. His personal fortune is estimated at £4.53 billion ($12.36 billion) and his impact on how people today consume media is profound.

Yet judging by his most recent interview, Murdoch does not feel these achievements have been wholly appreciated. He has long nursed a resentment for what he calls "the broadcasting establishment", which he believes sought to strangle Sky TV at birth. Ranged against him he has always envisaged a legion of shadowy "establishment forces" - the Eton and Oxford people who will never welcome him into their ranks, despite the fact that he went to Oxford.

Frequently he even appears to play up his status as bogeyman, saying about broadcasters: "It is perfectly natural that people would be a bit paranoid about me. They all hate me because of Sky."

This sense of being an outsider - and not wanting to belong - has been useful to him in business, powering his aggression and enabling him to become, as he recently described himself, "a radical agent of change".

How ironic, then, that to younger eyes, he has become that establishment he reviles. Murdoch now risks eclipse by young upstarts who, like himself 50 years ago, can think outside the box and use new technologies in radically different ways.

Nowhere is this more evident than with the anarchic power of the internet. The News International empire got the net wrong in the 90s - simply pasting its newspaper and TV content straight on to the web - but Murdoch has made fresh attempts to get it right. Recently, News International paid US$580 million ($914 million) for the online community Myspace.com, where young people blog, swap music and reach out to networks of friends. These community sites will be the way to sell media content in the future, Murdoch has decided, and he has proselytised to the industry ever since.

He said: "I think we're on the eve, you know, of an era, of a golden age for media. These, all these wonderful inventions are nothing if you can't put something on them - they've got to have content. And that's what our business is, creating or reporting news and creating entertainment. And I think we've got to do more of it and take advantage of these great opportunities ahead of us."

From his origins as the owner of one sickly newspaper in Adelaide, Australia, in 1952, Murdoch has bet his empire time and again on the latest big deal or visionary technology. Whether it was the rescue of the Sun, the move into television and film in the US or the creation of satellite broadcasters in Britain and Asia, the gambles have all paid off.

Outside Britain, this ballsy record has won him enormous respect. The media industry veteran Barry Diller, one of the United States' richest men, described him as "the only truly great international entrepreneur functioning in the media business".

Yet in Britain Murdoch still feels his status has never been properly recognised. Of Wapping, which revolutionised the newspaper industry but cast him as a hate figure, he said last year: "I'm certainly very, very proud of it. And it'll be part of my legacy."

Perhaps this year's low-key birthday celebrations owe something to the exhaustion of life in Manhattan. For a man who has spent years commuting between continents - and is said to give himself enemas on the company jet to avoid the bother of ordinary digestive complications - life with a young wife in the world's most frenetic city may just make him feel his age.

He caught sight of Wendi Deng, a former vice-president of his own Star TV, when touring the Hong Kong offices, and married her on a yacht in New York harbour just a few weeks after his divorce from Anna, his wife of 32 years, became final.

Wendi immediately got her ageing husband into the News Corp gym, lifting weights and streamlining his diet to overcome the prostate cancer he had developed.

But Wendi's ambitions for daughters Grace and Chloe have thrown up the greatest complications in the Murdoch dynasty. For the question that grows heavier with each birthday is: what happens after Rupert?

This year, the issue is more troublesome, because his most favoured son, the tattooed, motorcyling Lachlan, flounced out of the company last July, ripping up Murdoch's succession plan. Murdoch snr's public statement of "disappointment" isn't the half of it.

Lachlan, the middle of the three children by Anna, had climbed highest in the family business after a Darwinist exercise run by his father. He was the number-three executive at News Corp but was put out by Wendi's attempts to improve the inheritance of his infant half-sisters.

Desperate to ensure the running of the business stays in the family, Murdoch is now in a race against time to groom his younger son, 32-year-old Harvard drop-out James, who runs BSkyB but has yet to prove himself.

Mathew Horsman, media consultant and author of Sky High: The Rise and Rise of BSkyB, predicts that Murdoch will find it hard to get his own way in the long run. "It is difficult in a public company this size to ensure a family succession. It is controlled by Murdoch, yes, but not majority-owned by him."

- INDEPENDENT