BART SIMPSON CALLING

• Share

Rupert Murdoch isn't somebody to sit back and count his blessings. It was just two weeks ago that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission took a load off his mind when it decided not to force him to reduce his ownership stake in eight stations that are at the center of his Fox TV network. With that major distraction out of the way and the coffers of his News Corp. global media empire bursting--he boasted recently of having $1 billion on hand--everybody figured it was just a matter of time until his next big move.

No time at all, as it turned out. On Wednesday, News Corp. and MCI, the long-distance giant, announced a deal to form a worldwide media partnership, one that could add as much as $2 billion to Murdoch's buying power. A year ago, after MCI sold a 20% stake of itself to British Telecommunications for $4.3 billion, it began looking for a partner to transform its worldwide phone network into pathways for "content"-whatever a computer or TV screen can receive, from info-services to movies. "You can hardly think of content without the name of Rupert Murdoch coming to the fore," says MCI chairman Bert Roberts.

At Roberts' request, he and Murdoch held a brief get-to-know-each-other meeting at the Los Angeles airport in November. "After about 15 minutes we hit it off personally," he says. "And we both instantly saw that there may be some genuine reason to pursue this." At the end of the pursuit, MCI agreed to invest heavily in News Corp. stock--$1 billion now plus $1 billion over the next four years. In return, Murdoch will send his company's immense fund of grunt-and-grin entertainment, news and information through MCI phone lines into home and business screens. In addition to the Fox network, Murdoch owns the HarperCollins publishing house and a string of newspapers around the world, and two satellite-TV channels--BSkyB, which broadcasts across Europe, and STAR TV, which covers much of Asia. TV Guide magazine and the show Melrose Place, business data and the Super Bowl football game--all could come directly to your home screens via phone lines faster than cartoon kid Bart Simpson can make a prank call to Moe's Tavern.

Each side will contribute $200 million to a global joint venture in which programming and electronic information produced by News Corp. will be distributed to businesses and consumers in digital form through MCI's vast web of fiber-optic cable. But here too Murdoch may not have to ante up cash, just "content.'' Low risk but high potential profit for him-that's typical of the entire deal. If MCI eventually invests the full $2 billion, it will own 13.5% of News Corp. But the terms of the deal require MCI to vote its shares in the same proportion as the rest of the shareholders. That means Murdoch, who with his family controls 40% of his company's stock, cedes no control.