On this day in 1996, Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News Channel and changed the American news landscape, writes Eliot Wilson

Thirty years ago, 20th Century Fox was a film and animation production company. It had been purchased in 1985 by media magnate Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the Australian taking US citizenship as a condition of the Federal Communications Commission approving the takeover.

The next year, 1986, Murdoch launched a television network, the Fox Broadcasting Company, a direct challenge to America’s “Big Three”: ABC, CBS and NBC. 20th Century Fox had dabbled in television as far back as 1948, producing the deliciously campy 1960s Batman (1966-68) for ABC and iconic Korean War comedy-drama M*A*S*H (1972-83) for CBS. There had been several attempts at a fourth network over the years, but none had achieved sustained success.

Rupert Murdoch was a different proposition.

Fox Broadcasting opened with The Late Show, hosted by Joan Rivers, but the project was greeted with scepticism and in some quarters ridicule. Why would this attempt at a fourth channel succeed where so many others had failed? The sceptics were badly mistaken. By the 1990s, Fox was profitable,........

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