From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

For Rupert Murdoch, April's been the coolest month.

The U.S. won the war he championed.

Fox News Channel has been winning the cable news ratings race, and Murdoch's News Corporation won a long-coveted asset for its global media empire,

the DirecTV satellite broadcasting business.

General Motors, DirecTV's previous owner, sold its share to Murdoch for $6.6 billion.

If approved by federal regulators, the deal would give Murdoch 11 million more viewers and make News Corp the largest media group in the world.

Joining us to discuss the ramifications of this deal is Alicia Mundy, senior editor for Cable World magazine.

Alicia, welcome back to the show.

Thank you for having me.

All right, give us some background here.

This was not the first time Murdoch made a bid for direct TV.

He's had his eye on this property for some time, right?

He's had his eye on getting a satellite in the United States for at least 10 years.

And about 1995 or six, he began nosing around with DirecTV, which is part of the Hughes Corporation, which is part of General Motors.

Hughes put up a big fight, and he decided he would sit back and let somebody else go after it,

and that somebody else was Charlie Erkin who owns Echo Star.

And when it fell through, he would go in and basically pick up direct TV on the rebound for fire sale prices.

Well, what about satellite broadcasting to begin with?

In the United States, where this property resides, it's really marginal relative to cable.

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