Media mogul Rupert Murdoch was heckled on Monday after being named the most influential Australian of all time by a weekly current affairs magazine.
The 75-year-old chairperson and chief executive of News Corporation — one of the world’s biggest media conglomerates — topped a list of 100 notable Australians released by The Bulletin magazine on Monday.
Murdoch said he was ”very humbled” to have been chosen, and that there were others on the list who had ”done a great deal more to improve the whole world”.
But his speech was interrupted by a local union activist and environmental campaigner who asked: ”How can the most influential Australian of all time be an American?”
Murdoch, who was born in the southern city of Melbourne, relinquished his Australian citizenship in 1985 to become an American citizen, allowing him to clear a legal hurdle that blocked non-citizens from owning US television stations.
His News Corporation owns the Fox television network, Fox News Channel, the New York Post newspaper and the Twentieth Century Fox studio in the United States.
The company shifted its primary stock listing to the New York Stock Exchange from the Australian exchange in 2004. – Sapa-AP