Although I am no fan of Murdoch, it's screamingly obvious that the customers of his business pretty much all have had a free choice of whether or not to patronize those businesses. Just about every aspect of News Corp has competition. Newspapers, cable news, publishing, movie studios and so forth.
And while I do think form factor, ease of delivery, customer service and price play a role, there's little doubt that content is the backbone of media devices like ebook readers, tablets and so forth.
re: Paywalls, Murdoch doesn't own the NYT, so he doesn't care what they do, unless he can buy them.
He has seen paywalls work with the Wall Street Journal, and sees how web ad revenues are a total failure at keeping news outlets afloat. I'm not thrilled about paying for news, but if "free" is decimating the news business, it obviously can't be that good of a plan.
Murdoch may be many things, but he isn't much of a Luddite. That's just one reason why he still runs a multi-billion dollar media empire.