WASHINGTON – Rupert Murdoch owns the Fox network, which for the first time won the season-long ratings battle for viewers age 18-49, a benchmark demographic that makes advertisers salivate and pull out their checkbooks. Fox’s “American Idol” – to which I am, yes, addicted – was the top-rated show among viewers across the board. Murdoch also owns the No. 1 cable news network, Fox News, which has left CNN and MSNBC in its dust. And you might have heard of the little movie that’s raking in a bit of change for Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox movie studio: “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.”

In other words, at the moment Rupert Murdoch pretty much owns this country’s eyeballs. The question is, does he have designs on any other parts of our anatomy?

The conquest of the United States by this aging, Australian-born, workaholic billionaire fascinates me. Murdoch’s reach has become so broad and all-encompassing that it’s tempting to break out the “Citizen Kane” analogies, especially in light of his well-known conservative political views.

I’m even more tempted in light of Fox News’ “fair and balanced” tilt to the right. The news channel’s uncritical coverage of the Iraq War looks like pure jingoism when seen via satellite overseas, friends out there tell me, but then again it’s hard to think of a country (besides this one) where you’d expect a cheery slant on the war to go over very well.

So are our ocular orbs now in the firm possession of another Charles Foster Kane, Orson Welles’ fictional tycoon? Welles based the character on William Randolph Hearst, the Gilded Age newspaper baron who legendarily helped push the nation into the Spanish-American War. Has Murdoch, a naturalized American, found his San Juan Hill somewhere on the outskirts of Baghdad?

Not to take up for Murdoch, who can defend himself, but the truth is that I doubt there’s any real political agenda behind his campaign for world domination. He’ll support politicians and push for legislation that furthers the interests of News Corp., his media empire, but that’s about it. Murdoch simply practices capitalism in its most naked, elemental form. Instead of following an agenda, he’s guided by greed, cunning and a razor-sharp instinct for what people want to watch, hear and read.

I haven’t used the phrase “right-wing” to describe him because he seems so different from the sanctimonious right-wing politicians who have become so lamentably powerful in Washington. His upstart Fox network, which 15 years ago wasn’t even broadcasting a full seven-day schedule, overtook the established troika of NBC, CBS and ABC among young viewers not by appealing to the Christian right but by being flashy, racy and wildly secular. Remember “Temptation Island,” the reality show that proudly promoted infidelity?

“The Simpsons,” which was Fox’s first breakout show, is hardly written for the likes of Tom DeLay or Rick Santorum. But my sense of the way the Murdoch empire functions is that if slathering on the false piety were likely to draw more viewers, Fox probably would have been happy to oblige. Bart Simpson could have been rewritten into a Bible-toting young Baptist seminarian. What works, works.

In the same vein, Fox News is engineered to fill a market niche, not to spur the conquest of Middle Eastern oil fields. The growth of conservative talk radio suggested there might be a similar opportunity in television – and it turned out there was. Maybe Murdoch would have had qualms if the opening had been on the left, but somehow I doubt it.

Murdoch has his many newspapers around the world, all of them with a certain raffish Fleet Street charm.

He saw the potential for satellite television in Europe and China before anyone else, and has no trouble kowtowing to the communists in Beijing when it suits his business plans.

He’s 74 and has more money than he or many subsequent generations could ever spend, and still he crisscrosses the globe, making deals, working as if his life depended on it.

He hates unions, he apparently sees citizenship as less a matter of allegiance than a way to satisfy pesky regulators, and if there’s an offshore tax haven out there somewhere, he’ll probably find it.

None of this is particularly uplifting. Unalloyed opportunism is hardly the noblest of moral yardsticks. But it’s a far cry from the worst-case scenario of a tycoon with Murdoch’s power pushing an agenda because of fervent ideological or religious belief. Given the choice, I’ll take plain greed.

I do wish he didn’t look so much like the Sith lord in Star Wars, though.