The Man Who Owns the News (11 page)

While maintaining the
Herald
’s establishment appeal, he begins to apply the basic Northcliffe formulae: contests, serials, shorter stories, beauty pageants, crime stories. More significantly, Murdoch launches a sister paper, the
Sun News Pictorial,
a morning tabloid—the first in Australia—which becomes the biggest-selling paper in the country.

In 1928, it’s Northcliffe who helps convince the board of the Herald and Weekly Times company to make Keith Murdoch the managing director of the firm. Expansion is substantial and immediate. Keith adds radio stations to the group, installs up-to-date presses, and begins, through a program of acquisitions, to build the first newspaper chain in the country.

Continuing to imitate Northcliffe, Keith becomes an art collector too.

Rich, powerful, a workaholic—and not, apparently, the most likable guy in Australia—the forty-three-year old bachelor marries Rupert’s mother, nineteen-year-old Elisabeth, in 1928.

Two more family themes are set in stone: Elisabeth, through her father, Rupert Greene, is the source of their son’s charm and gambler’s bravado; Keith, by way of two generations of clergy, is the source of Rupert’s coldness, toughness, and puritanism.

Keith Rupert Murdoch is born in 1931—the boy among what will be three sisters, the heir among the girls.

Later it will be hard to get a clear picture of Murdoch’s upbringing because it will come prepackaged in lots of upper-class language. That in itself will be a distinguishing fact: The Murdochs, within the context of egalitarian Australia, are living at the uppermost extreme.

His childhood alternates between idyllic and lonely, with lots of Australian country life (when Rupert is seven, his father also buys a many-thousand-acre sheep farm). It’s about not being overindulged in the midst of substantial wealth—in fact, being treated with calculated cruelty to build character. Still, the mythology holds that while there is great harshness, there is great love and affection too.

And then it’s off to boarding school—at age ten. Geelong Grammar on Corio Bay, fifty miles from Melbourne, is among the world’s most elite boarding schools; twenty years after Murdoch’s time, Prince Charles will be sent to Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop program, which involves a year of living in the Australian mountains. Geelong, which into the 1990s will still be using corporal punishment, features all manner of privations. It even has a novelistic headmaster, Sir James Darling, a man whose Christian determination is to break the pride of rich kids, not least of all through the theoretically leveling virtues of sport.

Rupert, who will one day control a significant part of the world’s sports programming and own stakes in a handful of professional teams, hates sports. And he hates authority. These two attributes are the classic mark of a prep school troublemaker. Nor is he popular. He is the disliked son of the disliked father—the domineering, politically meddling newspaper publisher often at odds with the other fathers of the establishment.

Rupert, it turns out, is rather unbreakable. The lesson he seems to take from Geelong Grammar is the obvious one: Fuck them all. (At his mother’s eightieth-birthday party, in 1989, attended by the entire upper crust, including Sir James Darling, Rupert will even force something like an apology out of the former headmaster.)

And then in 1950 it’s off to Oxford, in England, that hell/heaven for Australians.

His mother and his father take him to school—and along the way give him a bit of a world tour, including an audience for the Presbyterian Murdochs with the Pope in Rome.

The reason Keith has the time to accompany his son is that at sixty-five and in failing health (several heart attacks and prostate cancer), Keith is slowly being forced out of his job at the Herald and Weekly Times. Keith Murdoch may be among the most powerful men in Australia, but he’s run up against the limitation that generations of corporate men of the future will regularly encounter: at the end of the day, even CEOs are just employees. Their power is rented—they don’t own it.

Oxford is, all in all, a good time for Rupert. He cuts a figure. He’s arch, he’s aggressive, he’s charming, he’s funny, he’s rich, he’s rebellious (though not too rebellious), he gambles. His father is naturally worried about his left-wing airs—he sports a bust of Lenin on the mantel in his rooms—as well as his grades; he’s a terrible student. But he’s a focused one, too—focused on his own unique interests. William Rees-Mogg, the editor of the
Times
of London when Murdoch acquired it and who would go on to be a
Times
columnist, was an undergraduate with Murdoch and remembers Murdoch’s enthusiastic interest in buying the undergraduate magazine,
Cherwell.
(“I told him,” Rees-Mogg will recall almost sixty years later, “I thought
Cherwell
would never get enough advertising from the sort of ordinary university advertisers to make it profitable.”)

There’s a summer road trip—in a car purchased by his father—through Eastern Europe and Greece. The car is totaled in Turkey.

Then, in October 1952, Rupert’s father suddenly dies.

While Keith was the chairman of the Herald and Weekly Times, in a bit of corporate shuffling that would be dubious now—and raised eyebrows then—he personally came to own both the
Adelaide News
and a significant stake in Queensland Newspapers Ltd., which owned the Brisbane
Courier-Mail.
Together with his reputation in Australia and a modest fortune, these papers are the legacy he leaves his family.

The co-executor of Keith’s estate with Dame Elisabeth is Harry Giddy, Sir Keith’s successor as the Herald and Weekly Times chairman, who promptly convinces her, over Rupert’s protests, to sell the family’s controlling interest in Queensland Newspapers to the Herald and Weekly Times. Rupert blames the owners of his father’s company not just for failing to accord his father a bigger stake in the company he built for them, but also for acting in their own interests in convincing his mother to sell a key part of the Murdoch family patrimony. It’s an elemental moment for him of understanding what the rich are up against: other people who are rich.

And it will remain a family sore spot. His mother, in my interview, will take careful issue with her son’s resentment: “It was very hard to know what to do, because he wanted to keep certain properties and we knew that it was not possible. And that was hard, as I said, it was a very hard time because I insisted that we were not going into enormous debt and I’m sure that was the right thing. But I think he will always regret it very much that I didn’t allow him to hang on to [the] Queensland interest because, you know, we just couldn’t go owing a lot of money at that stage. Rupert was too young.”

Meanwhile, Rupert has another year of Oxford left in which to think about the
Adelaide News.

It’s a familiar scenario: the (slightly) ne’er-do-well son who is left the father’s odd media holdings at a callow age. There’s Hearst, of course, who turns a failing newspaper into an empire; there’s Bill Paley, whose father leaves him, in addition to a cigar company, a radio station, which eventually becomes CBS and the most powerful media company of its time; there’s Bill Ziff (parts of whose business Rupert will one day buy), who inherits a few small magazines and turns them into one of the largest private media fortunes in the United States. There’s Ted Turner (whose rivalry with Murdoch will be an eighties subtheme), whose father leaves him a billboard company which he turns into his billion-dollar media enterprise.

The key here is young men inheriting not just family businesses but specifically media enterprises, which by their nature seem to invite young men to think they can do it as well as anybody else. If the family business were, say, coal mining, or banking, or manufacturing, they likely would not be so confident.

So…a young man of particular self-confidence, entitlement, aggressiveness, with a dilettantish what-the-heckness and a deep competitive streak, prepares to take up his legacy.

But before Rupert goes home to assume his position at the
Adelaide News
he goes to work for the newspaper proprietor who, next to Northcliffe, most defines the Fleet Street style and “the black art of journalism”: Beaverbrook.

William Maxwell Aitken, who will become Lord Beaverbrook, had arrived on Fleet Street by way of Canada and a profitable stake in the Rolls-Royce company, which he sold to fund his one true passion—a London newspaper company.

It’s 1953. Rupert is twenty-two. Beaverbrook’s
Daily Express
is at the epicenter of Fleet Street, the world’s most competitive newspaper market. There are low papers (the vivid and “popular”) and high papers (the stuffy and “unpopular”). Fleet Street’s measures are as harsh and binary as the Nielsen ratings will be in American television a generation later.

Fleet Street is to journalism—journalism as an act of civic responsibility, that is—as military music is to music. Its essence is selling single copies: making the sale in the blink of an eye as you go past the newsdealer. Fleet Street is in the audience business rather than the news business, or it is an open rivalry between both impulses. It is also the class business. Every Fleet Streeter knows which is his class.

Rupert’s brief few months on the
Daily Express
become the basis for his assumption of the chief executive role at News Ltd., owner of the 75,000-circulation
Adelaide News
.

It’s really hard to say what running a newspaper in the 1950s might prepare you for. Most people who run newspapers in this era, or even work for them, will fade away, sell out, or drift into some other line of work over the next generation.

It’s an archaic vocation, an experience and skill set that become progressively less relevant. It is, for one odd thing, a factory business. Everything you do is mechanically driven. If you run a newspaper, you are at least as concerned with machinery as you are with journalism. You are in the trucking, hauling, and delivery business. The noises, the smells, and the people are industrial. The sound on the newsroom floor when the presses come on is loaded, heavy, primal. While in years hence newspaper labor unions will come to seem like some odd conceit for what will have become an otherwise white-collar line of work, in the 1950s it is clear that the business operates on the backs of very big men.

The very idea of the newspaper proprietor, which Murdoch at twenty-two has become (later, he will appoint his own son Lachlan, at twenty-two, the general manager of Queensland Newspapers), is itself feudal. It is much like inheriting the estate and the big house—and all of the servants and workers and other dependents who belong to it. It comes with outsized authority. You inherit power. Arguably, the more entitled you are, the better a proprietor you are. Newspapers are about throwing your weight around. Modesty is not a newspaper virtue.

Rupert Murdoch is having, by the mid-fifties, the full flower of the experience of the family proprietor. And he is perfectly in character. He is to the manor born. He dives into the job without skipping a beat to learn it. His supreme confidence is born not just from arrogance but from incredible, relentless energy. There is in Murdoch’s paper, as in so many other under-resourced papers, a sense of
Let’s put on a show
. Adelaide, after all, is twelve hours by car from his home in Melbourne. He’s got nothing else to do but put out a paper. To learn the business and to meddle in it.

The corollary to the idea of a newspaper as a feudal base is the idea of newspaper wars—another feudal kingdom trying to put down your feudal kingdom. In Australia’s media business for most of the twentieth century there are three kingdoms that control the continent: those of the Fairfaxes, the Packers, and the Murdochs. It’s like the Hatfields and McCoys in the turn-of-the-century Ozarks, or the five Mafia families in 1950s New York, or the Medici and Sforza families in fifteenth-century Italy.

The Fairfaxes are the establishment family. In their self-importance and stodginess—and ultimate collapse—they bear a distinct resemblance to the Bancrofts. The Packers are the arriviste family, vulgar, bumptious; Kerry Packer will become Australia’s richest man. And then the Murdochs: in some sense the least transparent, the most disciplined and deadly, and most intelligent of the bunch.

In the 1950s, after Keith Murdoch’s death, the enemy begins its advance.

The first shot is fired by Keith’s former firm, the Herald and Weekly Times. Trying to get the Murdochs to sell the
Adelaide News,
the company advises the Murdochs that the HWT paper, the
Adelaide Advertiser,
plans to start a Sunday edition to go up against the Murdochs’
Sunday Mail.
Murdoch actually fights the Herald and Weekly Times to a rather modern draw—they merge their paper with his, leaving him in control, and giving HWT a 50 percent interest.

This is what newspapers do: fight great wars of attrition. If you can hold on longer than the other guy, you win. It’s not so much a marketing business—headlines only get so big—as one of endurance. How much pain can you tolerate? Rupert Murdoch can always tolerate more. This becomes Murdoch’s model: He forces himself and his competitors into a no-win spiral, your basic game of chicken, and they blink. It is, in so many ways—given its costs, its risks, its creation of lasting antagonisms, its psychic mayhem—the exact opposite of modern business strategy.

In the 1960s, Sir Frank Packer and the Fairfaxes, fearful of Murdoch’s inroads in Sydney, put aside their differences and form Suburban Publications. The whole rationale of Suburban is to squeeze out Murdoch and his newly acquired Cumberland Newspapers Group, with its small local papers.