The Man Who Owns the News (18 page)

The past six years of his career have been largely spent pursuing DirecTV, the satellite television network owned by General Motors. He has staked his reputation and much of News Corp.’s reason for being on his satellite vision. He has pursued DirecTV so assiduously, so single-mindedly, that, at one point, he even considered buying General Motors to get it. He has invented some of the media businesses’ most baroque and far-fetched financing strategies to do the deal. When he fails in his quest, because EchoStar, the other major satellite competitor to DirecTV, makes a last minute bid, which GM, in 2001, partly out of antipathy to Murdoch, accepts, he still keeps going. He finally succeeds after waging a fifteen-month antitrust battle. It’s the pinnacle of all his aspirations. It’s the top of the top. It’s his most megalomedia dream come true. It is, he says, the absolute necessary synthesis of all that he’s worked for—and it has finally all come together.

And then, in late 2006, he shrugs it off—as though it hardly ever existed. Puff! Not important. That he might have told the world DirecTV was the most vital component of News Corp.’s business is something that he can, apparently, readjust—ignore. If he has to change reality, flip it, reinvent it, he can. It may be a sort of narcissism—nobody exists but him, therefore he can do what he wants. Or like a certain authoritarian, even Orwellian, regime—he can merely change the facts, rewrite history. Anyway, he long ago gave up trying to justify himself.

In order to make his bid for Dow Jones, he’s got to get rid of John Malone, his largest shareholder since Malone’s midnight raid on News’ Australian shares in 2004, when Murdoch was preoccupied with election-night anxieties and festivities. Malone, he knows, will go ape shit about a Dow Jones bid. Malone won’t sit still for Murdoch buying…a newspaper. Murdoch would have to fight two battles at once: against Malone and for Dow Jones.

Malone’s threatening presence within News Corp. had bedeviled Murdoch for two years now—it was a cold war. Neither man would blink. But now his desire for Dow Jones clarifies Murdoch’s thinking about how to deal with Malone. Simple: He’ll pay the cost and fuck it. That is, New Corp.’s shareholders will pay the cost.

What Malone wants is a steal. Malone doesn’t want Murdoch to pay him money to go away—Malone would have to pay taxes on that and he has a great tax aversion—he wants Murdoch to sell him something for cheap. So if that’s what Murdoch has to do to get the
Wall Street Journal,
get screwed by Malone, that’s what he will do.

In this marvelous, bravura way, Murdoch declares DirecTV to be irrelevant to his interests and goals and gives Malone a good deal on it. And that is it. No looking back.

You don’t really have to offer many excuses or justification when you’ve come to believe you live outside and above everybody else’s fairly contemptible world.

HIM VERSUS THEM—BRITAIN FROM
1968

Why should Rupert Murdoch be so difficult? So stubbornly the “other”? So impatient in his position? So ambivalent about his own desire for acceptance that he believes his own mythology about his determined outsiderism?

It could be an Australian consciousness. He’s the product of a nation whose artifice is lack of artifice, which inevitably comes into conflict with everybody else’s rituals and proprieties.

Or it could come from what happened to him at Oxford, or, for that matter, at Geelong Grammar. In these two experiences of being thrust out into the world, he found himself marked, cut off, not accepted. This caused him not so much to figure out a way to fit in, to submit, as to lead a parallel existence.

Or it’s his appetite for risk. The prudent world seems weaker, lesser, more fearful to the gambler.

Or it’s his actual displacement. He literally isn’t at home. He’s not so much an immigrant, eager or forced to fit in, as a colonist, living in his own preserve, certain of his own superiority.

Or it’s the nature of his business. He’s in the tabloid business. He’s the whoremaster. The ruder you are, the more papers you sell. You can sugarcoat this, or not. In some perversely honorable sense, he chooses not to do so.

Then, having taken this on—having become the outsider, the person apart—he has to push back ever more forcefully against the pushback. Sensing his own ostracism, he sits it out even more defiantly.

He began as an insider; became an outsider because people didn’t understand he was an insider; became such a successful outsider that he becomes, once again, necessarily an insider.

But by that point, having only contempt for insiders, he has to find ways to be an outsider again. Offending polite sensibilities becomes his hobby and calling card.

Such outsider-insiderism, such shifting sense of place, of the barometric pressure of social judgment, becomes even more complex when you make Britain such a great part of it.

It would be curious to rewrite the Murdoch history with him skipping England and coming directly to New York. It’d all be less kill-or-be-killed. Less about the premium on disruptiveness. Less about him against the rest.

Murdoch in England is a never-ending fight with the establishment. He uses the word
establishment
partly as the Brits do, to suggest toffs and Eton and plummy accents, but expands it to include any other power center that he’s against—for instance, and not incidentally, the BBC. So there is the left establishment, and the journalistic establishment, and the banking establishment, and the royal establishment, and of course the trade union establishment. He wins; they lose.

Curiously, the establishment shortly found itself rather in awe of him. He was a new sort of spectacle, in part even a comic figure (the villain you hissed at—enjoyed hissing at). The journalist Chapman Pincher describes his and everyone’s great amusement at seeing Murdoch, in the early seventies, arrive at a manor house for a hunting weekend “in a brand-new shooting suit, with knickerbockers—you could see it was absolutely brand-new—and what looked to me, as an old hand, like an absolutely brand-new twelve-bore, side-by-side gun”—and then, never having fired at a pheasant before in his life, to have bagged a ton of birds.

The credit for his victories belongs, however, as much to his timing as to his natural talents.

During his career, England is substantially reinvented—with Murdoch at the center of it. He might be one of the prime change agents, but the superstructure really puts up a pretty meager resistance. Britain’s labor-socialist establishment is so sclerotic that it’s an easy target for any entrepreneur with a little management and organizational acumen.

It’s actually handily preyed upon by all sorts of outsiders. After Murdoch, there’s his nemesis, Robert Maxwell, the Czech; there’s Conrad Black, that other would-be Murdoch, a Canadian; Tiny Rowland, of a German father interned during World War II; Mohamed Al Fayed, an Egyptian; and then, later, the Russian billionaires. Compared to this bunch, you can begin to make the case that, relatively, Murdoch’s a proper gentleman. And yet, he similarly offends upper-middle-class sensibilities. All of these guys are opportunistically feeding on the passive, depressed British body. And while they are allowed to feed—pretty much gorge—they are still regarded with contempt, mockery, and condescension. They can have money, but they can’t have standing (until they ultimately take that too).

In London, as an Australian, Murdoch is marked as particularly uppity, unsuitable, and not serious. He makes bumptious and arrogant noises about buying the
Mirror,
Britain’s greatest tabloid. When he’s rebuffed by its owner, IPC, he starts buying shares in the parent company—although nobody seems to take this as much of a threat. He’s merely obnoxiously calling attention to himself.

And yet, the obnoxiousness has a certain value. He so insistently and loudly expresses his interest in buying into Fleet Street that one of his bankers puts him on to the
News of the World,
which, right away, Murdoch becomes desperate to buy.

His immediate interest in the
News of the World
—a ridiculous, almost campy British Sunday paper whose specialty was sexual perversity of a particularly English kind (spanking), crime, and scandal—suggests two things: that newspapers did not necessarily mean news to him but rather theater and spectacle, and that the rather priggish Murdoch would fit his tastes to what was for sale (and what he could buy).

The
News of the World
has been run for nearly a hundred years by the Carr family. At its height, in 1950, as a pre-television diversion in a postwar Britain dying for diversion,
NoW
had a circulation of 8.5 million; by 1968, when it comes to Murdoch’s attention, it is down to 6 million. For sixteen years, the paper has been run by Sir William Carr, who, at the earliest possible hour for lunch, walks the few blocks from the
NoW
headquarters on Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street, to the Savoy Grill, where he stays late. Even with circulation dropping, the share price falling, and Sir William in his cups, the family thinks its position is unassailable. Sir William’s family owns 27 percent of the voting shares, and Sir William’s cousin, Professor Derek Jackson, owns another 25 percent.

The professor, however, tired of his relatives, decides to sell.

Enter Robert Maxwell. The Jewish, Czechoslovakian-born Maxwell (who will become known as, among other things, the “bouncing Czech”) is almost twenty years into the forty-year fraud he is perpetrating—engendering only mild suspicion—on the British media industry. He uses his company, Pergamon Press, a publisher of, among other things, specialized scientific literature (so his interest in the
News of the World
is even quirkier than Murdoch’s), whose value he has inflated by various financial subterfuges, to make a stock offer of £26 million for
News of the World
. The professor puts Maxwell into the catbird’s seat by agreeing to sell him his 25 percent.

Several things are about to happen:

Murdoch, through his courtship of Sir William Carr, and through a series of promises that he will not keep, is about to pull a jujitsu move, which, along with the broken promises, will stick to him as a kind of signature (indeed, this hoary old deal will one day be dredged up and endlessly cited by Dow Jones partisans).

He is also, to his great annoyance, for the next twenty years, about to become associated, indeed hopelessly identified, with the crooked Robert Maxwell—they are both the two interloping R.M.s of the British media business.

And he is about to become branded, through to his core, as among the most exploitive and most vulgar publishers working in the English language.

Anyway, it’s really nifty jujitsu. Murdoch, even though he’s been posturing about buying up IPC shares, doesn’t have the money to counter Maxwell’s offer. On the other hand, Sir William appears to welcome death more than he’d welcome Robert Maxwell—likely not so much because Maxwell is a crook as because he is Jewish.

Murdoch is the Protestant antidote, albeit without the necessary cash.

Murdoch, having won over the Carrs (Sir William admires Murdoch’s mother), gets them—after he threatens to walk away from the deal and leave them helplessly saddled with Maxwell—to make him, along with Sir William’s nephew Clive, co-CEO of the company. Sir William will become chairman, with a seven-year contract. The
News of the World
will then acquire certain assets Murdoch owns in Australia. In this semi-flimflam exchange, Murdoch’s Australian company will get 40 percent of the
NoW
company. His 40 percent, and Sir William’s 27 percent, means they can block a sale to Maxwell. Sensing that he holds the upper hand, before the deal closes Murdoch seriously backpedals on the agreement to be co-CEO and insists he get the role alone—and without too many options, save Maxwell, the Carrs agree.

Meanwhile, Murdoch and Maxwell are trying to gouge each other’s eyes out. Maxwell even tries to buy News Ltd. It all ends in a huge dustup at the shareholders’ meeting on January 2, 1969, with Murdoch, the presumptive heir, and Maxwell, the losing pretender, fighting bitterly to the end.

Not long after, Murdoch, who agreed not to buy any more shares in
News of the World,
turns around and buys part of the professor’s stake. The justification for this is—well, there is no justification. You take what you can get.

In short order, he forces Sir William to resign, and then gets rid of all the other Carrs, who, too late, understand that they were lambs led to slaughter.

Murdoch seems remarkably dense about how he’s regarded. He doesn’t pick up the signals. His press image is seldom a topic of interest for him, or even of conversation (as it is, quite often obsessively, with so many other public men). It may be that he is so temperamentally opaque that nothing gets through. Or it may be that high regard is, quite uniquely, not what he’s about. To be held in the esteem of the British public and press is the least of his ambitions. He may not even be aware of this as a measure of anything important or telling or valuable. He occupies a different world.

For an international businessman and would-be tycoon, he’s incredibly parochial. He’s just an Australian come to London to do some business. That’s how he sees himself—proudly, as an opportunist. Britain is something to take advantage of, not to be part of. In outsider fashion, he creates a little circle of cronies around him. That becomes his finite world.

Bert Hardy is one of his first retainers. Hardy has been an advertising salesman for the
Mirror,
the leading British tabloid. In Hardy’s view, there isn’t a sense of great strategy and big picture, and certainly not destiny, about Murdoch. At the outset, at least, he sees Murdoch as the leader of a little group of small-timers trying to keep their businesses—lame, faltering businesses at that—on their feet. It’s a patchwork; it’s ad hoc; it’s seat-of-the-pants; it’s all-consuming. It’s a condition in which no other reality can quite exist—you’re just too busy.