The Man Who Owns the News (3 page)

“I hope you’re going to use your access to Murdoch,” he said without preamble, “to really screw him.”

“So
that’s
how we do this job,” I said—mordantly, I hoped.

Alter was not to be dissuaded. “You’ve got to ask yourself, is it good for the country or bad for the country? And Murdoch is bad for the country.”

Tina Brown, who like Murdoch had achieved media renown in New York by way of London’s Fleet Street, offered me the unsolicited counsel to avoid certain seduction, advising that my job was to educate readers about Murdoch’s “cynical amorality” (a journalistic sin she is often said to be no stranger to herself).

When the former Murdoch executive Judith Regan—as much an avatar of Murdoch methods and values as anyone, and, to boot, quite a nut—sued News Corp. in the fall of 2007 for all manner of alleged conspiracies and slights, she was suddenly taken very seriously by anti-Murdoch journalists, regardless of her own operatic tabloidism. His enemies were automatically an honorable journalist’s friends.

If he was demonized by one side, it was not easier to get a more rounded portrait from the other side—the people who worked for him. Pressed in an interview for his estimation of Murdoch, Col Allan, the editor of the
New York Post,
pronounced him a “gifted journalist,” who could do any newspaperman’s job in the world. Rebekah Wade, the editor of the
Sun
in London, told me with great intensity one evening that she had really considered from all angles what made Murdoch Murdoch, and her conclusion was that he was “a genius!”

There was a curious and stark divide among journalists as the Dow Jones battle progressed: overt hostility on the front page—the
New York Times
launched a major investigation against him—and palpable fascination on the business pages, an eager, breathless, gossipy interest in all things Murdoch.

At the
Journal
itself, as the deal proceeded, reporters became not just chroniclers of the moods and inclinations of Dow Jones’ owners—the Bancroft family—but also the propagandists influencing those moods and inclinations. The
Journal
’s reporters were waging, in effect, a proxy fight against Murdoch.

As soon as the takeover was sealed there was another, reflexive response: an attempt to calm the waters, curry favor, and even discover an admiration for the man heretofore the Antichrist.
New York Times
media writer David Carr censoriously opined during the takeover that Murdoch “has demonstrated a habit over time of using his media properties to advance the business interests of his organization.” Then, with the takeover completed, Carr pronounced him one of the most admired figures of the new media class precisely because he integrated all his business interests.
New York
magazine elevated Murdoch in one of its emblematic best-of lists to one of the best things about New York. Marcus Brauchli, the editor who somehow wasn’t getting the message that he wasn’t wanted, was telling people how positively he thought the Murdoch experience was going to turn out. Part of the antipathy to Murdoch is created when people go out of their way to swallow their pride and suppress their better judgment in an effort to love him—and then he brushes them away like so much dust.

It was not without cause for some concern or self-scrutiny that Murdoch was willing to sit for extensive interviews for this book, something he had done only in a begrudging and limited fashion in the past with would-be biographers.

Possibly his willingness had something to do with his perception that I regarded many of his enemies—particularly the journalistic priesthood—with some of the same contempt with which he regarded them. Uncomfortable talking about himself, he was nevertheless immediately animated when it came to talking about his various nemeses. To the extent that I had written about what had long seemed to me a fatal flaw among many anti-Murdoch journalists—namely, that they were increasingly part of an anemic and dwindling business, that they had lost the ability to make people want to read what they had written—I was, he seemed to think, on his side.

I might also have been perceived as having a family connection. News Corp. is, as they often say, a family company. They mean that in an atavistic as well as sentimental sense. If you or yours have been part of News Corp., you are more trustworthy than those who haven’t been. You’ve crossed some line, undergone some self-selection.

My wife’s first job out of law school, more than thirty years ago, was as an associate in the law firm Squadron, Ellenoff, Plesent, and Lehrer, which represented Murdoch from the time he came to the United States. And while she was there for only two years three decades ago, several of the people who were her colleagues back then still have major roles at News Corp. now. In any ordinary corporate enterprise, most connections and relationships are fleeting. At News Corp. they can last for generations. You gain permanent citizenship in Murdochland. You’ve married the mob.

When my daughter Elizabeth graduated from college in 2006, Vicky Ward, a colleague of mine at
Vanity Fair
and a former editor at the
New York Post,
walked her résumé into the
Post,
where she was hired as a junior reporter—a job she has since left. (Murdoch and I have the same bias in this regard: We believe our children should work for newspapers—that to be a newspaper reporter, as long as it is still possible to be one, is the world’s best job.)

Having been in the journalism business in New York for more than thirty years, I have inevitably been an anti-Murdochian too.

During the dot-com era, I had a public spat with Murdoch’s son James, then running the not-too-successful News Corp. Internet businesses. I ridiculed his messianic pronouncements, and he called me (in an interview in
GQ
magazine), much to my then-eight-year-old son’s delight, “an obnoxious dickhead.” (When, writing this book, I reminded James of this, he felt it necessary to insist he’d been misquoted, saying that he had only called me a “jerk.”)

When I became the media columnist at
New York
magazine, in 1998, my first column was about Murdoch’s imminent divorce from Anna, his wife of thirty-two years. I found it a delightful possibility that marital acrimony—especially in California, a community property state, where the Murdochs then resided—might fracture the empire (I was wrong). Not too long after this, I wrote a column not just attacking the
New York Post
but analyzing its vast business failures and concluding that, by any logic, Murdoch must shut it down (wrong again). This resulted in a vendetta by the
New York Post
—not, as it happened, against me but, with greater effectiveness, against
New York
magazine’s then parent company, Primedia.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, I found myself, as the result of some idle cocktail party chatter, in a room of determined left-wing types considering how to counter Fox News with a campaign to demonize Murdoch, who was not only the very personification of Big Media but a thrice-married foreigner (with an Aussie accent so thick no one in the foreigner-hating heartland would ever mistake him for anything but a foreigner) with a Chinese wife. You couldn’t have a better villain.

On the other hand, covering the media industry, I had an increasing interest in who was succeeding and who was failing. Also, I was curious about someone who so obviously did what he enjoyed doing, rather than someone who rushed, willy-nilly, to do what all the other boys did. Indeed, Murdoch was, with a little critical interpretation, the man to blame for the idiotic hodgepodge we call a modern media company—because everybody had followed Rupert. As much as you might detest him, he had been, over so many years, an original and unstoppable force—in addition to having had great fun doing it. (Of course, this is also true of many con men and despots.)

And then too, I had started to think that he was somehow…less threatening. He was, after all…old. There weren’t too many public companies being run by men in their seventies. The end was, had to be, near—didn’t it?

Now, it is true that William Shawcross, whose biography of Murdoch was published in 1992, clearly thought Murdoch was in a wind-down phase (Murdoch’s second wife, Anna, thought this too, frequently telling people that he had assured her of his imminent retirement—“And she believed him!” said Prudence, his daughter from his first marriage), when, in fact, News Corp. was only then entering the most significant phase of its growth. Still, there
had
to be an end. How much longer could he reasonably impose himself?

I ran into Murdoch in 2002 at a technology conference in California. He’d seemed hapless-looking, holding on to a stuffed animal he’d gotten in a swag bag and planned to give to his new daughter—but also, it seemed, holding on for dear life. In wise-guy fashion, a few of us—fellow conference attendees—asked him if he wanted to go for a drink. He accepted our invitation with great alacrity and, finding the bartender at this particular establishment in Monterey lackadaisically AWOL, commandeered the bar himself. Here was an appealing man, puckish, easygoing, unpretentious, in a Wal-Mart flannel shirt. He seemed like someone’s grandfather—indeed, he bore a strange resemblance to my own. We ended up having dinner and chatting for several hours. When I recounted this story in a column in
New York
magazine, Murdoch’s only response was to complain about the comparison of him to my grandfather.

This is the background of my prior relationship with Rupert Murdoch and of his unexpected willingness to be interviewed by me. I assume this book is part of his branding and legacy strategy—but if so, it has lacked most usual marketing or PR controls. There was no approval of the manuscript or agreement to provide News Corp. with a prior look. There were no restrictions on what I might ask about.

My interviews with Murdoch, over nine months, took place either in his office at News Corp.’s headquarters at 1211 Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, over lunch in a private News Corp. dining room, where we shared his health food drinks, or at his Manhattan home on Park Avenue—his temporary home while his new apartment on Fifth Avenue is being refurbished—when his wife was away and he was looking after his children. (An ordinary Manhattan scene of nannies, dogs, play dates, and a father picking up after all of them.)

On several occasions I was alone with him, but most other times I was accompanied by my research assistant, Leela de Kretser, a former reporter at the
New York Post
(and, before that, at Murdoch’s paper, the
Herald Sun,
in Melbourne, Australia, where she grew up). Gary Ginsberg also was often present, occasionally participating in the discussion, but most often just listening.

Murdoch is a game but difficult interview subject. He trails off before finishing sentences; he speaks in what is frequently just a low mumble; his Australian accent is still thick and his Australianisms often opaque; he sometimes dips into an alarming reverie in which he is either carefully weighing his words or napping.

He’s not good at explaining himself and gets annoyed and frustrated when he’s asked to do so. He rarely has patience or interest in talking about the past, and he has a tenuous grasp on dates, to the point of sometimes transposing decades; he has little capacity or even language for talking about his own motivations and character. But any issue that was on his mind at the moment of the conversation he seemed always willing to explore. His thinking was, in fact, remarkably transparent—often almost guileless. His narrative of that day’s events is detailed, sharp, amusing, and revealing. I certainly came to look forward to these interviews, and perhaps he did too.

He also arranged access, with only the gentlest prodding, to his top executives, all famously reticent and tight-lipped (and quite unpracticed in just exactly how they ought to be talking about him), and to all his family members—mother, sisters, wife, and children—in New York, London, Melbourne, and Sydney. “Just say anything you want to say—the worst you can think of,” he told his daughter Prudence, in Sydney, who seemed to take him at his word.

One question I asked most everyone: “Why do you think he’s doing this?”

Nobody had a very good answer.

ONE
The Butterfly Effect

THE EARLY 1970S

Without any firm plans and only some old family contacts, forty-two-year-old Rupert Murdoch, an Australian publishing entrepreneur relocated to Britain—not the most savory one either; reports of the “Page 3” bare-breasted pin-ups in his London newspaper precede him—starts traveling regularly to New York in 1973, looking for business opportunities. He cuts a certain sixties-ish figure: the pretty slick media executive. With his double-breasted blazer, longish dark hair starting to thin (the beginnings of a seventies comb-over), a frequent cigarette (he’ll stop smoking within the year), and satisfied, plumpish figure, he’s more the Madison Avenue or Mayfair type—an artful combination of diffidence and intensity—than a casual or scruffy Fleet Street guy.

His father was the most powerful newspaper publisher in Australia. Some twenty years after Sir Keith Murdoch’s death, his son has made his own name—in Australia, he’s
almost
as famous as his father was—and has now branched out, aggressively and noisily, to the United Kingdom. But if he’s known for anything in the United States, it’s that two years before, in London, he was the main character in a bizarre incident that got international attention: he’s the rich guy whose wife was targeted by kidnappers who instead snatched and then murdered the wife of one of his executives who’d had the misfortune of borrowing the Murdoch family car (a Rolls-Royce, which added nicely to the story). He’s the disreputable tabloid publisher at the heart of a macabre tabloid tale. The subtext of the kidnapping as it’s been reported in the London papers is that it surely has something to do with, and confirms, his notorious character. (Not to mention what it says about the perils of working for him.) That’s Murdoch: He’s shady and alarming and dangerous.