The Man Who Owns the News (33 page)

The three family members along with Michael Elefante go into the May 31 Dow Jones board meeting believing that the Bancrofts are in control of the process. They’ll meet with Murdoch and solicit his views on editorial protections, and to boot they’ll begin discussions with other possible buyers. Then they’ll weigh their options. What could be more reasonable?

The board, waiting now for nearly a month to hear from the family, has remained in its disinterested pose—that is,
It’s the controlling shareholder’s duty to advise us of its desires
. But as the meeting begins—most participants are connected by telephone, which compounds the sense of confusion—the mood gradually shifts from disinterest to concern to incomprehension.

Elefante begins by reading the Josh Cammaker–drafted statement that the family wishes to release. It says that the Bancrofts want to explore alternatives with regard to the future of Dow Jones and, at the same time, meet with Murdoch to discuss his ideas about protecting the editorial freedom of the paper.

There is a painful irony here, because reporters from the
Journal
are at that moment, in an exercise of editorial freedom or subversion, receiving what seem to be virtually real-time reports from the board meeting. Elefante, who has begun to regard the
Journal
staff as yet another pressure group lobbying his clients against a sale, will wonder later if a
Journal
reporter isn’t surreptitiously listening in on the call. Indeed, the Dow Jones board will later consider whether to discuss an investigation into the leak, but it decides in light of the Hewlett-Packard scandal—wherein members of the HP board authorized phone taps—to grin and bear their own leaker.

Various members of the board now try to clarify what they’ve heard. The Bancroft statement, they begin to realize, goes too far. It opens the door to
all
discussions. It’s saying,
Yeah, we’re for sale to the highest bidder
—when, in all likelihood, the highest bidder has already bid. The only leverage they have with the highest bidder is him thinking there might be another bid. If you make it clear that there isn’t, and they’ve already been advised that without Reuters or Thomson there probably isn’t…
Shit
.

There’s a sudden moment of disarray—which is duly reported in the
Journal
—in which the board does not know what to do or what’s about to happen (or what has
just
happened). Peter McPherson asks the Bancroft representatives to drop off the call while the rest of the board discusses the implications of the Bancroft family statement. Michael Elefante objects, arguing that there is no reason for the family not to participate. Dick Beattie, representing the board, argues that the board, in this instance, may have different fiduciary duties than the family does. The family representatives begrudgingly agree and accept their timeout.

The board conversation is basically,
How can these people not know what they’re doing? Are they so hopeless? What are Wachtell and Merrill doing? How can they be so hopeless?
The board consensus is that the family should be asked to withdraw this statement.

When the family comes back on the speakerphone, Chris Bancroft says, in effect, wait a minute, the family didn’t mean to say that the company was for sale.

Dick Beattie says…
Ahhh…Um.
He’s just at that moment looking at the
Journal
Web site and…
Ahem
…the family’s statement has already been posted by the
Journal
reporters who are eavesdropping on the call. (The
Journal
reporters who have posted the story will subsequently report the fact of the post.)

Murdoch is thus alerted to the sea change in the family’s views—and to the potential success of his editorial integrity gambit—by the very publication he intends to buy. Indeed, the family has opened the door to eliminating any other potential bidders—Murdoch, who has been working the phones and feeling out all the other potential bidders, is sure there won’t be any—and to certifying him as a reasonable editorial steward.

That’s the beauty of an editorial-protections plan—it commits them so much more than it commits him.

How can they not know this?

IT’S HIS NEWS

It was Murdoch’s takeover of the
Times
of London—for which he made similar promises of editorial protections—that turned him from a vulgarian operating at the margins of the business into, well, a threat to truth.

The transformation of the paper is an event that is still bitterly contested, in which who did what to whom, who was righteous and who not, and what has been lost and what saved are still, more than twenty-five years later, touchy matters.

The anti-Murdoch argument is that he took an upmarket paper famous for its probity, detail, and specialized focus on matters of policy and government, with long-practiced standards and traditions of fairness, restraint, expertise, and impartiality, and transformed it into a middle-market paper expedient about its coverage and its quality controls, casual about its areas of expertise, and willing to sacrifice the attention to detail sought by a limited group for the general-interest superficiality sought by a larger audience. All true enough.

Murdoch himself argues that between 1981, when he bought the money-losing paper of record for the establishment, and now, the transformation that has occurred at the
Times
simply mirrors what’s happened in the news business overall. General-interest news outlets that once maintained a strict, hierarchical sense of news have—in the face of competition from specialty outlets and in an effort to attract a wider, often younger or more female demographic—embraced a softer, more feature-oriented idea of what’s important. And sure enough, that broadening and softening could just as easily define the transformation of, for starters,
Time
magazine and the
New York Times
.

Not to mention that Murdoch has turned a twenty-four-page broadsheet selling not much more than 200,000 copies a day into a 120-page tabloid selling 700,000 copies a day.

But it is not just that such a transformation occurred, and it is not just the nature of the transformation, but that he bullied it into being. In fact, he carried it out as something of a jihad against
Times
people themselves—anyone who represented the older order was part of the problem. The transformation was a statement about who he was and who they were. Of what he wanted and what they’d have to become—or get out.

He blames the journalists who worked at the paper for not knowing that they had to change—for resisting his program of change. The way he sees it, he is strong, direct, practical, and strategically deploying his own money; journalists, given their natural inclinations, are weak, self-indulgent, and, given the opportunity, absolutely sanguine about wasting his money.

The proof of their fundamental weakness and incompetence is that if they had been doing their job right, he wouldn’t own them—and be doing their job for them. Murdoch sees journalists mostly as necessary functionaries who don’t get the big picture.

In his view, there are two kinds of reporters: the ones who acknowledge their limited range and repertoire—few, after all, know all that much about the complicated businesses that employ them—and accede to his direction, and the ones who
think
they know, and who believe in their own importance and righteousness. The former are skilled craftsmen—Murdoch accepts what they do as a useful trade; the latter, in the Murdoch view, see themselves, delusionally, as intellectuals, as arbiters of right and worth. The former are beholden; the latter believe—again, delusionally—that they are independent from their proprietor. The former have no pretense—they know they’re hacks; the latter crave respectability (that respectability is, in part, earned by hating him).

This is, for him, the fatal weakness of papers such as the
Journal
and the
New York Times
—that they are fundamentally about respectability rather than about the needs of their readers and their proprietors.

And so, Harry Evans. Evans, who was promoted by Murdoch from the editorship of the more successful
Sunday Times
to the editorship of the more prestigious daily
Times,
may have done more damage to Murdoch’s reputation than anybody else. First, he’s an elegant and trenchant writer, and in 1983 when his book
Good Times, Bad Times,
with its portrait of Murdoch as a modern monster, was published, Evans was the most famous journalist in Britain. It was the most respected newspaperman of the age against the most loathed proprietor of the age (or if he wasn’t quite yet the most loathed, Evans would help make him so).

Murdoch may have started with a misguided smidgen of PR thinking along the lines of,
Get Harry Evans to run the
Times
and the furor over my having bought the
Times
will be somewhat allayed
. Just as likely, though, it was a calculation that by moving Evans out of the
Sunday Times
editor’s slot, he was putting all his editors’ chairs in motion, giving him a fluid situation to mess with.

The structure for editorial protections that Murdoch accepted when he bought the Times Newspapers, and which he almost immediately, publicly, and shamelessly subverted and ignored, is the precise structure that he offers the Bancrofts. And the one that they accept pathetically, stupidly, guilelessly, desperately, moronically.

The Evans book could not have been more stark. Beyond who is the bigger prima donna, Harry or Rupert, the book’s message was clear: Murdoch will
always
have his way. It is, to him, physically painful not to have his way. Maintaining neutrality would be torture. The paper would not be a reflection of Harry Evans, it would be a reflection of Rupert Murdoch. Simple.

Murdoch partisans and Evans detractors (of which it turns out there are a lot—especially combined with the detractors of Evans’ wife, Tina Brown) describe a scenario in which Evans was the spurned lover. He was infatuated with Murdoch, wanted to be in Murdoch’s circle, wanted to be the favored son (even though Evans is three years older than Murdoch). He was envisioning his own ascension to entrepreneurial, managerial, and financial heaven. Having not gotten there, having not impressed Murdoch enough, Evans, in his memoir, was just expressing his great disappointment with himself. He was a wounded bird.

For Murdoch detractors and Evans partisans, Murdoch is just an out-and-out liar. A fraud. What he says he’ll do, he doesn’t. What he agrees to, he reneges on. He makes everybody his pawn. And he’s a frightening bully, so the people who might stand up to him don’t.

Certainly it’s true that Murdoch manipulated his way out of the editorial agreements he made to take over the
Times
. Indeed, he obviously made the agreements with the
Times
and with the British government (as a way to avoid having to come before the Monopolies Commission) as he is making them with the Bancrofts, knowing that they are weak and unenforceable and more about other people’s need for a fig leaf than about any reasonable idea of governance.

And, likely, it’s also true that Evans did have grand, mogul-ish aspirations for himself. Judging from his own later transformation into an American of high social standing, and, with his wife, a consort of the rich and celebrated, Evans was, like Clay Felker, a would-be Murdoch. In fact, Evans has since rather developed a specialty as a courtier to capricious billionaires, having gone to work for Si Newhouse, who owns Condé Nast, who eventually pushed him out, and for Mort Zuckerman, the real estate magnate who owns the New York
Daily News,
who pushed him too. Similarly, his wife went to work for the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, and he pushed her. (Indeed, Tina Brown, encouraged by Harry Evans, became, in her moment astride the publishing business, almost as controversial a figure as Murdoch himself, and for many of the same reasons—she’s become the product of the journalism she publishes; it’s all about her.)

In hindsight, it is hard to see Evans’ brush with Murdoch as much more than two alpha media figures wrestling for control. Murdoch merely had the advantage of a better business sense.

Ultimately, they both seem to have helped create each other’s character: Murdoch is a brilliant and manipulative bastard; Evans is a brilliant and easily manipulated man of taste and honor.

Exercising a heavy hand as a newspaper proprietor is actually much harder than it looks. Newspeople have something like a structural talent for ignoring their owners. Newsrooms, evolving over more than 150 years of difficult and entitled proprietors, have developed an organizational model designed, in part, to maintain a distance from the actual guy in charge. In a typical structure, only the editor communicates to the owner (or, even more remotely, the editor communicates to an executive who in turn communicates to the owner). It’s the editor’s job to be the buffer—not so much to carry out the owner’s mandates and desires, but to carry out the minimal level of the owner’s mandates and desires and still keep his job.

From a newspaperman’s perspective, the owner is almost invariably a lesser sort, a weak heir, a self-dramatizing buffoon, or a corporate know-nothing. Newspapermen have, classically, measured their careers not so much in terms of the news outlets they’ve worked for but in terms of the owners they’ve had: bumptious owners, crazy owners, meddlesome owners, weak owners, bureaucratic corporate owners—and, only in rare Camelot moments, fair, reasonable, responsible, appreciative, hands-off owners.