The Man Who Owns the News (37 page)

She pressures Michael Elefante into attending a meeting with her and Brian Tierney, the marketing executive who put together an investor group that, in 2006, bought the
Philadelphia Inquirer
—which since then has fallen further and further into extremis. Hill also gets a meeting at Dow Jones for MySpace founder Brad Greenspan, who bears a grudge against Murdoch and News Corp. over News’ acquisition of MySpace. Greenspan proposes that he’ll raise the money to buy 25 percent of Dow Jones and thereby protect it from Murdoch.

Chris Bancroft, meanwhile, is also using the
Journal
’s reporters to help him make a market. His antipathy is not toward Murdoch per se—but if a deal is to be done, he wants more money. He’s on the road, looking for private equity firms or hedge funds that might be willing to put up the cash so he can buy a controlling share of Dow Jones and block the deal—thinking he too might not be such a bad CEO.

Ron Burkle, who has emerged as a suitor in many bidding wars for media companies, now emerges, at least in the pages of the
WSJ,
and partnered with the
WSJ
union, as a potential savior for Dow Jones.

As it happens, the alternatives to Murdoch are much more real in the minds of these suddenly attentive Bancroft second cousins and in the
Journal
’s own reporting of the alternatives to Murdoch than in actuality. But the effect of the
Journal
’s reporting and its aggrandizement of unlikely saviors, along with the evident futility of the Bancroft family’s heroic or mock-heroic efforts to find another buyer, serves most of all to make Murdoch look better and better—or at least singular.

The initial optimism about a blue-chip suitor that would value and support the editorial independence of the
Wall Street Journal
shortly fades into a more clear-eyed view. A company such as GE, for instance, which early on was the board’s favorite alternative to Murdoch, exists for no other reason than to impose rational, regulated behavior on its various businesses. That would surely mean, it soon becomes clear to
WSJ
reporters, that the newsroom head count could be at risk if the business were run by GE on the strictest economic terms.

After all, the
Wall Street Journal
is not—at least nowadays—a terribly rational construct. Murdoch, say what you want about him, is one of the few Fortune 100 CEOs empowered to not act rationally—for instance, pouring a lot of money into newspapers simply because he likes newspapers. What, after all, does GE or private equity or Ron Burkle, for God’s sake, care about newspapers?

And then there is the sotto voce point, cherished by only a handful of
WSJ
true believers—but they are and always have been the important handful. An odd and fundamental truth about the
WSJ
is that it is a profoundly conservative newspaper—irascibly and militantly conservative. It is part of the anomalousness of the
Wall Street Journal
. Most of the paper makes every effort to exist as an entity without a political agenda; if there is such an agenda, it is unassumingly liberal. But the two editorial pages, the penultimate pages of the first section, speak in the most determined conservative voice of any newspaper in the nation. Arguably, they are the country’s most influential newspaper pages—regularly supplying more support and valuable ideas to the conservative establishment than any other paper or magazine. Indeed, it is not entirely far-fetched to argue that this—these pages, this mission—is the
real
reason the
WSJ
exists, and why the paper’s independence has been protected so tenaciously for so long. Peter Kann and Warren Phillips, key members of the Dow Jones board, along with the determined, scary, radical figures on the editorial page, not to mention the deeply Republican older members of the Bancroft family (no matter that the offspring have become liberals), have in the past been united—in some sense have even conspired—to protect the
Journal
’s wherewithal to argue its pure conservative view. Kann’s deft avoidance of all takeover approaches is, not inconsiderably, because there really is nobody out there who might be a reliable steward of these views.

The
Journal
has managed to protect its editorial voice, and actually give it great respectability, by sequestering it inside a relatively liberal newspaper. It’s a neat trick—and a fragile construct. One that Ron Burkle or PR-minded GE likely would not understand. Indeed, few at the
Journal,
save its innermost circle, understood this. The younger Bancrofts surely don’t. In fact, one of the things that troubles the younger Bancrofts most is the paper’s political stance—which is yet another reason the Bancrofts have been so adroitly kept at a distance. The inner circle of the paper has been protecting not just a quality paper, but this other mission.

In this regard, Murdoch understands he has a singular advantage. In 1997, when he went down to the Dow Jones offices to see Kann—free-market, small government, anti-regulation, America-first believer, no matter how mild-mannered he might appear—this was an aspect of what he was saying:
We’re on the same page, you and I—and about how many buyers can that be said?

If this inner circle has to choose between the anodyne sensibilities of most major corporations—GE most of all—and such insubstantial, blowing-in-the-political-breeze figures as Ron Burkle, or Rupert Murdoch, well, there is really no contest.

The newsroom may want Donald Graham at the
Washington Post
or even the Sulzbergers at the
Times,
but as Karen Elliott House, Peter Kann’s wife and the paper’s former publisher, will acknowledge to me in the aftermath of the deal, among the most senior editorial managers, Murdoch is much preferred to the assorted liberals.

If he is a bad choice, he’s still the better one.

THE POLITICAL MAN

If you’re not with Murdoch, even on a modest point, you’re a
liberal
, or—though this appellation has dwindled in the past decade or so—a
commie
. It’s important to get the tone right here. It’s not necessarily even all that disdainful. Said with exaggerated resignation or incomprehension, it is often semi-affectionate. Murdoch’s sisters, for instance, are “the socialists.” Gary Ginsberg is often waved away with “Well, you’re a liberal.” Murdoch is almost not making a point about ideology. It’s more a point about temperament—his versus yours. The way he sees it, he’s the last reasonable man standing.

Are you sentimental or are you realistic? Are you a basic sort or are you fancy? Do you know the value of a dollar? (Particularly
his
dollars.)

What he is is a fifties sort of dad. In fact, he
is
a fifties dad. (His daughter, Prudence, was born in 1958.) In the international media circles that he’s moved in for the last generation, this fifties dad thing has become a particularly rare sort of sensibility. So when he sees it, he embraces it. While this sensibility is, most prevalently, found among right-wingers, specific policies aren’t only what he’s looking for or what attracts him. It’s rather the articulation that moves him: a lack of equivocation, a firm declaration, a clear identity, a fundamental compression, a lack of evident complication or obvious neurosis—along with, of course, the various tax, regulatory, and fiscal policies that will benefit him personally.

How he would like the talk to be, how he would like the world to be—suffused with patriarchal definitiveness—finds one of its highest reflections on the
WSJ
editorial pages. This is his true temperamental home. These pages hew more closely to Murdoch’s views than, perhaps, even those of any of his own publications (including the conservative political magazine the
Weekly Standard,
which was launched with Murdoch funding in 1995, but is often more wonky than declarative). They lack equivocation, they revel in their own certainty, they
sell
it. “You can’t write a fifty-fifty editorial,” one of the pages’ first editors, William Peter Hamilton, a Scotsman like Murdoch, once wrote. “Don’t believe the man who tells you there are two sides to every question. There is only one side to the truth.”

They are, quite likely, the only editorial pages in the country that are actually avidly read. They may even have their own dedicated readership—a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand hard-core conservatives who buy the paper
for
the editorials. They’re informed by them, galvanized by them, in love with them.

On our editorial page we make no pretense of walking down the middle of the road. Our comments and interpretations are made from a definite point of view. We believe in the individual, in his wisdom and his decency. We oppose all infringements on individual rights whether they stem from attempts at private monopoly, labor union monopoly or from an overgrowing government. People will say we are conservative or even reactionary. We are not much interested in labels but if we were to choose one, we would say we are radical. Just as radical as the Christian doctrine.

—William Henry Grimes, 1951

The editorial pages, ruled by the editorial page editor, exist so apart from the rest of the paper that they function almost like a separate business. Until the
Journal
headquarters were remodeled after 9/11, the editorial pages even had a separate lobby entrance, where you walked past the photograph of Ronald Reagan, one of the pages’ mainstay heroes.

It’s a different kind of calling on the editorial pages—a kind of faith. This is about orthodoxy. Free trade, low taxes, anti-regulation, anti-collectivist—and later, anti-communist and pro-Israel. They’re proud and determined ideologues—ideologues (at least on their best days), not partisans (the
Journal
editorial pages eviscerated George H. W. Bush when he abandoned his no-new-taxes pledge—arguably costing him a vital part of his base, and hence his presidency). The pages’ editor—now Paul Gigot—is invariably the linear descendant of William Peter Hamilton, that steadfast, aggressive, absolute believer in market virtue. (The Dow Theory is his: “Beneath the fluctuations in individual stocks there was present at all times a trend of the market as a whole.” And too: “The market represents everything everybody knows, hopes, believes, anticipates.”) From Hamilton to Thomas Woodlock to William Henry Grimes to Vermont Royster to Joseph Evans to Robert Bartley to Paul Gigot, for over a hundred years, the position, values, and affect of the page remain largely fixed. There is no effort at consideration, balance, or even analysis.

This is one facet of the deal in which Murdoch has been able to avoid scrutiny: There aren’t liberal views for him to subvert at the
Journal
—at least not on the editorial page.

And yet, for the pages’ editors, there is grave concern: Can anyone, in the end, be sure what Murdoch actually believes in? Or if he believes in anything? Or if what he believes in necessarily has much bearing on what is expedient for him to
say
he believes in?

That suggests that his principles are fungible—that he’s ultimately a pragmatist. If he’s not faulted for being a right-wing reactionary, then he’s faulted for having fair-weather ideas. But that too may be wrong—this focus on his ideas. It may just be that what ideas he has are thin. It’s not ideas he’s pursuing but sensibility. He’s looking for other people who, along with whatever else they might believe, believe in the credo of winning—that winning is the point; that, policywise, giving wherewithal to likely winners is the point. The free market ought to rule, in other words. But, too, the free market should rule in favor of the strongest people in the free market. Likewise, all winners have virtue.

That’s his ideological framework. That and what the last person he’s talked to—and whom he’s moved by—has said to him.

At the same time, these views he leans toward, or these people with views he leans toward, ought to be able to sell papers—which is the point about winners.

In his own mind he has only ever been entirely consistent: He has never wandered in the wilderness or confronted ambivalence. Being warlike is his point. He likes to be the cause of the conflict. He likes to set the house on fire and watch all the fire engines drive maniacally down the road. With a little critical interpretation, there is a certain autistic quality to his attention—a certain detachment, an overemphasis on his own needs and desires. He is, relatively speaking, incapable of seeing that his views have changed—that they ever have changed.

There is, politically, Red Rupert, Reagan-Thatcher Rupert, Roger Ailes Rupert, and Slightly Readjusted Rupert. And What’s-Good-for-Rupert Rupert.

In all of these views or stages, there’s the same basic philosophical operation: fundamental contrariness. The point about being a contrarian—especially one with decisive views—is that you stand to gain a lot more leverage than just being one among many. Murdoch wants to be out in front of a position. After all, he’s in the tabloid business. It is important not to underestimate how much he actually sees his political position as an editorial act—his politics, he believes, enliven his papers. He’s not only using his papers to sell his views. He’s using his views to sell his papers—choosing views that will sell not because they’re consistent or popular but because they’re dramatic.

(Not that he doesn’t fixate: In late 2007, the
Sun,
in London, will frequently devote its front page to the anti–European Constitution campaign, an issue so boring, even Murdoch admits, that the paper is losing a hundred thousand readers a day.)