The Man Who Owns the News (39 page)

Koch is elected mayor in 1977, making Murdoch, only a few years after his arrival in New York, suddenly one of the most influential men in the city. Koch is not just his political coup but a business and personal one as well. The
New York Post,
which has begun its course of losing News Corp. tens of millions of dollars a year, has started to earn its keep.

It’s so very basic (as with all things Murdoch):

1. You can’t succeed unless you have political influence.

2. It’s more efficient to get political influence by starting with a new group than with the entrenched group—established power doesn’t give people outside the establishment very many opportunities.

3. Likewise, the new people vying for power need you more than the entrenched people with the power.

4. Your power and influence put in service to the upstarts will be magnified if the upstarts win.

5. The upstarts always eventually win.

6. In general, while conservatives are better for business, any political faction that owes you something is better than one that doesn’t.

Ideology is only one aspect of Murdoch’s political instinct. In general, he wants characters who provide the best story—that is, the most conflict. In that he is like any journalist. This is his sport. He’s in awe of public power and how it unfolds. But unlike other journalists, there’s no pretense about him being on the sidelines. He’s not just telling the story, he’s actively involved in
creating
the story. What’s more, he’s a character in the story too, even in some sense—at least as he understands the story—the hero.

More than any other journalist, Murdoch reflects, epitomizes, and benefits from the great conservative tide. He’s on the zeitgeist. This, in part, results from a temperamental distinction. In the middle of the 1970s, he’s building, plotting, pushing back when everybody else is settling in, resigning themselves, acquiescing to the long decline. It’s the decade of stagflation and the City of New York going bankrupt. It’s the great funk.

Murdoch is the countertemperament. If everyone else appears to have given up on the idea of gaining a personal and business advantage, Murdoch hasn’t gotten the message. As an outsider, he’s just not quite aware that the party’s over.

What he’s compulsively drawn to is action, opportunity, the center of attention. A vital element in understanding his political consciousness is understanding its shallowness. For an ideologue, he’s done little of the reading. Ideas are of marginal interest to him; he’s a poor debater (although he can raise his voice and pound the table).

And then there is the fact that at all times he’s being fed what he wants to hear. In a way, he himself is like a politician. He has people supporting and reinforcing his positions. He lives in a vacuum of, as it were, relative quackery (not unlike many politicians). Of course, even the dubious information he receives is compromised by the fact that he doesn’t really listen. What he’s looking for is just the top line—the executive summary, not the nuance. So, at any given time, he has this amalgamation of half facts, quasiprejudices, shorthand analysis, and cockeyed assumptions, with a smattering of gossip. All combined with his massive certainty and determined nature. That’s the basis of his and his newsrooms’ political agenda.

(One afternoon at lunch, during an interview with Murdoch, he will suddenly have the urge to point out to me his new understanding of the Muslim situation—that Muslims have an inordinate incidence of birth defects because they so often marry their cousins. Gary Ginsberg, mortified, pauses, his fork in midair, and says, “Ahhh…really? Wow. Hmmm…That does explain a lot.”)

Such views as he adopts and promulgates derive in part from his collection of columnists, who in turn are often trying to write what they think he wants to hear, and who are, too, his social life. Or, if not his actual social set, his social buffers or social amusements, as well as his fundamental gossip sources and intellectual advisors (gossip and intellect go hand in hand for Murdoch).

It’s useful to look at the brain trust that’s supplying him with much of his political intelligence during the vital Reagan-Thatcher years: Woodrow Wyatt and Irwin Stelzer, both Murdoch foot soldiers competing for his attention.

Wyatt, thirteen years older than Murdoch, was a Labour MP until he lost his seat in 1970. He was made head of the Tote—the office that governs horse racing—in the United Kingdom, whereupon he began his precipitous slide to the right. Wyatt became a television talking head, with his signature floppy bow tie, for the anti-labor side of the Labour Party, until the Labour Party asked him to shut up and declared him just this side of persona non grata.

Murdoch meets Wyatt in London after the acquisition of
News of the World,
when the Murdochs are making the effort to climb, or at least find, the social ladder in Britain. Wyatt, a veteran social climber, had become a nexus for bankers and aristocrats and titans of industry. He is also a man with the kind of authoritative-sounding, if not necessarily informed, unified-field-theory opinions that Murdoch likes. Murdoch is suitably impressed by Wyatt’s no-nonsense views about labor nonsense. What’s more, Wyatt, like Murdoch, has a young wife, Verushka, who is Hungarian; Anna, Rupert’s wife, is Estonian—and, like Murdoch, a young daughter (Petronella Wyatt would, like Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth, become, in a generation’s time, the talk of London).

Wyatt is the kind of Brit who would seem to confirm all Murdoch’s Brit prejudices—a snobbish, eccentric anti-Semite with many former wives and indiscreet affairs, obsessed with, more than anything, the state of his wine cellar. “He was a figure,” the
Independent
will write on his death, “albeit a slightly ludicrous one, in the land.” But given Wyatt’s immediate and fulsome appreciation of the new publisher in town, Murdoch finds him talented and amusing, even prescient and sage.

Within a few years, Murdoch will, under Wyatt’s tutelage, come to see the real nature of rot and decay in British life (per Wyatt: unions) and, within a few more years, the real hope for the future (per Wyatt: Thatcher). Wyatt is instrumental in arranging the early contacts between Margaret Thatcher—still a dark horse among the Tories in socialist Britain—and Murdoch. The Thatcher victory in 1979 is a serious elevation for Wyatt, not least in terms of his usefulness to Murdoch.

Shortly after Murdoch buys the
Times
in 1981, he gives Wyatt columns in the
Times
and, as well, the
News of the World
. Amidst the randy vicars and spanked schoolgirls, there’s Woodrow Wyatt articulating the virtues of the free market in a column called “The Voice of Reason.” The columns, surely more valuable to Murdoch than to readers, are drippy encomiums to all things Thatcher. (They are, reportedly, always her first read of the day—some say her
only
news read of the day.)

Wyatt is a terrier at Thatcher’s skirt. Her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, who spends much time trying to fend him off, will recall for me how obsessive Wyatt is in hounding Mrs. Thatcher: “A bloody menace. He thought he was running the country by ringing her up at eight in the morning. Poisonous little twerp, he was.”

Almost no one in the Murdoch organization has any use at all for him—his columns relentlessly promote not only Thatcher but himself—except Murdoch. The various memoirs by Murdoch hands invariably characterize Wyatt as a great annoyance or comic relief. (In turn, Wyatt, who becomes a memoirist and prodigious diarist, will take his revenge—when his diaries are published posthumously—on those who slight him, or edit him, or deprive him of opportunities for income enhancement, or serve him poor wine.) But Wyatt understands—and frequently points out without restraint—that he is under Murdoch’s personal protection.

Wyatt may actually be Murdoch’s closest friend during the 1980s. Their families vacation together and socialize together.

Wyatt also becomes not just somebody who is influencing Murdoch on his anti-union position but a significant player in the battle for Wapping. It’s Wyatt who brings Murdoch moderate union leaders who will supplant the radical leaders. It’s through Wyatt that Murdoch is introduced to Frank Chapple, head of the electricians’ union, who agrees to have his membership undermine the printers and typesetters.

Wyatt is the model of a Murdoch columnist and ideologue: The significance that the column gives him is, in turn, used in the service of News Corp. He is, too—and this mightily helps his standing—a courtier. Mr. M. is his singular client.

When Wyatt dies in 1997, having sacrificed his News Corp. pension for more cash up front, it is Murdoch who has to step in and bail out Wyatt’s widow, Verushka, and his daughter, Petronella, who herself becomes a columnist for the
Spectator
and
Sunday Telegraph
. (Petronella, not incidentally, later becomes a protagonist in a sex scandal that makes it big in the
News of the World
—she’s the lover of Boris Johnson, the married Tory MP and future mayor of London, and a prominent figure in a roundelay of sexual intrigue involving the
Spectator
magazine and the highest reaches of government in 2004.)

It is the other vital member of Murdoch’s 1980s brain trust, Irwin Stelzer—who will later feel the sting of Wyatt’s diaries (Stelzer apparently stores his expensive wines improperly)—who negotiates the payout to the widow Wyatt.

Stelzer is an American. He’s an economist who—and this is attractive to Murdoch—has actually made money: He’s started and sold a forecasting company. Murdoch meets him because his attractive neighbor in upstate New York, Cita Stuntz, who’s explained the inner workings of New York State government to him, is dating Stelzer. (Stelzer is trying to take her out for her thirty-fifth birthday, but Cita tells him that Murdoch has already made the invitation, so Stelzer calls Murdoch and asks if he can split the check, and hence gets invited along—which is how he and Murdoch meet.) Stelzer’s economics specialty involves regulatory matters, and on this issue—Stelzer, as a business advisor, is of course anti-regulation—he and Murdoch agree and bond.

Stelzer is furthermore a gossip, a man about town, a raconteur. Having just bought the
Post
and
New York
magazine, and not having found any sort of like-minded brotherhood in New York, Murdoch now has Irwin. It’s a kind of meeting of the minds that you wouldn’t necessarily, or easily, find in Manhattan in the late seventies: two free-market, anti-regulatory, self-styled libertarians. Murdoch likes expressive people whose opinions he shares—who offer him opinions that he can adopt for himself.

Irwin is also a kind of Anglophile. Actually, he’s Murdoch’s kind of Anglophile: He likes everything about England but the English. Murdoch enjoys Stelzer’s British-type pomposity even more for Stelzer’s being an American. When Stelzer and Cita are married, Murdoch gives them a dinner party in London, where he introduces Irwin to Woodrow Wyatt, who Murdoch thinks will share Irwin’s views.

In fact, Irwin finds Wyatt to be a rather ridiculous British eccentric, not to mention an anti-Semite and, he’ll eventually conclude, “a lying son of a bitch,” and he considers Wyatt’s wife, Verushka, to be “stark raving mad.” Wyatt, in turn, hits on Stelzer’s new wife.

Now Stelzer and Wyatt are competitive courtiers. Murdoch is on the phone with each of them every day. They’re functioning not just as columnists—Stelzer also gets column space in the
Sunday Times
—but as his eyes and ears.

Cita and Irwin have a house in Aspen (it’s at the Stelzer home that Claudine Longet, the former Mrs. Andy Williams, renting the place for a few weeks one winter, kills her lover, “Spider” Sabich), and Anna and Rupert follow them there. Rupert comes over one day, in Irwin’s telling, and says, “It’s not fair for me to keep taking your ideas,” and offers to begin paying him a consultant’s fee. Irwin says, “I don’t think my wife would approve—you’re one of her friends,” but then Anna calls Cita and says, “We’ll never be allowed to have dinner with you again unless Irwin takes the money.” Voilà. Irwin is now business advisor, researcher, and speechwriter as well as columnist.

Stelzerism and Murdochism are all about the defense of the free market, of Israel, of American clout. Stelzer, through Murdoch, arguably helps make this heretofore complicated, even tortured combination of positions quite a mantra. It’s early neoconism.

Stelzer ultimately takes on the role of a kind of Murdoch intellectual spokesperson. That is, when Stelzer talks, people come to believe it’s Murdoch talking. Likewise, Stelzer, in addition to his personal work for Murdoch and his columns for Murdoch publications, becomes a Murdoch representative and diplomat to the Reagan administration and almost any other place Murdoch needs a voice, an argument, or some intelligence. At the same time, not always to Murdoch’s liking or to the liking of other people in News Corp., Stelzer becomes a kind of freelance Murdoch exponent. Stelzer runs his own Murdoch portfolio. That portfolio will eventually come to include British prime minister Tony Blair and his people, who will regularly make pilgrimages to Stelzer to find out what Murdoch might be thinking.

Murdoch’s politics, opinion, and general discourse, along with whom he favors and whom he’s against, are less the product of his developing and increasingly conservative worldview than of the odd troop of conservative-minded irregulars who find their way onto his relatively impatient wavelength.

Along with Wyatt and Stelzer, there are, at other times, other oddities. There’s Maxwell Newton, once the darling of the Aussie left, whom Murdoch appoints as the first editor of the
Australian
and then fires. He arrives in New York to, of all things un-Australian, quit drinking, and his redemption comes in the form of a business column in the
New York Post,
which basically echoes Murdoch’s own growing romance with Reaganomics. There’s John Podhoretz, a strange, abrasive, Asperger’s type, whose father, Norman, is a guiding eminence of neocon conservatism, who becomes a
New York Post
columnist too and helps convince Murdoch to put up the money to start the
Weekly Standard
—which will become the leading journal of neocon opinion. And there is Eric Breindel, the former socialist and junkie (his incipient career in liberal politics was ended by a heroin bust) and social figure (Harvard, friend of the Kennedys, friend of Henry Kissinger, lover of
Washington Post
heiress Lally Weymouth), who, as a
Post
columnist, becomes a virulent anti-Arab, anti-welfare, anti-communist voice. He brokers the relationship between Murdoch and Rudy Giuliani (Murdoch didn’t like Giuliani, not least of all because he prosecuted his friend and financier Michael Milken), which results in the
Post
’s endorsement of Giuliani in the New York mayor’s race. (Breindel will die of AIDS in 1998.)