The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch

by Michael Wolff

  Gary Ginsberg, News Corp.’s executive vice president for global marketing and corporate affairs and one of the executives most frequently attending Murdoch, while worried about the particular branding initiative of the ads, had his own brand idea that he was pushing. He had, of late, vastly expanded his portfolio beyond just being the company’s PR guy to include, among other things, big-concept brand-awareness thinking. In this role, he was helping spearhead the bid News Corp. was making with the Related Companies, a major Manhattan real estate developer, for the rights to build a massive complex (larger than Rockefeller Center) on the biggest undeveloped piece of land in Manhattan. News Corp., with its naming rights to News Corp. Center (unless they changed the name of the whole company), would become the anchor and one of the main brand names of midtown.

  In light of the fact that Rupert Murdoch now owned the most important—all right, the second most important—newspaper in the world, not to mention having created the world’s most successful media company and being quite possibly the most influential businessman of the age (certainly the most influential for the longest time), why wouldn’t he want to figure out just how he’d done what he did and claim credit for it? (Of course, another reasonable view, one that Murdoch—for so long a deal-a-minute guy—also seemed to subscribe to, was about how little meaning or calculated direction or vision there had been in the growth of News Corp. But no matter.)

  Murdoch was, frankly, impressed with himself. Delighted. Giddy. He couldn’t believe how exhausted he felt once the deal was done. He’d held his anticipation and excitement “all inside,” and as soon as he could relax, he felt “wiped out.” Perhaps more than any other accomplishment, getting the Wall Street Journal was, in and of itself, the big one, and not just a next step toward something else.

  And there was the other stuff. Legacy stuff. There were his two young children—Grace, six, and her sister Chloe, four—and how they would think of him in, well…the future. There were his older children and the importance of defining the meaning of the company he would be leaving them. That was James’ point. That was also what he was always hearing from Matthew Freud, the Svengali-ish marketer, who was now married to the family. Brand was legacy. The bigger the brand message, the bigger the legacy.

  Plus there was Murdoch’s wife, Wendi, thirty-nine. Her energy, her sense of possibilities, her urge to take over the world, to leave her mark, might be as great as his own. Perhaps they were competing.

  Not to mention that at nearly seventy-seven, even a man without hubris should get a chance to make a statement. If not now, when?

  On the other hand, it also seemed a potentially great mistake to attribute too much sentiment or craving for positive recognition to his motivations.

  For one thing, the branding statements toward which Murdoch seemed to gravitate were not so much about News Corp.’s greatness or vision as they were about kicking dirt in people’s faces. His true message about his acquisition of the Wall Street Journal was that he was the winner.

  A month or so after the Bancroft family voted to sell him their great-great-grandfather’s company, Murdoch invited the Journal’s fifteen top editors to lunch at the Ritz-Carlton downtown and brought along as the featured guest Col Allan, the profane, hard-drinking and foul-tempered editor of the New York Post. (Not too long after the sale went through, Allan was dressing down a subordinate so heatedly that he slammed his hand on the desk and cracked his cuff link—a gift from the police commissioner.) In journalistic terms, Allan might be as different from a Wall Street Journal editor as, say, a pit bull from a spaniel. Allan’s very presence at the lunch announced that the Wall Street Journal had been taken over by News Corp. (Not to mention that it was just delightfully evil of ol’ Rupe to bring ol’ Col along to scare the bejesus out of his new charges.)

  Murdoch’s march into the Wall Street Journal newsroom with his two lieutenants—loyal Les Hinton, who ran News Corp.’s U.K. operation and who would be coming to run the Dow Jones business, and inscrutable Robert Thomson, the London Times editor, who would be taking over the Journal’s newsroom—was not the arrival of someone who wanted his great purpose and historic destiny to be roundly applauded. Rather, with the back of his hand, he let it be known that the Wall Street Journal was his most recently conquered nation—the staff at the Journal, many of whom were soon to be displaced persons, were merely history’s flotsam and jetsam. They were the impediments to change. He was the change agent. “We might,” he said one afternoon as he considered his new conquest, “have to let people go just to make a point.” He summarily replaced Dow Jones’ top executive, Richard Zannino, and the Journal’s publisher, L. Gordon Crovitz. He was purposely brutal with the sitting editor, Marcus Brauchli—who was, in theory, protected by the editorial agreement Murdoch had entered into with the Bancroft family in order to buy the paper. Doing an easy end run around the agreement that precluded him from unilaterally firing the existing editor, Murdoch had brought in his own editor of choice, Thomson, an Australian, and called him the publisher. The News Corp. people were bemused that people didn’t immediately understand that Thomson’s arrival as publisher was a demotion of Brauchli. The News Corp. people did not even let Brauchli speak at Murdoch’s first meeting with the entire newsroom.

  “Doesn’t he understand it’s our paper now?” said one of the executives closest to Murdoch, smacking his head. And if publicly disregarding (and dissing) Brauchli didn’t make the point, “the fact that Rupert will stop speaking to him will,” the executive chuckled. Although Murdoch offered some begrudging words about working together when he spoke to the staff, what he actually meant, News Corp. people were explaining, was that if you had a problem, leave. There was work to do, a paper to put out. A Murdoch paper.

  For many journalists, hatred of Murdoch had come to define the profession. As the Dow Jones takeover progressed, both Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, and his boss, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher, were busy characterizing Murdoch in cocktail party conversations as the worst thing that had ever happened to journalism. That’s how Keller earlier confronted Ginsberg: “How can you work for the Antichrist?” The New York Times more and more defined itself as “not a Murdoch paper.”

  That characterization paralleled how Murdoch defined the profession too: there were the elites, whose contempt for him encouraged him to regard them as all the more contemptible, and there were those who worked for him, who were, necessarily, true believers in him.

  Of note, the journalists most unhappy about Murdoch taking over the Wall Street Journal were often unhappy themselves. Unhappy because their jobs were insecure—the Journal, itself, had had waves of layoffs—their influence waning, workload increasing, and paychecks going down, indeed unhappy always knowing that they had to worry about Murdoch taking over. The people who worked for Murdoch were, arguably, among the happier people in the media business. As a newsman at News Corp., your influence increased rather than dimmed. Both Fox News and the New York Post took a manic delight in their influence. And Murdoch himself was fiercely loyal—even if you talked dirty to underlings, as the Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly had, or took money from sources, as New York Post “Page Six” editor Richard Johnson had.

  Murdoch’s intention, which he began to announce everywhere with something like a sadistic glint, was to use the Wall Street Journal to go to war against the New York Times, not least of all because the Times was ground zero for the journalists who held him in contempt.

  He’d acquired one of the two best papers in the world—which every journalist who didn’t work for him assumed he would ruin—in order to destroy the other. It was a kind of personal revenge as well as, possibly, a viable business strategy.

  It would be a true, and perhaps final, newspaper war.

  A few weeks into the writing of this book, when news of Murdoch’s willingness to sit for a series of interviews with me had spread—suggesting that I might have sold my soul or that I was in danger o
f losing it—I ran into Jonathan Alter, Newsweek’s lead writer and a figure of doubtless journalistic rectitude, in a television studio in Manhattan.

  “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, frequent
ly 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.