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

by Michael Wolff

  THREE The Throwback

  FALL 2005: ANDY STEGINSKY

  He is a classical music fan and a Rupert Murdoch groupie. And oddly, those things turn out to be related. In 1997, Andy Steginsky, a money manager in Princeton, New Jersey, met Billy Cox through their mutual support of the New Jersey Symphony, just before Billy began stirring up trouble in the Bancroft family. Indeed, in a breakfast conversation with Cox—the kind of meeting any high-net-worth investment advisor might try to hustle with a high-net-worth individual—Steginsky claims to have instructed Cox on the virtues of Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. as well as corporate activism. “Life is short,” said Steginsky. “Why don’t you do something to make a difference?” And then, voilà, Billy Cox, joined by his cousin Lizzie Goth, started to agitate for change at Dow Jones. In Steginsky’s view, perhaps not a coincidence.

  As for Andy Steginsky’s unusual attraction to Rupert Murdoch, that started in the early eighties. Not long after Steginsky, with a B.S. from Ohio State, joined the Wall Street brokerage Oppenheimer and Co. in 1981, he called up the CEO of News Corp. to discuss the company’s prospects. Murdoch not only took the time to sit down with the kid just out of school—it is a Murdoch strategy or character note that he is easy to get on the phone—but also charmed the pants off him. News Corp. was then an Australian company whose ADRs (American depository receipts—which is a way to buy stock in foreign companies in the United States) were only lightly traded, so Murdoch was keen on Oppenheimer’s interest, even if Andy himself was nobody much.

  Steginsky, besotted, came to believe in all things Murdoch with a particular zealotry, and regularly put his clients into News Corp. stock. (Years later he would acknowledge that, all in all, this had hardly been the world’s savviest investment.) In 1989, when Lachlan was getting ready to go off to Princeton, Murdoch called Steginsky and asked him if he could occasionally give Lachlan a hot meal. This was both Murdoch the obsessive father as well as Murdoch the obsessive networker.

  Lachlan, as it happened, also likes opera, and he and Andy became fast friends, sharing, in Steginsky’s telling, a pair of headphones for hours on end.

  Steginsky, a round-faced man in his late forties, has a kind of carte blanche at News Corp. He stops in when he’s in town; he kibbitzes; he annoys people who are trying to get their work done. And while it is not always clear what he’s doing, everybody is used to him doing it.

  In September, Steginsky stops in at Murdoch’s office. Murdoch, a great mentioner, happens to mention Dow Jones—and Andy Steginsky immediately recounts his possibly meaningful meeting with Billy Cox ten years ago.

  “I could,” he says to Murdoch, “make some calls”—which is what people say to get in on something. This gambit, combined with a giddiness to do anything that Murdoch might ask, sends Steginsky…well, it sends him to Rome and Prague.

  Billy Cox, who was forced out not long after he started making trouble at Dow Jones, moved to Europe, settling finally with his family in Rome. Steginsky gets Billy on the phone, and Billy is…Billy. He’s mad at Dow Jones for kicking him out; he’s mad at his father, Bill junior, for not siding with him; and he’s mad at everyone else in the family who has more money than he has. Billy may be on the outs with a lot of the family, but over the phone—with renewed enthusiasm for a fight with Dow Jones—he still tells Steginsky that he’s sure he can get various siblings and cousins and other relatives to listen to reason now, even to meet with Murdoch. The next time he’s in New York, Billy drives out to Princeton, where he and Steginsky, over a bottle of wine, sketch out the family structure and Billy gives a little brain dump about who is who, as well as who within the three branches of the family might, and might not, be approachable. Billy offers to make the introductions.

  But over the next few months, Billy doesn’t do much of anything except talk to Steginsky on the phone and tell him he definitely can do something. Finally, at the end of one call Billy says that if Andy were ever in Rome, that might be a good time to talk about next steps.

  “And so I hung up the phone, called a limo service, and it picked me up in Princeton within an hour. I knew if I called Billy back and said, ‘I’m coming to Rome,’ he’d say, ‘Don’t come,’ so I just went. I called the airline on the way and booked the ticket. I knew where he was and I booked a hotel not far from where he lives. I got there the next morning. I called him right before lunch and he said, ‘It must be early in Princeton.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not in Princeton, I’m in Rome.’”

  Billy shows up with his French wife, Beatrice, and his son. It’s the week before Thanksgiving, and the four of them have turkey in a Roman trattoria. The next day, Billy and his wife come over to Steginsky’s hotel, near the Piazza del Popolo, and over more wine take a look at the Bancroft family chart that Andy’s worked up, pointing out what’s wrong with it, what should be added to it, and, most importantly, giving Andy phone numbers. It’s perhaps too much wine, because the next day Billy is back trying to get assurances that Andy won’t be calling Bancroft family members willy-nilly—at least not on Billy’s say-so. But who you do want to see, says Billy, is Lizzie Goth—his partner in the failed putsch of ten years before—who is now living in Prague.

  “Well,” says Steginsky, “let’s get her on the phone.”

  In seconds, Lizzie agrees to see Steginsky, who immediately calls the concierge at the Hotel de Russie: “I’m the guy in room 602. Get me on the next flight to Prague.”

  They spend an hour together in the Prague airport. Lizzie doesn’t want grief from the family again. She and Billy have been shunned enough by the family. Still, she offers her version of who’s who, who might be susceptible, and who’s not worth pursuing at all. Her message is clear—she understands the undeniable power of money in her family: “You can tell Rupert that, if he’s interested, just put an offer on the table.” And then Steginsky gets on a plane back to Rome—pausing to pick up his stuff and call Rupert, then in Sydney, with his report—and then on a flight to New York.

  Steginsky’s quixotic mission is to convince the Bancrofts that Rupert Murdoch is their kind of people. To the Bancrofts, however, he is their antithesis. If to the people at the Wall Street Journal he is bad for journalism, to the Bancrofts he is even more pernicious. If they stand for something high, Murdoch stands for something low, possibly all that is vile, louche, and corrupt about the modern world. He is the worst of the businessmen who have debased the media business.

  Indeed, it is business itself, or success itself, or ambition, or striving, that the Bancroft family—once a bulwark of American capitalism and the Republican Party, but now proudly remote from commerce—has a problem with.

  Murdoch, to many of them, is that most modern rough beast, an amoral technocrat, a market vulgarian, a destroyer of virtue. A man for whom everything is subservient to his business interests.

  He is, and is pleased to let everybody know it, a winner-take-all businessman—the worst nightmare of sentimental, lefty intellectuals, which is exactly what so many of the Bancrofts have become.

  And yet, just as obviously, this most quintessential and disturbing modern executive is, here in his eighth decade, premodern. In fact, if he had an MBA, if he was that sort of spreadsheet executive, he certainly would not want to buy Dow Jones and pay practically double its value. If there is a sense of not exactly rational entitlement on the side of reporters and editors who work at elite institutions such as the Wall Street Journal, they are up against Murdoch’s not exactly rational entitlement too. In his years of ownership, Murdoch’s New York Post may well have lost more money than any other media enterprise in history. (When I later offer that hypothesis to Robert Thomson, then the editor of Murdoch’s Times of London, he will say, “I would not underestimate the Times in that regard.”) No, it would be a mistake to see Murdoch as just another modern ill, born of the corporate state. Murdoch, who may have mastered modern business, is also a throwback, steeped in both dynastic traditions and in old-fashioned news-papering (how many are st
eeped in that anymore?)—a reversion to a type that is now quite unfamiliar.

  THE MURDOCHS OF AUSTRALIA

  Dame Elisabeth boasts that all of the living Murdoch family members plan to return in 2009 to Cruden Farm, the family homestead—which Sir Keith bought as a wedding gift for his nineteen-year-old bride in 1928—along with anybody who is anybody in Australia to celebrate the Murdoch matriarch’s one hundredth birthday.

  The gathering, the celebration, Cruden Farm, and Dame Elisabeth’s longevity itself are all part of a dynastic self-consciousness that has to be understood as the anomaly that it is. Families fall apart—most in one generation, and virtually all, including the Bancrofts, within four. Only in the rarest instance does a postmodern Western family manage to maintain its structure and identity over a century or more.

  The Murdochs, in their yen for centrality, their insularity, their generational codependence, and their business practices, resemble some of the world’s great family dynasties—the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Sulzbergers.

  Part of the Murdoch problem, however, is that nobody knows how significant and entitled the Murdochs are. The Murdoch story, no matter how deeply woven into the public mind in Australia, remains an Australian story. This makes Rupert Murdoch, when he finally sets himself upon the world, only slightly more familiar than, say, a Russian oligarch in London, or an African despot on the Riviera, or any old Eurotrash in New York. The Murdoch mythology, what makes Murdoch Murdoch and the Murdochs Murdochs, is only vaguely understood and not terribly cared about far from Australia.

  He thinks he’s something. We don’t. We don’t think his entitlement is worth much—we mock it, even.

  But entitlement is not just about other people giving you your due. It’s also a psychological condition, which can either marginalize you or make you strong. In the latter case, it can be a kind of arbitrage—you know something the market doesn’t. You have all the confidence and financial resources of a disciplined and entitled family, while we, without a clue about your real lineage, have no reason at all to take you seriously. Not only do we not accord you an advantage, we believe, since we don’t know you, that you ought to be at a disadvantage—meaning we’re not at all attentive as you, in your entitlement, take what you want.

  Such entitlement comes from a family with a set of dominant and controlling figures. (Such a heavy hand can also send family members running for so many disparate hills.)

  At the center of the Murdoch family structure, dominating not just by longevity (although that surely helps) but by all manner of maternal force and wiles, is Dame Elisabeth Murdoch.

  Her frequent notes to grandchildren and great-grandchildren, which now seem like the stuff of fond irascibility, must have seemed in her prime incredibly demanding, constant, and oppressive. Murdoch himself seems strikingly, and sourly, aware of this. “She was an okay mother,” he told me—the first time I’d heard Dame Elisabeth described as something less than saintly. “That’s a terrible thing for a son to say, in that we were a pretty close family, but my father came first, and, you know, the rest of us had to be sent off to boarding schools. My father was much older. He was always wanting to spend time with us and spoil us; she was always the disciplinarian.”

  Dame Elisabeth Murdoch is, in Australia, in the league of Rose Kennedy and the Queen Mum. What the matriarch does, the psychological operation she performs, is to infantilize everybody else in the family, keeping everybody in his or her place. Rupert Murdoch, a man of infinite wealth and power to the outside world, is, within his family, his mother’s son—put in his place. Forget the empire: “I’m more interested in him being a good son.”

  There are in Murdoch’s newspapers in Australia no Page 3 girls—they of the bare bosoms that have so successfully identified and sold the Sun, his London tabloid—out of deference to his mum.

  When he announced his plan to marry Wendi Deng, his mother apparently told anyone who would listen that she “can’t even look at the girl.”

  And Dame Elisabeth is not just Murdoch’s mom; she is the most famous old lady in Australia, not merely a Murdoch family icon but a national one too.

  Arriving in Melbourne in February 2008, I will find some 5,000 Melburnians turning out for a picnic in honor of Dame Elisabeth on her lawn. Cruden Farm, which when Keith Murdoch bought it for her in 1928 was a country estate sitting among the farms that surrounded Melbourne, is now itself surrounded by lower-middle-class housing developments. Still, it remains a preserve of some proud, flinty Anglo character (Dame Elisabeth’s accent is more English than Australian)—something not quite of this world. The gardens themselves, more than eighty years in the tending, are a particularly uncommon monument. The house, a nineteenth-century many-pillared neoclassical farmhouse, with all of the antiques and paintings acquired by Keith Murdoch, an avid collector, early in the century still in place, is frozen in time. It has neither heating nor, evidently, a vacuum cleaner. Dame Elisabeth answers her own phone—or, since it’s a half-century or so old dial-faced instrument, with the receiver alone weighing several pounds, hoists it—and maneuvers around the estate in a walker, which she lifts to and fro, or in an ancient old golf cart, which she double-clutches, racing under the garden trellises and between the sprinklers. At ninety-nine, she sat for a three-hour interview and then conducted the garden tour in her golf cart, summing up a sort of perfect, and even attractive, noblesse oblige: “Rupert would say that everything he gained from me was by example. I think that’s probably true. One tries very hard to be an example to one’s children. I think that all of my children say that my example has been enormously important to them. Rupert says it quite often, so I think he believes it. I don’t think you want to be giving too much advice. I think you want to be leading by example. It’s quite a responsibility to be the head of such a huge family.”

  After three hours of Dame Elisabeth’s instruction on how she has managed to hold together a family that spans three continents, her views on her “elderly” son’s divorce (“I just bite the bullet and get on with it…I remember saying to Rupert, ‘Rupert you’re going to be very, very lonely, and the first desiring female comes along will snap you up,’ and he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mum, I’m far too old for that’”), what makes “that wretched boy of mine” tick (“He was very definite. I mean, he mightn’t be always right, but he was always very definite”), and his chosen profession (“I don’t care a hang about the newspapers. I don’t care if I don’t see a newspaper for days. Terrible, isn’t it? I’m ashamed to say.”), she is off to a consolation dinner for the recently defeated prime minister, John Howard.

  “She’s got this almost Victorian attitude to do this,” Murdoch says with some frustration. “It’s her duty. I keep telling her, ‘Mum, you don’t have to do this, just relax. You’re tiring yourself out. Go out two, three days a week, not seven days.’”

  It is surely true that the ties that bind are a lot tighter where there’s a lot of money—and through the early years that Murdoch built the business, Dame Elisabeth held the purse strings. (Murdoch’s financial stake in News Corp. was wound up in Cruden Investments, the company Keith Murdoch left to his wife and children in 1952.)

  But it’s not just money—the Bancroft family will prove as much—but money combined with a daunting mythology that truly binds.

  You are, in a Murdoch discussion—especially in a Murdoch discussion with Murdochs—instantly back, on a first-name basis, five generations. Not only are the names clear, but so are their characters and motivations. Their stories become an overarching historical composite, such that their descendants might easily believe they are history’s living embodiment—and imperative.

  William Henry Greene, Dame Elisabeth’s grandfather, is an Irish railroad man. In the transition from Ireland to England to Australia he becomes the commissioner of Victoria’s railway system.

  He marries Fanny Govett, the Australian-born daughter of a founding citizen of Melbourne. Their son, Elisabeth’s father, Rupert
Greene, is born in 1870.

  Rupert Greene is, in the telling, the source of the family charisma, the deadly charm that, genetically transferred to his grandson, Rupert, would seal so many deals in the latter twentieth century.

  The adjectives for Rupert Greene—which we might assume are euphemistic in their ways—include swashbuckling, popular, amusing, wild, and delightful. He’s a gambling man, and he challenged, in some more or less flashy and memorable ways, the upper-middle-class norms of early-twentieth-century Melbourne—an especially unflashy Protestant place. Still, he married properly: His wife, Marie Grace de Lancey Forth, Elisabeth’s mother, was from a long line of British and Scottish establishment figures.

  In 1927, with the Greenes firmly ensconced in Melbourne society, their eighteen-year-old daughter Elisabeth’s debutante picture catches the eye of Keith Murdoch, the forty-two-year-old bachelor publisher, when it is printed in the gossip pages of his own newspaper.

  Such an age difference, while mildly scandalous, creates for the Murdoch family a living historical expanse from Keith Murdoch’s birth, in 1885, to the end of his wife’s life—at this point, at least 123 years later. It’s some perspective. (The lives of Murdoch’s two youngest children, Chloe and Grace, could well bookend their grandfather’s birth by more than two hundred years.)

  In December 1986, Rupert Murdoch marches into the offices of the Herald and Weekly Times, the company that his father built—and which, in family lore, wronged him by frustrating his efforts to become an owner himself—and announces he’s going to buy it.

  This is thirty-four years after his father’s death. For more than three decades, Rupert has nursed this revenge fantasy. He tried it once before, in 1979, and failed: The company’s trustees enlisted Australia’s oldest establishment media family, the Fairfaxes, to block him. Seven years later, he’s back, and wins.