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

by Michael Wolff (Author)
Key Phrases: virgin media, editorial protections, News Corp, The Man Who Owns the News, Dow Jones (more...)

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Book Description

If Rupert Murdoch isn’t making headlines, he’s busy buying the media outlets that generate the headlines. His News Corp. holdings--from the New York Post, Fox News, and most recently The Wall Street Journal, to name just a few--are vast, and his power is unrivaled. So what makes a man like this tick? Michael Wolff gives us the definitive answer in The Man Who Owns the News.

With unprecedented access to Rupert Murdoch himself, and his associates and family, Wolff chronicles the astonishing growth of Murdoch's $70 billion media kingdom. In intimate detail, he probes the Murdoch family dynasty, from the battles that have threatened to destroy it to the reconciliations that seem to only make it stronger. Drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews, he offers accounts of the Dow Jones takeover as well as plays for Yahoo! and Newsday as they’ve never been revealed before.

Written in the irresistible stye that only an award-winning columnist for Vanity Fair can deliver, The Man Who Owns the News offers an exclusive glimpse into a man who wields extraordinary power and influence in the media on a worldwide scale--and whose family is being groomed to carry his legacy into the future.

An Interview with Michael Wolff on Rupert Murdoch

Q: Over the years, Rupert Murdoch has built a personal fortune worth $9 billion and a global media empire that includes more than 100 newspapers, the Fox movie studio and television networks, satellite TV systems in Europe and Asia, the book publisher Harper Collins, and MySpace. Despite that, he has continued to be regarded as an outsider, an interloper at the establishment ball. Is that perception of him accurate, or is it an image that he has carefully cultivated to serve his own goals?

Michael Wolff: I think both are absolutely true. Rupert Murdoch came into this business as an outsider and he continues to see himself as such, no matter that he owns everything, controls everything, and is the central person of our time. He continues to see himself as an outsider and it gives him enormous happiness, joy, and a reason to get up in the morning to stick it to, I guess, the rest of us.

Q: In 2007, Murdoch mounted a successful $5 billion bid to acquire Dow Jones, a drama that occupies center stage in your narrative. Why did he pursue Dow Jones and its crown jewel, The Wall Street Journal? Was it an expression of the opportunism for which he is legendary, a bid for respectability, or both?

MW: It was a bid for a newspaper. Murdoch is a newspaper man--a man who is consumed by newspapers. His reason for being is newspapers. The Wall Street Journal is arguably second only to the New York Times, the best newspaper in the world--and Murdoch had set his sights on it long before he had any hope of getting it. That’s one of the interesting things about Murdoch: The fact that he has no hope of realizing his dreams is never an impediment to him. With Dow Jones, he was just there and just wouldn’t go away, and, finally, as in all things, it comes to him.

Q: Murdoch has said that he is “proud” of the enemies he has made. Why does he instill such strong feelings of fear, contempt, and even outright loathing in so many people? What is it about him that gets under people’s skin?

MW: The truth is that he doesn’t go along. “To get along, you go along” is not a Murdochian turn of phrase or turn of mind. He is a man who, because he comes out of the newspaper business, has fought newspaper wars and newspaper-like wars wherever he’s gone. There’s always an enemy, and an enemy gives Rupert a reason for being, it gives structure to the fight, it gets him up in the morning--and it means that at the end of the day, there’s always a winner and there’s always a loser. There’s no middle ground, there’s no ambivalence with Rupert Murdoch.

Q: The title of your book, The Man Who Owns the News, calls to mind outsized media moguls such as Henry Luce, William Randolph Hearst, and William Paley, men who relished ownership of their media properties and used them not just to build their fortunes but also to influence politics and society. Do you see Murdoch as a continuation of that historical tradition? And, if so, is he the “Last True Mogul,” an anachronistic throw-back in today’s world?

MW: The point is that Rupert Murdoch is so much bigger than any of these men. The world has never seen someone like Murdoch. He has held power literally longer than any politician, any businessman, any celebrity in our day and age. For thirty years he has been at the top of his game, more influential than anyone else across that period of time. So you have to see Rupert as absolutely sui generis, absolutely unique. We will, I doubt, ever see the likes of Rupert Murdoch again.

Q: In reporting your book, you gained an unprecedented level of access to Murdoch himself, as well as to his family members and most trusted lieutenants. How were you able to gain such access? And did Murdoch try to impose any conditions on your reporting?

MW: Absolutely no conditions were unimposed. The answer to how I gained such access remains entirely unclear to me, and I think, certainly for the first couple of months as I sat interviewing Rupert, that it was entirely unclear to him. I think he looked at me, kept looking at me, and kept asking himself, “What is this guy doing here?” This is partly a function of the unique culture of News Corp. I think Rupert’s people thought that Rupert wanted me to be there, so I kind of found my way in. But I must say that this was cooperation beyond my wildest dreams. They never said no to anything. Even when I went to Australia and spent the day with Rupert’s 99-year old mother, he called ahead and said, “Oh, tell him anything,” and she did. It has been one of the seminal experiences of my long journalistic life.

From Bookmarks Magazine
By no means has Michael Wolff given the world the definitive biography of Rupert Murdoch. Several critics, especially those in the United Kingdom, felt that he had not even written a factually adequate one, leaving out major episodes and making several major errors. Others wrote that Wolff has written an interesting book but that it never truly penetrates the "secret world" of its subtitle. But like the tabloid newspapers upon which Murdoch built his empire, The Man Who Owns the News offers so many titillating details that reviewers found it difficult to put down. Add in the fact that its foundation was an encounter between two of the most enigmatic and controversial characters in today's media elite, and it may not even matter what's true and what's not.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Broadway (December 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385526121
• ISBN-13: 978-0385526128
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #206,060 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unflattering, lively and compelling portrait of a global mogul, December 5, 2008

By	S. McGee (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"Pull up a comfortable chair, here; have a glass of this great wine I've discovered, and let me tell you all about Rupert Murdoch..."

Those lines never appear in Michael Wolff's chatty and engaging biography of Rupert Murdoch, the decidedly un-engaging media titan who most of the world loves to hate. But they might as well, because Wolff takes just that kind of unstructured and original approach to his task, telling the tale of the transformation of Murdoch from Australian newspaper proprietor to (he argues) the world's first global media titan as if he were breathlessly recounting it to friends by the fire after a good dinner. Darting back and forth in time and location, Wolff goes in quest of what makes Murdoch tick, digging into everything from his relationship with his father (who helped expose the folly of the Gallipoli landings in 1915, which cost the lives of thousands of Australian WW1 troops -- a key element of the family myth) to his often-troubled ties to his children.

Murdoch-haters will find lots of ammunition here, from his indifference to those rules of common courtesy that the rest of us feel we have to live by (Murdoch discards subordinates, alienates wives and children, plays power games at an advanced level with great aplomb, but almost unconsciously) to his political views (conservative/libertarian) and his refusal to step back and let the journalists run the newspapers he owns. After all, why should he? He owns the news...

Wolff's narrative revolves around Murdoch's 2007 acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, a purchase that Murdoch had dreamed of for decades. Together with the author's unprecedented degree of access to Murdoch himself, his family members and closest aides, that structure takes what otherwise might have been a mundane biography of a 77-year-old empire-builder (a historical retrospective, in other words) and makes it more dynamic. This Murdoch, in Wolff's portrayal, may mumble in a thick Australian accent, wear a singlet under his shirt and die his hair orange in a futile bid to look younger beside his third wife, half his age -- but he's still able to pull off a $5 billion deal to acquire a paper that, famously, was thought to be un-acquirable at any price.

There are surprising insights here -- at least to someone who doesn't scan Gawker and follow every twist and turn of the Murdoch empire. Roger Ailes at Fox may have portrayed presidential candidate and now president-elect Barack Obama as a domestic terrorist of some sort -- but meanwhile, Wendi Murdoch was having dinner with him; Wolff, asking Murdoch who he should vote for in the Democratic Party primary, is told Obama. The reason? "He'll sell more papers." (That, in a nutshell, is Murdoch as seen through Wolff's eyes -- what matters is what is good for the newspapers.) Meanwhile, Ailes, far from being the media baron's alter ego, is, as Wolff reports "Murdoch's monster -- but a very profitable one." Indeed, Fox News -- whose approach to newsgathering is one of the primary reasons for a lot of hatred of Murdoch -- makes the man itself uncomfortable a lot of the time, particularly Bill O'Reilly, for whom, Wolff writes, he can barely restrain his loathing. With Wendi at his side now, "Murdoch's life is ... largely spent around people for whom Fox News is a vulgarity and a joke", Wolff reports -- and he even raises the possibility that now he has acquired the Wall Street Journal -- a newspaper, his true love -- Fox News may go up for sale.

But while marriage to Wendi Deng has changed him, it doesn't seem to have softened any of his rough edges. His eldest daughter suggests he get his hair professionally colored to a more natural shade; he retorts that she needs a facelift. He treats veteran Wall Street Journal editors, such as Marcus Brauchli, with visible scorn. When Wolff shows him at his desk, eagerly pursuing a news story, it's not one in the broader public interest. Rather, Murdoch has heard a rumor that a Hillary Clinton aide he greatly dislikes may be a partner in an online pornography venture, and has set himself -- and a New York Post reporter -- to trying to confirm it at all costs; it's a personal vendetta disguised as 'news'.

No, Murdoch does not emerge as likeable or even moderately congenial in this biography, much less a hero. But nor are the more conventional newspaper proprietors, who beside Murdoch look lazy and slightly witless (even as, in some media circles, the tendency is to view their ownership as if it were some kind of golden age.) Indeed, the Bancroft family (former controling shareholders of Dow Jones), seen through Murdoch's and Wolff's eyes, emerge as a bunch of ineffective buffoons, neglecting their responsibilities to the organization they control until it's too late. It's an intriguing implicit comparison with the Murdoch family: however dysfunctional their internal relationships may be, Murdoch, his wife and four adult children all emerge as intelligent and driven to succeed in their different ways -- set any one of them against a Bancroft, and it would be a very unequal competition indeed.

Wolff's ability to get inside the Murdoch inner circle, his style (which gives the book a sense of immediacy and momentum that many biographies lack) and the creative structure make this book more than just another media mogul biography. But it's not flawless -- hence the missing star in this review. It's not a book that anyone looking for insight into how Murdoch views the nitty gritty of his business dealings will find satisfying -- the complex details of the business itself are scattered here and there throughout the book and sometimes addressed or mentioned only in passing (as with the reference to Murdoch's reliance on single-copy sales rather than advertising to fuel revenues and profits.) He mentions several times Murdoch's strategy of using his higher profile as a way to get access to better dealflow, but doesn't go into details of how that works, any more than he is able to give fresh insight into the story behind how Murdoch narrowly escaped bankruptcy less than two decades ago. How did he deal with bankers (beyond, Wolff reports, kow-towing to them?) It's about A deal -- the deal the acquire the Wall Street Journal (which is deftly recounted), but not about the art of THE deal, in broader terms, which is how Murdoch manoeuvered himself into a position where he was a viable bidder and ultimately THE ONLY viable bidder for Dow Jones. A bigger issue is the difficulty Wolff grapples with throughout the book -- answering the question of what makes Murdoch, Murdoch? We hear he is impatient, ambivalent, difficult -- and get a lot of evidence to support that, in most cases -- but no clear idea of why, despite Wolff's tangential efforts to address the question. It would have been interesting to be witnesses to Wolff challenging him on just these questions -- How would Murdoch answer the direct question of "why are you so impatient?" But then, perhaps the problem lies as much or more with Murdoch himself than with the author; as Wolff notes, Murdoch is very bad at explaining himself (even his grasp of dates is shaky enough that he can be out by a decade or so in recalling an event). Murdoch just doesn't do introspection. He doesn't understand it, even on a conceptual level. Perhaps he is Nike's motto personified -- "Just do it".

(One side note -- I was impressed that Wolff laid out all previous connections with Murdoch's empire up front in the main body of the biography, rather than leaving the reader to wonder. While Wolff does occasionally seem awed by the fact of being in such close proximity to such a formidable business presence, his ability to be scathing and dispassionate seems to signal that his objectivity remains intact. His final notes -- identifying the sources of some comments that initially appear very sweeping and editorial in tone -- further reinforce his credibility and professionalism, IMO.)

As the book ends with a "giddy" and triumphant Murdoch taking possession of Dow Jones and its prize, the Wall Street Journal, Wolff returns to look at the question of his family and the issue of 'legacy'. That's an intriguing twist, given that the saga of the Dow Jones transaction is the end of the Bancroft family 'legacy'. Murdoch himself has no intention of ceding control to any of his children until he's unable to avoid it, but two of the four elder ones have left the family firm's embrace (at least for now) in response to familial tensions. What will happen to Murdoch's empire when the emperor is dead and gone? Will Murdoch's personality flaws lead to the same kind of family implosion that the Bancrofts experienced? Will Wendi really allow her two toddler daughters to be kept out of the family business, or will their be a coup d'etat?

Hopefully, when that day comes, Michael Wolff will be the one telling us all about it...

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cheeky, irreverent, revealing , December 12, 2008

By	John E. Drury "jedrury" (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Wolff, in that snarky New York way, does a wonderful job of slicing and dicing the Murdochian world of News Corp., Rupert's confused family life, his outsider status and rapacious instincts, and his stalking the Wall Street Journal. His buccaneering negotiations for the Journal and the clueless disparate Bancroft family are center stage with fascinating detours on Murdoch's upbringing, his foray into the staid world of London journalism and then his invasion of America. Wolff's characterizations of the world of modern media are priceless; for example, Fox News that " very odd combination of mischief and sanctimony - the perfect tabloid formula." One might read this book as a long magazine piece but it misses its entertainment value and the strong undercurrent of accuracy and insight Wolff brings to his portrait of Murdoch and the iffiness of modern media and news.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars vanity fair dribble, March 29, 2009

By	Byron Reimus (Yardley, PA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Here's a book that wouldn't even make a half way decent very short article in Vanity Fair. Most of the story-telling and characters run from flat to downright boring. In light of the back WSJ acquisition story, influential if not colorful people Wolff got access to, big media world knowledge that he keeps reminding you he has, etc. there's no excuse for such a poor outcome.