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.
Review
Praise for Michael Wolff’s BURN RATE
“Burn Rate has a terrific feel for the crazy deals, the characters, and the clashing bicoastal cultures of the Internet.” —Deborah Stead, New York Times
“Burn Rate is the real deal: a smart, thoughtful, funny, knowing, clear-eyed, candid and altogether exhilarating insider’s chronicle of the new media business—that is, the new media ‘business.’ If there’s a more honest and entertaining book on the digital revolution, I haven’t seen it.” —Kurt Andersen, columnist at The New Yorker
“Wolff has given us the best account of both the lure and the frustration of the Internet.” —Peter Martin, Financial Times
“Burn Rate is a hilarious and frightening account of the life of an Internet startup.”
—Amy Cortese, BusinessWeek
“Wolff, a nimble writer with a knack for spotting colorful details, moves the story along at movie-of-the-week pace.” —Katie Hafner, New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Michael Wolff, a columnist for Vanity Fair and two-time National Magazine Award winner, is one of the nation’s most influential writers about media, culture, and politics. He is a commentator for CNBC and a found of Newser (www.newser.com), the news aggregator. In 2003, he achieved international recognition for his dispatches from the Persian Gulf as the Iraq War began. His work, which has been widely anthologized, has appeared in numerous publications in The United States, including New York magazine, where he was a columnist, and the Guardian and Spectator in The United Kingdom. He is the author of four other books, including Autumn of the Moguls and Burn Rate. He lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PROLOGUE: HIS MESSAGE
FALL 2007—WINTER 2008
Rupert Murdoch, a man without discernible hubris–or at least conventional grandiosity–had nevertheless begun to believe that his takeover of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, something he’d dreamt about for most of his career, might actually indicate that he and his company, News Corporation, had a certain destiny, a higher purpose of which the world should be made aware.
He’d started to think that his triumph in the quest for Dow Jones was an opportunity to rebrand–the kind of marketing frippery he usually disdained. He was even toying with the idea of changing the name of News Corp., that oddly boring, genericsounding throwback to the company’s earliest days–his first paper in Adelaide, Australia, was the News–to something that could better indicate his and News Corp.’s philosophical reason for being.
What that reason for being exactly was . . . well, um . . . that was still hard to actually put into words. But it had something to do with . . . well, look at these:
He had mock-ups of full-page ads that, he was thinking, should run in all the Wall Street Journal’s competitors–particularly the New York Times and the Financial Times–on the day he took over the paper.
One of the ads had the big headline “Agent Provocateur.” Another pursued the idea of pirates–the notion being that for more than fifty years the company had been . . . well, if not exactly outlaws . . . not literally, still . . .
When, after many hours of conversation with Murdoch, I despaired of ever getting an introspective word out of him, his son-in-law Matthew Freud, the PR man from London, advised me to ask him about “being a change agent.”
This conversational gambit prompted Murdoch’s enthusiastic unfurling of these ads and eager, if far from concrete, ideas–“We’re change agents,” he kept repeating, as though new to the notion–about the meaning of News Corp. and, by extension, himself. It also prompted dubious looks from some of the executives closest to him. Murdoch’s sudden search for an ennobling and guiding idea was a vexation not just because it called attention to exactly what News Corp. executives often despaired of–that image of runamok ruthlessness that the battle for Dow Jones had stirred up all over again–but also because it was distinctly out of character.
Soul-searching wasn’t, to say the least, a part of the News Corp. culture. So it was curious, and unsettling, to have the veritable soul of the company trying to figure out why he’d gotten where he’d gotten, and for what good reason.
Such a statement about his fundamental righteousness (and even, perhaps, relative coolness) was, significantly, being urged on him by his son James, a Harvard dropout who had started a music label and then spearheaded News Corp.’s new-media initiatives in the 1990s, and who had become the CEO of British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), the News Corp.—controlled company that operates the Sky satellite TV network in the United Kingdom. Not long before, Murdoch had favored his older son, Lachlan, and before that his daughter Elisabeth, to eventually run News Corp. But now it was James. In fact, unbeknownst to the rest of News Corp., James was about to be given responsibility for the U.K., Europe, and Asia by his father–who wanted to spend more of his time at the Wall Street Journal and, in addition, wanted to use the opportunity to put James in reach of the top spot in the company (without having to actually turn over the top spot).
James had been, much more so than his father, particularly aggravated by the terrible press heaped on his dad and on the company because of the Dow Jones bid. Alternately aggressive and defensive, James was looking for a way to fight back. In fact, it was not entirely clear that the father’s sudden enthusiasm for brand development wasn’t about pleasing his son, clearly the apple of his eye at this moment. (He was very excited about showing off BSkyB’s annual report, for which his son was responsible and which he thought was the kind of thing they could be doing at News Corp.–every employee, he said, as though new to the novelty of an expensively produced annual report, could get one!) There was enough triumphalism around News Corp. to please everybody.
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, harddrinking 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 theWall 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 a...
