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

by Michael Wolff

  My interviews with Murdoch, over nine months, took place either in his office at News Corp.’s headquarters at 1211 Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, over lunch in a private News Corp. dining room, where we shared his health food drinks, or at his Manhattan home on Park Avenue—his temporary home while his new apartment on Fifth Avenue is being refurbished—when his wife was away and he was looking after his children. (An ordinary Manhattan scene of nannies, dogs, play dates, and a father picking up after all of them.)

  On several occasions I was alone with him, but most other times I was accompanied by my research assistant, Leela de Kretser, a former reporter at the New York Post (and, before that, at Murdoch’s paper, the Herald Sun, in Melbourne, Australia, where she grew up). Gary Ginsberg also was often present, occasionally participating in the discussion, but most often just listening.

  Murdoch is a game but difficult interview subject. He trails off before finishing sentences; he speaks in what is frequently just a low mumble; his Australian accent is still thick and his Australianisms often opaque; he sometimes dips into an alarming reverie in which he is either carefully weighing his words or napping.

  He’s not good at explaining himself and gets annoyed and frustrated when he’s asked to do so. He rarely has patience or interest in talking about the past, and he has a tenuous grasp on dates, to the point of sometimes transposing decades; he has little capacity or even language for talking about his own motivations and character. But any issue that was on his mind at the moment of the conversation he seemed always willing to explore. His thinking was, in fact, remarkably transparent—often almost guileless. His narrative of that day’s events is detailed, sharp, amusing, and revealing. I certainly came to look forward to these interviews, and perhaps he did too.

  He also arranged access, with only the gentlest prodding, to his top executives, all famously reticent and tight-lipped (and quite unpracticed in just exactly how they ought to be talking about him), and to all his family members—mother, sisters, wife, and children—in New York, London, Melbourne, and Sydney. “Just say anything you want to say—the worst you can think of,” he told his daughter Prudence, in Sydney, who seemed to take him at his word.

  One question I asked most everyone: “Why do you think he’s doing this?”

  Nobody had a very good answer.

  ONE The Butterfly Effect

  THE EARLY 1970S

  Without any firm plans and only some old family contacts, forty-two-year-old Rupert Murdoch, an Australian publishing entrepreneur relocated to Britain—not the most savory one either; reports of the “Page 3” bare-breasted pin-ups in his London newspaper precede him—starts traveling regularly to New York in 1973, looking for business opportunities. He cuts a certain sixties-ish figure: the pretty slick media executive. With his double-breasted blazer, longish dark hair starting to thin (the beginnings of a seventies comb-over), a frequent cigarette (he’ll stop smoking within the year), and satisfied, plumpish figure, he’s more the Madison Avenue or Mayfair type—an artful combination of diffidence and intensity—than a casual or scruffy Fleet Street guy.

  His father was the most powerful newspaper publisher in Australia. Some twenty years after Sir Keith Murdoch’s death, his son has made his own name—in Australia, he’s almost as famous as his father was—and has now branched out, aggressively and noisily, to the United Kingdom. But if he’s known for anything in the United States, it’s that two years before, in London, he was the main character in a bizarre incident that got international attention: he’s the rich guy whose wife was targeted by kidnappers who instead snatched and then murdered the wife of one of his executives who’d had the misfortune of borrowing the Murdoch family car (a Rolls-Royce, which added nicely to the story). He’s the disreputable tabloid publisher at the heart of a macabre tabloid tale. The subtext of the kidnapping as it’s been reported in the London papers is that it surely has something to do with, and confirms, his notorious character. (Not to mention what it says about the perils of working for him.) That’s Murdoch: He’s shady and alarming and dangerous.

  So New York, in addition to its business potential, is something of an escape from what the Brits feel for him, and he for them. New York, he senses, is his kind of town—a place where he’ll be more welcomed than disdained for his bit of notoriety.

  He’s a workaholic when this is not yet a popular thing to be. He’s got no friends—has really never had any. “Too busy, to tell you the truth,” he will explain decades later in one of our interviews. At the age of seventy-five, he’ll say to his third wife, Wendi Murdoch, when she presses him on the issue, that he could have had them if he’d wanted to. He has no interests outside of his work: not sport (he may be the only Australian man not interested in sports), not culture, not reading, not movies. He has no social aspirations either. Money itself isn’t even that compelling to him. He’s eerie, or scary, in his lack of lifestyle desires and need for approval. There’s almost a sort of autism or fanaticism to his focus. He’s a new sort of business guy—“married to the business,” as he will characterize himself many years later, not without some ruefulness. Working isn’t the means to an end; it’s the end. It’s one man’s war—a relentless, nasty, inch-by-inch campaign.

  For the past twenty years, he’s been focused almost solely on newspapers. He perhaps knows as much about the various aspects of putting out a newspaper—paper, printing, distribution, advertising, reporting, editing, headline writing, promotion—as anyone in the world. When he hasn’t been working at one of his papers—eight in Australia, as much as two thousand miles apart; two more, twenty-five hours away, in London—he’s been traveling between them. It’s a kind of monomania that, from an early age, fascinates and disturbs other people.

  He’s aloof, contained, preoccupied. “Shyness,” Simon Jenkins, a former editor of Murdoch’s Times of London, will write in his 1986 study of newspaper owners, is “a characteristic shared by most second-generation proprietors, growing up under dominant fathers.” In 1984, Harry Evans, another editor of the Times—whom Murdoch would rancorously fire—will recall the Rupert he first met in 1969 as being socially “crippled by shyness.” “He shuffled, smiled and left sentences in mid-air. He seemed too diffident to be a tycoon and too inarticulate to be a journalist. This was as appealing as it was surprising.”

  Still, he can be disarming—if he cares to. He’s not a great conversationalist, but he’s a decent listener. He can even appear to be self-effacing—though this would hardly be the case. He asks good questions, and he’s witty in an understated way (it’s a sort of hangman’s wit—he’s most entertaining and caustic on the subject of other people’s lapses, losses, and screwups). He’s a good gossip—he’ll offer information and he’s appreciative of the information you give him; he’s hungry for it, often rewarding the people who give it to him with sudden, surprising openness and easy, almost giggling laughter.

  On the other hand, he’s often disconcertingly direct or abrupt—cutting to the chase, breaking the social flow. It’s a tic. It’s unsocialized. Lacking any depth of self-awareness (and being impatient with what that implies), he’s not all that interesting when it comes to talking about himself; he can’t tell you why he does what he does, and has never been all that interested in the question. But he can be trenchant about other people—he’s got a snap sense of their weaknesses. He can apply this to their spouses, their bank accounts, their ambitions (he’s an expert on overreaching); he’s always filing away telling, or damaging, personal details.

  He’s without flamboyance or personal exaggeration—he’s rather buttoned-down, in fact. His occasional excesses—the Rolls-Royce in London, for instance—are guilty ones. (Later, even when he’s much richer, he’ll continue to be awkward about anything that suggests personal vanity or indulgence—the face-lift he’ll get in the late eighties, which he will remain embarrassed about, and which will later fall, or the fretful decision to finally get himself a private plane after he buys Twentieth Century
Fox and feels he has to match his status with that of the Hollywood people.) He certainly does not seem like a tabloid publisher—or what you would think a tabloid publisher might seem like.

  To his employees—the people who, apart from his wife, know him best—he can be cold, impatient, all business, even cruel. And yet among them there’s a sense of excitement and opportunity about working for him—and this at a time before he’s done much to suggest great excitement or opportunity. He tends to hire people who are grateful for the chance, who feel they’re getting more from life because of him than they would have without him. Outsiders tend to view his little band as not ready for prime time. It’s one of the reasons he will, in his career, be so regularly underestimated: he never seems to be surrounded by the brightest bulbs, the A-team. Still, they are a devoted, or at least dependent, group.

  Certainly the little gang that comes with him to New York in 1973 and 1974, none of whom has done any business here before, fails to impress anyone—in fact, he sends them all back and recruits other, soon-to-be-dependent, not exactly top-of-the-class people.

  Those who work for him are all, in their way, followers and hangers-on—he is careful to cultivate no partners.

  Bert Hardy, an advertising sales executive Murdoch recruited in London in 1972—and whom Murdoch will fire eleven years later—will later regard the Murdoch years as the most amazing and satisfying of his career. (This sense of awe or wonder is a theme of Murdoch lieutenants.) Hardy senses early on that Murdoch is different from other businessmen. But what makes him different, what motivates him to be different, remains for Hardy enigmatic.

  Hardy cannot say, for instance, why Murdoch, a publisher from Australia and London, in 1973 buys a local newspaper company in San Antonio, Texas, except that it is for sale and he can afford it—which, in fact, are Murdoch’s reasons. And that he has to begin somewhere. (As Hardy will recount years later, the two lieutenants whom Murdoch sent to do the deal initially returned empty-handed because the price had gone up. “I didn’t send you to negotiate; I sent you to buy the paper,” said Murdoch, and sent them back.)

  With his odd beachhead in San Antonio, and his plan to start an American tabloid, the National Star, he moves his wife and four children—who, five years before (then with two children), he moved from Sydney to London—to Manhattan, where the Murdochs rent a place on East 72nd Street.

  The reputation that will form around Murdoch derives not least of all from the impression that there is something uninvited about him—and his failure to recognize that he’s not welcome, or, conversely, his enjoyment of that fact.

  The single most vital, most complex element of business is, arguably, entrée. Whom you know is the basis not just of your credibility but of what information you have, and hence your success. This is also called access to the deal flow: If you don’t know the people who know the people, the first time you hear about an opportunity will be when you read about it in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times because someone else has already acted on it. Hence, too late for you.

  One of the reasons all but the most well-financed entrepreneurs remain mostly local phenomena—even Kerry Packer, the richest man in Australia, and one of Murdoch’s primary competitors, stays in Australia—is that part of the skill you need as an entrepreneur is knowing your own turf and market. Assuming you can re-create it elsewhere involves an amount of recklessness and grandiosity.

  And there’s something shifty about people who try.

  It’s a literary staple, the hustler’s tale: the nobody from somewhere else arriving in a new place and convincing people that he or she is somebody. The characteristics of this kind of person—the charm, the plasticity, the calculated generosity—are suspect ones. He’s likely escaping something, or trying to reinvent himself. That story, most often, has an unfortunate end.

  Murdoch in 1974 is only qualitatively different from that hustler. He’s legitimate, but the legitimacy isn’t worth all that much. His company, News Ltd., has a relatively modest value of $44 million (inflation-adjusted, that would be about $200 million in 2008—not even a midsize publisher). He’s got nothing that would make anyone particularly notice him. He’s starting in New York pretty much from scratch.

  He actually seems like someone New Yorkers might easily take advantage of: a wannabe. There are always new wannabes—foreign wannabes are the best—ripe for the picking in New York.

  He doesn’t, however, make the wannabe’s mistake of presumptuousness, demanding attention he doesn’t deserve. James Goodale, the general counsel and executive vice president of the New York Times Company, a figure of great hauteur and authority in the New York media business of the 1970s, is involved with the Columbia University Media and Society Seminars, gatherings of media eminences, when he first meets Murdoch. Goodale, a proper host, goes out of his way to chat with Murdoch at a gathering because Murdoch isn’t talking to anyone. In a group of people who have known each other for years, Murdoch is content to be the odd man out, not forcing himself on anyone, not asking for attention—or too shy to seek it out. “Placid, modest, unassuming, alone,” is how Goodale will recall the new man in town many years later. At first blush, there’s no reason not to like him—no reason to be on your guard at all.

  His slate isn’t actually blank. For what it’s worth—and it’s a marginal boast—his family is one of the leading newspaper families in Australia. When he was nineteen and visiting America, he spent a Sunday at Hillandale, the country home of the Sulzberger family, the controlling shareholders of the New York Times, in Connecticut. On that same trip, he and his father visited Truman in the White House. He would later see both Kennedy and Johnson. His family entertained Katharine (Kay) Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, in Australia; she returned the favor when he arrived in the United States, hosting a dinner party for him full of Johnson administration officials. He knows Leonard Goldenson, the head of ABC, who has sold him programming for his one television station in Australia.

  Still, he’s got to be incredibly crafty or particularly foolish to think he can re-create his business in New York. Either he’s going to need a preposterous amount of luck to succeed here, or capital (which he doesn’t have), or he has a preternatural vision of what’s going to happen in the worldwide media industry.

  Certainly in hindsight it will seem like vision. The great change that is about to come to the media business—evident nowhere in 1974—will make Murdoch possible and transform him as well. But to assume he sees this now is, practically speaking, a dramatic fallacy.

  In 1974 it is almost impossible even to articulate the vision he will later get credit for: that the media business is going to go global. For one thing, the word media hardly exists. There is just a set of unrelated publishing, entertainment, and distribution industries. The word global isn’t used to indicate a market. All he can sense is that the United States is big. That its media market may someday be like its automobile market—and have that kind of effect in the world. But this is also pretty far-fetched.

  There isn’t a model, in 1974, for turning your media business into a movable feast. Media businesses, more than most any other businesses, are local.

  What’s more, the media business in the United States is fixed—“not just monopolistic but growing ever more boring” is his first impression. There hasn’t been any real movement in the media in years. It’s locked in place by regulation, audience habits, and aging technology.

  The business is dominated by the three television broadcast networks, each of which has made the leap from a dominant radio network. If there’s a media kingpin, it’s Bill Paley, who founded and controls CBS. There is NBC, controlled by RCA. And ABC, run by Leonard Goldenson.

  There are the eight major movie studios, whose ownership is largely controlled by Hollywood insiders.

  The publishing world—books, magazines, newspapers—consists largely of independent companies: old-line publishing houses in books, single-title companies in magazines, local ow
nership in newspapers. Only in newspapers is there some shift: the first stage of significant chain consolidation.

  Other than the network evening news shows and the newsweeklies—Time and Newsweek—there are no real national news outlets. The New York Times is a metropolitan paper. The Wall Street Journal is a specialty business publication. USA Today does not exist. CNN does not exist. Cable television and cable news do not exist.

  The fact that Murdoch will become the dominant player in each of these media categories, those that exist when he arrives in the United States and those yet to exist, is beyond rational explanation. Even the most obvious explanation—that he has no baggage, that he’s the first modern media man—is untrue. He’s a newspaperman—the most retro of all the media disciplines.

  He’s a foreigner; he’s got limited resources; he’s never done business in the United States before. What’s more, as a newspaperman, his style of journalism—the workingman’s tabloid—has been out of fashion for a generation.

  What, then, is his special advantage? It may be that of the confidence man for sussing out the new environment, for absorbing information, for insinuation, and then for tricking people. Or that he enjoys what he does more than anybody else. Or that he has created for himself a bubble world—one in which he can be unmindful of other people’s doubts and conventions, one in which he’s able to view life in terms of only his own needs and desires. Or that he is able to subjugate his own ego to the job at hand, what the people around Murdoch call, with great respect, his natural curiosity, but which is really an extreme, killed-the-cat kind of curiosity, the curiosity of a thief; he’s not just interested but covetous, not just covetous but insatiable.