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

by Michael Wolff

  This has been a consistent disconnect—what American journalists think of when they think of news and what Murdoch thinks about news. To Murdoch, even the word tabloid is misunderstood. “Tabloid” in the Murdoch context is an idea of immediacy, sharpness, efficiency, and emotion—it’s news at its most visceral and powerful and entertaining. The craft, and it is a high craft, is compression. Necessary and vital compression: The tabloid tradition in Britain and Australia derives in part from newsprint rationing after the First and Second World Wars. When Murdoch took over at the Adelaide News, newsprint was still controlled. Hence, during the Falklands War in 1982, when the Royal Navy sank Argentina’s warship ARA General Belgrano, Murdoch’s Sun famously reached the pinnacle of the form by delivering the news in a word: GOTCHA.

  “Tabloid,” in the modern U.S. context—to most people at the Journal, certainly—is about celebrities and gossip. It’s faux news. Tabloidism is a modern journalistic illness, a virus—spread most of all by Murdoch himself.

  But Murdoch is, more accurately, not a modern journalist but the last representative from an era when a newspaper was its own advertisement, when it had to sell itself.

  Newspapers as sellers of news—as loud, unsubtle, rude instruments, as midway-type entertainment (games of chance, horo-scopes, funny pages)—were, of course, the American form too. The Hearst and Pulitzer empires were built on such papers. Any city with two or more papers fighting it out was certain to have a version of carnival news: cheaper (cheaper to produce, cheaper to buy), blunter, louder.

  Then American papers—American news—turned orderly and genteel. This happened as newspapers, feeling television’s competition, figured out a new business model: monopoly (largely by absorbing secondary papers). And then the big chains—Gannett, Knight Ridder, Tribune Company, Advance—replaced local owners. What’s more, the American city as a working-class redoubt was transmuted into ghettos and suburban flight. The newsstand, and with it the battling urban evening newspaper, died. But a newspaper controlling its geographic position—not so much the city as its piece of the great expanding suburbs—had a monopoly on local ads. In a single-newspaper market, local advertisers often had no alternative but to advertise in the single paper. So a newspaper’s best strategy was to be sedate, mannerly, uncontroversial—to offend no one, and not to call attention to the fact that it has monopolized the market, which it would certainly do if it screamed and bullied.

  The dominant news voice in the United States has become a network television voice. News was now a serious, weighty, basso profundo affair, delivered by men of unimpeachable integrity and, relatively speaking, zero personality. News, bland news, self-important news, suddenly defined a kind of respectability and upward mobility. For the middle class, Walter Cronkite rather than William Randolph Hearst or a chain-smoking city editor came to represent the news.

  The business itself was transformed from a workingman’s profession—reporting had been a semi-white-collar job that didn’t require a college education—to an Ivy League one. This is sometimes called the Watergate effect—the press’s own good press during the investigation and pursuit of Richard Nixon, together with its evident power, made it a profession of choice. Also, during this time, the newsgathering function was being overtaken by the information-processing one—more specialized skill sets were required. Then too, there were fewer and fewer newspaper jobs; employers got to be choosier.

  Arriving in New York in the early seventies, Murdoch—whose papers are in markets where television news is hardly a factor, and are still staffed by working-class reporters—is struck by one overpowering sense of the market: American news is lazy, stultifying, pickle-up-its-ass, boring. This suggests, to a man who has spent twenty years selling news in some of the most competitive news markets in the world, great opportunity.

  In this regard, he is both right and wrong. In retrospect, it will be possible to see his years in America as a process of wrestling with what he does not understand about the American news market—a losing fight that, oddly, will make him a winner. It’s partly out of frustration with American newspapers that he will come to build an entertainment empire. It’s partly because he doesn’t doubt himself that he will continue to try to succeed at news, and build Fox News, and bid $60 a share for Dow Jones. The $60 offer will indicate to many observers, however, that he still does not understand the American news market.

  By the time Murdoch arrives in the United States he’s mastered one business model: single-copy sales. Advertising is a modest adjunct to this greater business strategy. Indeed, at the beginning of his career, Murdoch is kept out of the “quality” media and the “rivers of gold” classified advertising revenue by the dominant Fairfax family. His son Lachlan, in a discussion about his father, will later point out that if Dame Elisabeth had not sold the Queensland newspapers, which were the upmarket part of the Keith Murdoch legacy, as opposed to the downmarket Adelaide News, then her son would have begun his career with a quality broadsheet (in Brisbane), rich in classified advertising—and Lachlan’s father might not have ever become a tabloid king.

  Murdoch’s only real deviation in Australia from the single-copy tabloid strategy is the Australian, the first national newspaper in Australia, a quality broadsheet that he launched in 1964—the only newspaper he’ll ever create, as well as the proof positive of his journalistic bona fides that he’ll cite over and over again in the battle for the Journal. The Australian, whose respectability keeps his mother happy, will lose money for nearly thirty years.

  It’s the News of the World and the Sun that are his principal models. They are downmarket as an identity, with a precise and calculated form—constantly refined (even if refinement means vulgarization) and sharpened. And they sell like crazy.

  It’s media magic, his reconstruction of what he thinks of as the perfect tabloid form. Murdoch himself may be sour about and disaffected with Britain, but Britain embraces his Sun. Its tone is pitch-perfect. It is so spot-on that it effectively revolutionizes the form itself—in modern Britain, the tabloids become the most powerful media, breaking stories, setting the agenda, electing politicians, changing the culture. To question the form means you’re standing on the sidelines. Questioning it, turning up your nose at its cultivated noxiousness, its calculated downmarketness, would make you something like an intellectual arguing against television, or a sixties parent decrying rock and roll. Successful media is its own justification (a key Murdoch precept). It is not possible to overestimate how much the Sun’s success has transformed even Murdoch’s idea of the tabloid. He feels he has found the secret. What’s more, the Sun, with profit margins as high as 60 or 70 percent, has become the most significant part of his business and will remain so for nearly twenty years. It not only becomes the primary revenue source, supplying the cash flow for his other efforts, but it also gives him his extraordinary power base in the United Kingdom. The Sun becomes one of the key levers to push the transformation of Britain itself. It changes Murdoch too, giving him a sense of just how large his ambitions could be.

  The Sun and the News of the World are what he somehow hopes to bring to the United States. The size of this dream is disconcertingly huge—to be able to create a national tabloid with the success and impact of the Sun on a U.S. scale would be massive.

  And yet, judging by the incredibly boring newspapers in the United States, it seems almost like a no-brainer.

  Such sales as the Sun and the News of the World are having in the United Kingdom are dependent, however, on working-class men (ideally with the same interests, i.e., soccer) who buy papers, and newsstands where they can buy them.

  The absence of those key factors in the U.S. market is an indication of how little Murdoch knows—and how hard it is to dissuade him from going forward when he wants something. Part of the reason he sends his early U.K. coterie in America packing back to London is that each of them perceives, in the face of his stubborn enthusiasm, that the U.S. market is inhospitable to the British tabloid model
.

  In a car culture, in the great rolling suburbs, the only place the middle class gets to truly eyeball the cover of a periodical is in the supermarket. And all the middle-class people doing this eyeballing are women.

  The Murdoch formula—his tabloid magic, his working-class insouciance, his badgering and bullying—is for men. The aggressiveness, the girls, the sports, the jokiness, the news—all for men.

  Supermarkets in America do not really sell newspapers. Supermarkets sell magazines. And tabloids, aka “the tabs.” In the seventies, an American tab is a magazine/newspaper hybrid—it fits into a supermarket checkout rack—that merges two publishing genres: the fanzine (with slavish attention to celebrities) and the fantastical (accounts of aliens and grotesques and deviants with only the barest pretense of being factual). The National Enquirer—MOM BOILED HER BABY AND ATE HER!—which sells four million copies a week and is published by the Pope family, with its supposed organized-crime connections (Mafia boss Frank Costello is rumored to have put up the money for it), is the height of the form.

  Murdoch’s idea of a tabloid as a media property that could become a powerful working-class institution comes face-to-face with the American reality that a tabloid is a product that defines not only its readers’ lack of standing but that of its owners. This is confounding and frustrating to him—and, significantly, an entirely different business and cultural climate from any he’s ever been in. He has no background in soft celebrity gossip targeted at women.

  It’s important to keep in mind how premodern Murdoch is. He’s a fifties guy. A guy’s guy. From an era when guys talked about guy stuff.

  But now comes the stubbornness and the relentlessness and the conviction that he can do whatever it takes. That, going forward, is the important thing. You set something in motion and then you try to control it. Doing it is what defines you.

  In 1974, he launches the National Star. This is his American tabloid—not at all what he had in mind, but, nevertheless, he is playing it as it lays. Because although this is not the kind of paper he wants to be publishing, it does have another virtue that moves him: single-copy sales.

  In this instance, the money overrides his ego. It doesn’t really bother him that the Star is further poisoning his already problematic reputation. He’s not only a British tabloid publisher, which is one thing, but he’s now the proprietor of the lowest form of media in America. You can’t go further down than this. The publisher of a supermarket tabloid doesn’t get to eat out in Manhattan with the other parents at Brearley and Dalton.

  Still, say what you want, one fine morning in August 1977 Elvis Presley dies. Steve Dunleavy had just published a book about Elvis—it’s the King as a drug-taking debaucher well on his way to death. Murdoch scoops up the U.S. rights, and after the first installment of the serialization of the book, the Star’s circulation jumps from two to three million. The Star will serialize the rest of Dunleavy’s Elvis book twenty more times, and at four million copies reach an equal footing with the Enquirer. (Murdoch will sell the Star for $400 million in 1990 to the Enquirer’s parent company.)

  But never mind the Star. It will be the New York Post—acquired almost three years after he launches the Star—that will truly demonstrate his belief in the potential of the tabloid in America.

  The oldest paper in the city is, virtually overnight, transformed into a British tabloid—a species of newspaper that New York has not seen in two generations and which, over the next thirty years, will only ever lose money.

  It is almost impossible to exaggerate how determined and how wrongheaded Murdoch is with the New York Post. It is another one of those things that shadow his reputation: No matter how wrong he is, he won’t give up. That’s scary. In this regard, he’s beyond all reason. It is a grand and stubborn obsession.

  In fact, after he is forced to sell the paper in 1988 to comply with rules that prohibit a proprietor from owning a newspaper and television station in the same market, he will move political mountains to get the Post back when its new owners bring it to the brink of insolvency in 1993. He can’t entirely breathe without it.

  The Post exists, in some sense, like a perfect fantasy world. A tabloid newsroom in a world where there are no such things anymore. They pretend, at the Post, that this is real work, legitimate work, sustaining work—when, in some sense, it is more? like a theme park. (For that reason, I will tell my own daughter, casting about for her first journalism job, that there is no newspaper as wonderful to work at as the New York Post.)

  Nor can you argue that it hasn’t, on its own terms, been wildly successful. It is just, oddly, that this most commercial of papers is not, well, commercial. Upscale-centric New York advertisers treat the Post and its three-ring-circus sensibility with contempt.

  Still, Murdoch’s New York British tabloid arguably becomes the second most influential paper in America—the paper that everybody in the media business reads first. The Post—the only real daily tabloid in America—embodies and influences the circus of pop and media culture that has migrated to so many other media outlets and which has left so many newspapers behind.

  Meanwhile, the reason cited by Murdoch’s detractors for his keeping the Post alive—that it wields disproportionate political influence—seems a strained one, considering that by 1996 he will have Fox News. And by 2007, he’ll be losing $50 million a year on the Post—which could buy a lot of lobbyists and political leverage (which, at any rate, he already has bought).

  The Post’s early losses don’t in the least dissuade him from his plan to build an American tabloid newspaper empire. Wherever there’s a second paper—an imperiled second paper—he’s buying or trying to buy it. He considers launching a morning competitor against the New York Daily News which he’d call the Daily Sun. He tries, in 1982, for the Courier Express in Buffalo, but the unions rebuff him (and the paper closes—“We voted to die with dignity,” says one reporter). At the end of 1982, he buys the Boston Herald American, the also-ran against the dominant, establishment Boston Globe. In 1983, in Chicago, historically one of the greatest newspaper cities in the world—the setting of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s classic newspaper farce The Front Page—he buys the Sun-Times.

  His is a classic and anachronistic newspaper business plan: With boldness, sassiness, sexiness, and wild promotions, he’ll make big gains against the dominant paper. Because the tabloid style of journalism requires a much smaller investment than the starchy, information-heavy papers, it ought to be a no-lose formula.

  Except he loses. Each of his American tabloids, save the Post, is a kind of listless version of a true Murdoch paper. Stories are short; there are more pictures, there is more crime coverage (murder and rape), but there isn’t the tabloid joie de vivre. He is betwixt and between—and disengaged. American newspapers aren’t any fun. Also, they don’t make money.

  At least he understands the basic issue: Advertisers want to reach an aspirational middle class, and such a middle class reads a paper above its station. “Everybody in this country wants to get ahead, get a piece of the action,” he will tell biographer William Shawcross. “That’s the fundamental difference between the Old World and the New World. There’s not the self-improvement ethic in England that there is in this country.”

  And yet, even with this unprepossessing American experience, he remains committed to the tabloid model, unable really to see beyond it, believing that the visceral impact of tabloidism has to prevail—and, indeed, it finally will, on the Fox network and on Fox News.

  Murdoch’s tabloid stars are, in some striking co-dependency, extraordinarily loyal to him—and he to them. This may be because there is really nowhere else to do what they do than to do it for Rupert—no other well-paid corporate outlet for their kind of behavior—and because he relies on them to do what he personally, and temperamentally, can’t do. They’re his weapon, his amusement, his idea of romance. His personal fuck you.

  In the media business, which more and more strives for respectability,
many of his favorites border on the unemployable. They exist only because he lets them exist. They get to be employed by a public company only because his control of the public company is so sui generis. These are Rupert’s reprobates.

  As Murdoch first starts to think about pursuing the Wall Street Journal in late 2005, Rebekah Wade, the thirty-seven-year-old editor of the Sun—still Murdoch’s largest and most profitable publication—is sitting in a jail cell in South London. She was out the night before with Murdoch at a birthday party for his son-in-law, Matthew Freud, who is one of Wade’s close friends. After leaving Freud and Elisabeth Murdoch’s home in Notting Hill, Wade—who’s been running a campaign in the Sun against domestic violence—got into a drunken brawl with her husband, Ross Kemp, an actor who plays a tough guy on Britain’s most popular soap, EastEnders. At 4:00 A.M., the terrified husband—more than twice the size of his wife—calls the cops, who arrive at their Battersea home to find him with a busted lip. Wade is arrested and fingerprinted and gives a DNA sample before being thrown in a cell for eight hours to sleep it off, even as Murdoch sits waiting for her at News International’s Wapping headquarters for their 8:00 A.M. breakfast meeting. It’s the biggest story in the other British tabloids for more than a week. Wade continues to be one of Murdoch’s favorite editors and he frequently discusses moving her into the executive ranks of the company.

  And Richard Johnson. Not only does he not lose his job because of the “Page Six” bribery scandal, but in some sense the bribery business actually seems to confirm Johnson’s status for Murdoch as an old-time, walk-on-the-wild-side, dangerous, rule-bucking, proudly cynical newspaperman.

  At Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, flouting News Corp.’s own rules on sexual harassment, is caught up in a lawsuit that—complete with phone transcripts—accuses him of brutal sexual stalking and bullying. It’s handled as an internal matter.