The entire rationale of modern, objective, arm’s-length, editor-driven journalism—the quasi-religious nature of which had blossomed in no small way as a response to him—he regarded as artifice if not an outright sham.
Even as the discussion proceeded about the protections for the Wall Street Journal’s editorial independence, Murdoch would go through the paper every morning slashing and stabbing its pages, full of annoyance, contempt, and incredulity.
Is there a way for a Murdoch editor not to submit and be trammeled—not to be wholly Murdochified?
Actually, it’s become something of a subgenre of literature—editors who have worked for Murdoch and gotten out alive (often just barely) and then written a book about it.
There are so many of these accounts that it can start to seem as if the point of journalism, or the central experience, is to have dealt with Murdoch. The details of your dealings with the other powerful men of the age pall in comparison—Murdoch is the ultimate test.
Former News of the World editor Piers Morgan, who clearly anticipates someday going back to work for Murdoch and who remains on good social standing with Elisabeth Murdoch and her husband, Matthew Freud, has written what is meant to be a fond memoir. “He truly is Citizen Kane, though from my experience so far nowhere near as malevolent. It makes me laugh when I read what a vile monster he is,” he writes, while at the same time helplessly making a pretty good case for Murdoch’s malevolence. There is Murdochian vindictiveness, implacableness, and a corrosive disposition (however masked by courtliness) that Morgan is, during his editorship, constantly trying to weigh and anticipate and dodge. When he leaves News Corp. to edit the Sun’s main competitor, the Mirror—ostensibly because he wants to run a daily paper—what it feels like in his account is that he’s fleeing Murdoch. Not out of any specific antipathy—he’s clearly fascinated by him and has no issue about journalistic scruples—but because he can’t relax with Murdoch as his boss. Every second working for Murdoch is a second spent thinking about what Murdoch wants. He inhabits you.
JUNE 4, 2007
Editorial integrity suddenly somehow becomes for the Bancrofts the paramount issue. It’s beyond price, beyond the issue of continued independence, beyond the fraying family relationships, beyond a developing antipathy for the family advisors (there is the not incorrect feeling that the advisors are steering them to sell). This has become the pride issue—the face-saving issue. The moral stand: editorial freedom.
Murdoch, of course, had seen this countless times: an impossible, or, even pathetic, effort by the ancien régime to try to ensure the good behavior of the new regime. If you really want any of this, you keep control. If not, you don’t. The rest, Murdoch understands, is just guilt (or feckless superiority).
The meeting on June 4—it’s the first face-to-face between Murdoch and the Bancrofts—takes place in the big conference room at Wachtell, Lipton on West 52nd Street. Wachtell may be the most profitable law firm in the country, but its real estate is entirely humdrum. It’s faceless, unprepossessing, discouraging. Soaring ambitions are tempered here.
For Dow Jones and the Bancrofts, it’s Michael Elefante, Lisa Steele, Leslie Hill, Chris Bancroft, Peter McPherson, Marty Lipton, and Josh Cammaker. For News, it’s Murdoch, Dave DeVoe, Lon Jacobs, and, yet to arrive—flying in from Europe—James Murdoch.
Marty Lipton is shepherding the meeting. This is good for Murdoch, whom Lipton is clearly not immune to. Indeed, Lipton and Murdoch are fellow veterans of the great corporate realignments of the 1980s and ’90s—they’ve been made by the same forces. They are the substantial historical personages in the room; everybody else is…well, everybody else.
The News Corp. people, who will leave the meeting some five hours later in a celebratory mood, believe from the start they’ve got a lovefest going. The first two hours are spent in getting-to-know-you chitchat. Mostly, they’re waiting for James to arrive—Murdoch feels James will really carry the day. “I brought in James,” Murdoch recalled to me later, “so they could see that we’re a family company and they might say, ‘Look, you’re an old man, you could drop dead tomorrow and what are we doing,’ and so on. Okay? So I thought I’d have James there.” (In somewhat typical News Corp. fashion, although James is the secret weapon, he’s a last-minute one. In fact, Jimmy Lee says he was the one who asked that James be there: “That was actually my idea. I called Rupert the day before the meeting and said is there some way to get James there. It was tough but he did it.”)
But meanwhile, he thinks he’s putting on his best charm offensive. Leslie Hill is asking—grilling—him about China. Has he bent over backward to accommodate the Chinese government? What about booting the BBC off Star TV? What about the HarperCollins China book he canceled, the one by Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong? Murdoch feels he’s on, he’s handling this all very deftly. But Hill, who has actually gone into the meeting with a pretty open mind, decides Murdoch is ducking the issues.
They’re at a huge table—they’re all sitting miles from each other. Murdoch isn’t really listening to them and they can’t really understand him. He’s monologizing, slipping in and out of his heavy mumble and unfinished sentences. Elefante finds himself thinking, The guy is really old. He was anticipating being impressed—it’s Rupert Murdoch, after all. Instead he’s impressed by how unimpressive Murdoch is.
Then lunch, catered in the conference room. And then—finally—James arrives. James takes the floor. Elefante understands that James is there to snow them. Elefante isn’t unimpressed. If James doesn’t end up adding much, he’s at least got presence—youth, good looks, confidence. But glib. Scarily glib. He can say anything well (unlike his father, who appears to them to say nothing well). Murdoch, for his part, proudly believes James has really impressed Lisa Steele with, particularly, a bit of “tree-hugging” talk.
After almost three hours, they finally get to the editorial-protections discussion. It’s James who lays out how the Times of London agreement works. Now, Murdoch’s letter about editorial protections was sent almost three weeks ago. But nobody seems to have done any research about what the agreement entails. Nobody has even looked up the details of the Times agreement. They’re hearing about it here, really seeing it, for the first time. They even say, dumbly, Well, it looks good on paper. They ask how it will work, even having read in the Journal that in key instances at the Times papers it hasn’t worked at all.
Lipton asks the News Corp. guys to leave the room while they confer.
It’s a basic negotiating trick—let the other guys cool their heels. But, in fact, the News guys are so pleased with how things are going—reassured by the Bancrofts’ lack of focus and general cluelessness about the most basic notions of editorial process—that they don’t mind at all that they’ve been sent out. Indeed, they sit happily in another Wachtell conference room for nearly two hours before they’re asked back in. They feel this meeting is the great leap forward; they’ve connected.
It’s during this time, with the News guys out of the room, that Marty Lipton tries to give the family members, along with Elefante and McPherson, a context for thinking about editorial protections—trying to tell them what’s realistic from a legal point of view and what’s in essence ritualistic. What he does not tell them is that it’s baloney—that any such agreement is and will be only what Murdoch wants it to be. In some sense, by maintaining the artifice that this is a discussion among equals, among like-minded men of goodwill, Lipton is selling the idea of the agreement. (He certainly isn’t saying, Listen to me, you fools, this is all chump stuff!)
In fact, when the News guys return, Lipton says of the editorial protections, “Are you prepared to give it the force of law?”
“Sure,” says Murdoch, ready to hug them all. He’ll say whatever they want him to say if they’ll sell him the paper.
Murdoch is amazed these people are actually taking this seriously. Really, given everything—not least of all his own well-known history—it is preposterous that they wou
ld.
And yet, “It ended up,” Murdoch will later recall, “with Elefante and Lipton seeming to be helpful and all the others very happy. We thought that it was a great afternoon. We never expected it to turn out like this.”
Chris Bancroft asks, in a more gentlemanly than antagonistic sense, if he can trust Murdoch. Murdoch, somewhat hilariously, says that he should just ask around to see if he’s a trustworthy person or not.
The Bancrofts promise to respond in writing with regard to the editorial protections. And the meeting is adjourned.
The News guys repair, in a self-satisfied mood, to the Grand Havana Room, a cigar bar atop 666 Fifth Avenue, around the corner from the Wachtell, Lipton offices—though only Lon Jacobs actually has a cigar.
TEN Rupertism
JUNE 2007
In the Wall Street Journal’s narrative of events, significant potential bidders are circling the company. There’s a conversation between Microsoft and GE about a partnership to buy Dow Jones. Then there’s talk of a GE-Pearson hookup. GE, the parent of NBC, also owns CNBC, which Murdoch’s new cable business channel will compete with. What’s more, CNBC has a long-term content relationship with the Journal that a Murdoch takeover will imperil. Pearson, for its part, owns the Financial Times, which will face a new competitive threat from a Murdoch-owned Journal. Another rumor has Pearson merging its Financial Times with the Journal to create a new, separate company.
Then there’s Warren Buffett, the storied investor who is on the board of the Washington Post Company, and is thus perceived to have an interest in newspapers. Buffett is suddenly—apparently through no fault of his own—considered to be one of the Journal’s possible saviors. (The irony here is that Buffett has invested heavily in Dow Jones after the announcement of Murdoch’s proposed deal and is actively calling directors and urging them to sell.)
The source for most of the optimism about Murdoch alternatives is Leslie Hill, the Dow Jones board member and former airline pilot, who has developed a single-minded belief that she can save Dow Jones from Murdoch and that she herself might be a reasonable choice to head the company. The reporters with whom she’s speaking encourage her in this—“I Fly with Leslie” signs appear in the newsroom.
She pressures Michael Elefante into attending a meeting with her and Brian Tierney, the marketing executive who put together an investor group that, in 2006, bought the Philadelphia Inquirer—which since then has fallen further and further into extremis. Hill also gets a meeting at Dow Jones for MySpace founder Brad Greenspan, who bears a grudge against Murdoch and News Corp. over News’ acquisition of MySpace. Greenspan proposes that he’ll raise the money to buy 25 percent of Dow Jones and thereby protect it from Murdoch.
Chris Bancroft, meanwhile, is also using the Journal’s reporters to help him make a market. His antipathy is not toward Murdoch per se—but if a deal is to be done, he wants more money. He’s on the road, looking for private equity firms or hedge funds that might be willing to put up the cash so he can buy a controlling share of Dow Jones and block the deal—thinking he too might not be such a bad CEO.
Ron Burkle, who has emerged as a suitor in many bidding wars for media companies, now emerges, at least in the pages of the WSJ, and partnered with the WSJ union, as a potential savior for Dow Jones.
As it happens, the alternatives to Murdoch are much more real in the minds of these suddenly attentive Bancroft second cousins and in the Journal’s own reporting of the alternatives to Murdoch than in actuality. But the effect of the Journal’s reporting and its aggrandizement of unlikely saviors, along with the evident futility of the Bancroft family’s heroic or mock-heroic efforts to find another buyer, serves most of all to make Murdoch look better and better—or at least singular.
The initial optimism about a blue-chip suitor that would value and support the editorial independence of the Wall Street Journal shortly fades into a more clear-eyed view. A company such as GE, for instance, which early on was the board’s favorite alternative to Murdoch, exists for no other reason than to impose rational, regulated behavior on its various businesses. That would surely mean, it soon becomes clear to WSJ reporters, that the newsroom head count could be at risk if the business were run by GE on the strictest economic terms.
After all, the Wall Street Journal is not—at least nowadays—a terribly rational construct. Murdoch, say what you want about him, is one of the few Fortune 100 CEOs empowered to not act rationally—for instance, pouring a lot of money into newspapers simply because he likes newspapers. What, after all, does GE or private equity or Ron Burkle, for God’s sake, care about newspapers?
And then there is the sotto voce point, cherished by only a handful of WSJ true believers—but they are and always have been the important handful. An odd and fundamental truth about the WSJ is that it is a profoundly conservative newspaper—irascibly and militantly conservative. It is part of the anomalousness of the Wall Street Journal. Most of the paper makes every effort to exist as an entity without a political agenda; if there is such an agenda, it is unassumingly liberal. But the two editorial pages, the penultimate pages of the first section, speak in the most determined conservative voice of any newspaper in the nation. Arguably, they are the country’s most influential newspaper pages—regularly supplying more support and valuable ideas to the conservative establishment than any other paper or magazine. Indeed, it is not entirely far-fetched to argue that this—these pages, this mission—is the real reason the WSJ exists, and why the paper’s independence has been protected so tenaciously for so long. Peter Kann and Warren Phillips, key members of the Dow Jones board, along with the determined, scary, radical figures on the editorial page, not to mention the deeply Republican older members of the Bancroft family (no matter that the offspring have become liberals), have in the past been united—in some sense have even conspired—to protect the Journal’s wherewithal to argue its pure conservative view. Kann’s deft avoidance of all takeover approaches is, not inconsiderably, because there really is nobody out there who might be a reliable steward of these views.
The Journal has managed to protect its editorial voice, and actually give it great respectability, by sequestering it inside a relatively liberal newspaper. It’s a neat trick—and a fragile construct. One that Ron Burkle or PR-minded GE likely would not understand. Indeed, few at the Journal, save its innermost circle, understood this. The younger Bancrofts surely don’t. In fact, one of the things that troubles the younger Bancrofts most is the paper’s political stance—which is yet another reason the Bancrofts have been so adroitly kept at a distance. The inner circle of the paper has been protecting not just a quality paper, but this other mission.
In this regard, Murdoch understands he has a singular advantage. In 1997, when he went down to the Dow Jones offices to see Kann—free-market, small government, anti-regulation, America-first believer, no matter how mild-mannered he might appear—this was an aspect of what he was saying: We’re on the same page, you and I—and about how many buyers can that be said?
If this inner circle has to choose between the anodyne sensibilities of most major corporations—GE most of all—and such insubstantial, blowing-in-the-political-breeze figures as Ron Burkle, or Rupert Murdoch, well, there is really no contest.
The newsroom may want Donald Graham at the Washington Post or even the Sulzbergers at the Times, but as Karen Elliott House, Peter Kann’s wife and the paper’s former publisher, will acknowledge to me in the aftermath of the deal, among the most senior editorial managers, Murdoch is much preferred to the assorted liberals.
If he is a bad choice, he’s still the better one.
THE POLITICAL MAN
If you’re not with Murdoch, even on a modest point, you’re a liberal, or—though this appellation has dwindled in the past decade or so—a commie. It’s important to get the tone right here. It’s not necessarily even all that disdainful. Said with exaggerated resignation or incomprehension, it is often semi-affectionate. Murdoch’s sisters, for instance
, are “the socialists.” Gary Ginsberg is often waved away with “Well, you’re a liberal.” Murdoch is almost not making a point about ideology. It’s more a point about temperament—his versus yours. The way he sees it, he’s the last reasonable man standing.
Are you sentimental or are you realistic? Are you a basic sort or are you fancy? Do you know the value of a dollar? (Particularly his dollars.)
What he is is a fifties sort of dad. In fact, he is a fifties dad. (His daughter, Prudence, was born in 1958.) In the international media circles that he’s moved in for the last generation, this fifties dad thing has become a particularly rare sort of sensibility. So when he sees it, he embraces it. While this sensibility is, most prevalently, found among right-wingers, specific policies aren’t only what he’s looking for or what attracts him. It’s rather the articulation that moves him: a lack of equivocation, a firm declaration, a clear identity, a fundamental compression, a lack of evident complication or obvious neurosis—along with, of course, the various tax, regulatory, and fiscal policies that will benefit him personally.
How he would like the talk to be, how he would like the world to be—suffused with patriarchal definitiveness—finds one of its highest reflections on the WSJ editorial pages. This is his true temperamental home. These pages hew more closely to Murdoch’s views than, perhaps, even those of any of his own publications (including the conservative political magazine the Weekly Standard, which was launched with Murdoch funding in 1995, but is often more wonky than declarative). They lack equivocation, they revel in their own certainty, they sell it. “You can’t write a fifty-fifty editorial,” one of the pages’ first editors, William Peter Hamilton, a Scotsman like Murdoch, once wrote. “Don’t believe the man who tells you there are two sides to every question. There is only one side to the truth.”
They are, quite likely, the only editorial pages in the country that are actually avidly read. They may even have their own dedicated readership—a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand hard-core conservatives who buy the paper for the editorials. They’re informed by them, galvanized by them, in love with them.
The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch Page 27
