Murdoch is a troublemaker—one of the last great troublemakers in the holier-than-thou, ethically straitjacketed news business.
In August 2007, after News won Dow Jones, Gary Ginsberg told his boss that he was planning to go to Paris for the wedding of his friend Doug Band, Bill Clinton’s chief aide, to the handbag designer Lily Rafii. Ginsberg reported to Murdoch (Ginsberg too knows that Murdoch likes—needs—gossip) that the wedding was going to be a party-hearty affair with Ron Burkle, Steve Bing, and of course, Clinton himself. So Murdoch, onto not just a good story but also a way to annoy Ginsberg, called New York Post editor Col Allan and, busting the expense budget, had “Page Six” send a reporter to Paris. Headline (to Ginsberg’s consternation): “Bill and Pals Do Paris (The City, Not the Bimbo).”
Eight months after he had taken over the Wall Street Journal, the paper arguably was a better one. On a daily basis it seemed to metamorphose in the subtlest of ways into a sharper, less fussy view of business and of the events shaping markets and economies. The Journal’s foreign coverage was, suddenly, as good as any paper’s in the United States—as good as the Times. Within a few months of his takeover—even after Murdoch forced out the editor, thereby doing the one thing he’d agreed with the Bancrofts he wouldn’t do—most of the talk of his tabloidizing the paper, undermining its credibility, or bastardizing the brand went quiet. (As a further poke at the Bancroft family, in fulfillment of his agreement to appoint a Bancroft family representative to the News Corp. board, he selected Natalie Bancroft, a twenty-eight-year-old would-be opera singer who lives in Europe—who’d contacted her family only twice during the takeover drama.) Suddenly the only debate that remained was the business issue: Might his stated plan to turn the Journal into a national paper mean it would lose its focus on business? Was that really a good idea, to go from a specialized publication to a general-interest one?
And, actually, was that even the true plan?
Murdoch might be talking about a national paper covering politics and foreign news, but his editor, Robert Thomson, was hurrying to assure the Journal’s readers and advertisers that it would remain a business paper, that there would be no dilution of its focus. In separate discussions they were describing separate papers.
Part of the curiousness of the takeover was not just that Murdoch seemed to have no immediate Murdoch stamp to put on the Journal but also that he seemed in fact to have no specific plan at all for it. Not that he was adrift, but more in the sense that it was a new day. The world was fresh. He was marveling at what he held in his hands.
The truth was that he had strikingly little idea about what he had bought. He was uninformed about Dow Jones’ businesses—comprising more than half of the company’s revenues—beyond the paper. He had a vague and mostly incorrect idea of what Factiva, Dow Jones’ news database, did. He was all for making the Journal’s subscription-supported Internet business free until someone pointed out the immediate P&L hit that would cause. His idea was to sell Dow Jones’ chain of smaller newspapers until he found out there were no buyers (News Corp. quietly put the Ottaway papers on the block, and then, with no interest above their minimum asking price, announced that they had decided how wonderful it was to own these papers and what a strategic fit they were). And he and everyone else at News were gobsmacked by the sorry state of the U.S. newspaper business—especially in the face of a sudden economic downturn, which Murdoch was particularly gloomy about. (His vision of a great new News Corp. Center dominating midtown Manhattan was, as a result of the real estate melt-down, taken off the table.)
If panic was not the right word to use, concern certainly was. Murdoch, whose playbook for buying a newspaper was invariably to cut its price, thereby boosting its sales against the competition, upped the newspaper price of the Journal from $1.50 to two bucks—50 cents more than the Times. (And he doubled the price of the New York Post to 50 cents.)
Eight months after Murdoch & Co. walked in the door at Dow Jones, the News Corp. share price was down by 35 percent, with News executives putting the blame directly on Dow Jones. Indeed, not only was Dow Jones a certain culprit, but blaming Dow Jones made everybody else’s business less responsible. It was, although no one would have quite said it this way, Rupert’s fault. Indeed, at the rate the newspaper business was imploding, if he had waited six months News Corp. could have saved a billion or more on the deal. Ginsberg and Chernin, with gallows humor, sat on the phone together discussing the relative fortunes they’d each lost on their News Corp. options.
The question remained: How come? Why the Journal? What was the point? His children and some of his executives had begun to speculate that it was a sort of retirement move. That Murdoch wanted to stop traveling so much; that he wanted to spend time with his wife and youngest children and needed an excuse to stay put in New York; that the Journal was a place he could go to in the afternoons. As much to the point, he had effectively divvied up the rest of the company. Peter Chernin ran the U.S. entertainment assets; his son James ran the European and Asian assets; Australia, specifically carved out of James’ purview, awaited Lachlan’s return; Roger Ailes ran Fox News. Murdoch himself was left, in a manner of speaking, with only the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.
And yet this view seemed likely to be about his children’s wishfulness—to see their father content and to have him understand his natural, compartmentalized place in the world. Too, it seemed to buck more than fifty years of evidence about how Murdoch used newspapers.
From the Adelaide News to the News of the World and the Sun to the New York Post to the Times of London to his father’s old company, the Herald and Weekly Times, each of the newspapers he’d bought had been a transformative catalyst, turning him into something beyond what he was. Indeed, one central criticism of Murdoch—that he uses the clout of his newspapers to further his personal agenda—misses the larger point: He uses his newspapers to change himself. It’s as though he can’t quite express himself without one—or can only express himself with one. Nor, accordingly, can he truly see a paper as separate from himself.
What he got, what the shareholders of News Corp. got, for $5.6 billion would be a newer, fundamentally transformed Rupert Murdoch.
It’s even possible to say that we really might not have the old Rupert to kick around anymore.
The change in Murdoch could not be missed. At the same time, nobody acknowledged it. You couldn’t say he had changed, because that might imply that he’d needed to be changed before—that, for instance, he had long been among the must obdurate and knuckle-headed of right-wingers. Another reason you couldn’t say he had changed was that Murdoch didn’t do or understand that kind of talk—that psychological stuff. And finally, saying that he’d changed might imply he was mellowing—which might imply he was getting old.
But he had changed.
This was about Wendi. While Murdoch says she has no politics, what he means is that she has no bias, no prejudice. She does not think in the binary ways in which Murdoch had always thought. She has had to be so open and so plastic and so take-what-may in her own life’s adventure that her natural disposition has become enthusiasm, satisfaction, joie de vivre, and a big embrace of the opportunities and pleasures of the world. In other words, just the opposite of the disgruntlement, antipathy, and embattlement her husband cultivated for so long.
The girl whose American adventure started, before she could speak English, in a kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and took her to the Yale School of Management and then into the arms of Rupert Murdoch is a compelling heroine. Her adventure, in a way, may be as great as his. And he’s obviously captivated by it and by her ambition (their pillow talk, one might suspect, is business talk). You can see this as comic: no fool like an old fool—his gray hair bursting into colors not found in nature. But I think that misses the true quality of the change. Of the plot twist. Rupert Murdoch is, characteristically, seizing an opportunity. The zeitgeist is changing and he’s after it.
She has turned him into
…well, almost a liberal. At least she has introduced him to liberals. The angry outsider, the anti-elitist, the foe of airs and pretension has become part of the achieving, glamorous, clever, socially promiscuous set. Davos, Cannes, Sun Valley, Barry Diller’s yacht—this is now Rupert Murdoch’s world. The people around him debate how much this is real, how much he might have gone over to the other side; and how much of it is for Wendi—how much he’s just the put-upon husband.
Surely he remains a militant free-marketer, is still pro-war (begrudgingly—he’s retreated a bit) and uncompromisingly anti-Europe. And then there are his views on the inbreeding of Muslims.
And yet he’s come to like the liberals more than the conservatives—and many of them have come to like him too. Bono and Tony Blair and the Google guys and Nicole Kidman and David Geffen are his and Wendi’s circle. Liking Wendi’s friends so much better than his own (indeed, never really having had friends of his own), he finds himself with an increasingly conflicted temperament.
Along with Wendi, it is also his four adult children, all more or less liberal, certainly more liberal than he has ever been, pulling him in new directions. It’s very simple: Going his own way, he seems to sense, however ruefully, is the way of being old; going their way is young.
Like Wendi, his children are perfectly integrated into a more or less limousine-liberal world. And for all the griping he continues to do about such “values,” and all the ways he eschews talking that kind of talk, he’s in another place now than he was when, in the world’s eyes (particularly the liberal world’s eyes), he became Rupert Murdoch.
His own awareness of this seems tinged with both resignation and curiosity about the new game. One day as we spoke, he tried, with some determination, to describe his son James’ conservative bona fides. Of course then there was the problem that James is also a “tree hugger.” And then too, in a kind of double political reversal, there’s the situation in Britain. Murdoch continues to like Gordon Brown—he might be the Labour prime minister, but he’s conservative, particularly in the Murdoch sense of no pretense, no frills. But then there is James’ infatuation with David Cameron, the Tories’ cool, glam former PR guy, whom Murdoch knew he was, however begrudgingly, going to have to accept.
As I was finishing this book, Wendi urged me to do one more interview. To see Tony Blair.
The arrangement with Blair to sit down with me in his office in Grosvenor Square—John Adams’s old house in London, converted now into a set of minimalist conference rooms—was clearly a family affair (Matthew Freud is one of Blair’s longtime PR consultants). He was doing this at the Murdochs’ request and to buff the Murdoch image—and happily so. They have become brothers in arms, united not just by political wars but by longtime familiarity and even intimacy. By the time I spoke to Blair the Murdoch family was abuzz with consternation of how indiscreet Prue Murdoch might have been with me, which Blair had been fully apprised about (by Prue herself) and which indiscreetness he tried gently and generously to help smooth, “She told me what she said to you,” he laughed.
The Murdoch-Blair relationship, which began as one of convenience—of Blair the supplicant and Murdoch the cynical, realpolitik manipulator—has morphed into a relationship of philosophical identification.
Blair, curiously, sees the old man in much the same way as his children see him, partly understanding Murdoch as the product of a generational divide: “For someone of his generation—he doesn’t—he breaks out of traditional right-wing thinking at points and he is—he’s not somebody who admires position or wealth unless it’s been made by that person. You know what I mean by that?”
They like each other—and these guys are disliked by many of the same people. Over the thirteen years of this relationship, the tabloid right-winger and new Labour exponent have gone from opportunistic alliance to fast friendship—against which each, with evident humility, leavens his views. For each of them, this began in no small way as an effort to please Wendi. Tony liked Wendi and was therefore willing to get along with her difficult husband, and Rupert understood that Wendi liked Tony, so he’d make the effort too. When I asked Blair about the possibility of him going to work for News Corp., he blushed.
Just before the New York Democratic primary, when I found myself undecided between Clinton and Obama, I said to Murdoch (a little flirtation, like a little gossip, softens him): “Rupert, I don’t know who to vote for—so I’m going to give you my vote. You choose.”
He paused, considered, nodded slowly, then said, “Obama—he’ll sell more papers.”
Even though his wife had been attending fund-raisers for Obama in Los Angeles—as his daughter, Liz, and her husband, Matthew, had been raising money for him in Notting Hill—this was a leap for Murdoch. Murdoch has traditionally liked politicians to come to him. His historic shift in the 1990s to Tony Blair came after Blair made a pilgrimage to Australia.
Obama, on the other hand, was snubbing Murdoch. Every time he reached out, nothing. (At one point, Gary Ginsberg knew Caroline Kennedy was riding in a car with Obama and begged her to show Obama the New York Post’s endorsement.)
It wasn’t until early summer 2008 that Obama relented and a secret courtesy meeting was arranged. The meeting began with Murdoch sitting down knee to knee with Obama at the Waldorf-Astoria. The younger man was deferential to Murdoch—and interested in his story. Obama pursued: What was Murdoch’s relationship with his father? How had he gotten from Adelaide to the top of the world?
Murdoch, for his part, had a simple thought for Obama, which he’d prepared ahead of time. He has known possibly as many heads of state as anyone living today—has met every American president since Harry Truman—and this is what he understands: Nobody gets much time to make an impression. Leadership is about what you do in the first six months.
Then, after he said his piece, Murdoch switched places and let his special guest, Roger Ailes, sit knee to knee with Obama.
Obama lit into Ailes. He said he didn’t want to waste his time talking to Ailes if Fox was just going to continue to abuse him and his wife, that Fox had relentlessly portrayed him as suspicious, foreign, fearsome—just short of a terrorist.
Ailes, unruffled, said it might not have been this way if Obama had come on the air instead of giving Fox the back of his hand.
A tentative truce, which may or may not have historical significance, was thereupon agreed.
There is, possibly, also another motive behind Murdoch’s interest in Obama. Peter Chernin was one of Hillary Clinton’s most significant backers. Murdoch, with his support of Obama, was putting it to Peter. He was denying him. There was something good-natured here, but there was something much less good-natured too. Murdoch’s Chernin problem remained a significant one—it was just good corporate politics to get in the way of Chernin being the one whom the president owed.
And then there was Fox News. Murdoch’s life is now largely spent around people for whom Fox News is a vulgarity and a joke. And if he has happily spent much of his career being regarded as a rude vulgarian, the people who feel this way about his most significant news operation have never been so close to him.
It’s life with Wendi versus life with Fox News.
The embarrassment can no longer be missed. He mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it. He barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not that he would give Fox up—because the money is the money; success still trumps all—in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.
And call it restlessness, too. He has done this—done Fox. You can’t do it any more than he’s done it.
He needs a new chapter, a new plot twist to keep the story going.
His purchase of the Journal was in no small way about wanting to trade the illiberal—the belligerent, the vulgar, the loud, the menacing, the unsubtle—for the better-heeled, the more magnanimous, the further nuanced. He was looking for better company.
Also, it is, with a little criti
cal interpretation, perfectly in character. Taking over the Journal, actually becoming a respectable publisher, is the ultimate fuck-you to the people who have always believed they embody respectability.
Characteristically, his experiment in respectability may yet become an avaricious and all-consuming one if he pursues the New York Times, too.
Which he will be temperamentally compelled to do.
Business exists, continues to exist, as a series of fantasies he makes come true.
There was the moment, in the car heading out to the airport in the weeks before the Wall Street Journal formally became his, when the news broke that Merrill Lynch was going into the tank. Its CEO, Stan O’Neal, had just been fired. Anticipating events—Merrill’s need for cash, its inevitable sale of assets—Murdoch became, for an hour or so, the presumptive buyer of Merrill’s 20 percent stake in Bloomberg (Murdoch cultivates obsessions, and Bloomberg is one). Soon to have the Wall Street Journal, now soon to have his mitts on Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, at least in his own mind, would control worldwide financial information. It was management by fantasy—even though this one, like so many, was shortly to pass.
There was the Yahoo! moment. Or the several Yahoo! moments. During the Dow Jones battle, Peter Chernin, on the West Coast, was trying to talk about a MySpace-Yahoo! combination with Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel (this was, in part, Chernin’s effort to distract attention from the Journal deal). But then Semel got ousted. Then, after the Dow Jones deal, as Microsoft was trying to corner Yahoo!, Murdoch, creating a story for a day or two, put it out that News Corp. and Microsoft might have convergent interests in the deal—which would be true only in a parallel universe. But hey, you never know.
The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch Page 41
