A year or so ago, at a dinner of media executives and a few journalists, one of the guests told this joke:
"Rupert Murdoch, asleep in the middle of the night, is awakened by a flash of light. He sits up, rubs his eyes and sees Satan standing at the foot of his bed.
" 'What are you doing here?' the mogul demands.
" 'I have come to offer you any deal you can imagine,' the devil responds.
" 'What do you want in return?' says Murdoch, clearly intrigued.
" 'You can have any deal in the world you can imagine,' replies Satan, 'and, in return, all I ask is your immortal soul.'
" 'Any deal?' asks a skeptical Murdoch.
" 'Any deal,' purrs the devil, 'but in return, I take your soul.'
" 'Hmmm,' muses Murdoch, 'what's the catch?' "
If you spent any time around Hollywood a few years ago, you might have heard the same story told about Michael Ovitz, then head of the Creative Artists Agency. With or without satanic assistance, the super-agent's dreams of world domination ultimately came to naught, but as Michael Wolff's often fascinating, sometimes frustrating new biography, "The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch," shows, the 77-year-old head of News Corp. still is at the top of his game.
Wolff, who is a bit of an Internet entrepreneur himself, writes about media and culture for Vanity Fair, and one of his book's strengths is his decision to structure it like an extended magazine article. He uses Murdoch's purchase of Dow Jones and its corporate crown jewel, The Wall Street Journal, in 2007 to provide a genuinely gripping narrative spine to his account. Along the way, he weaves in the story of Murdoch's rather eventful life. Much will be familiar to people who have casually followed the mogul's career or who read British journalist William Shawcross' sympathetic biography back in the early 1990s.
There's the usual stuff about the Australian-born Murdoch's being shipped off to a posh boarding school, where he was rejected as a coarse outsider; about his undergraduate education at Oxford, where he was rejected as a coarse outsider; about his initial foray onto Fleet Street, where he was rejected as a coarse, self-seeking outsider; and into the American market, where he was ... well, you get the picture.
Wolff, who likes Murdoch because they share a basic fondness for newspapers and a distaste for most of the people who run them, persuaded the mogul to sit for 50-plus hours of interviews and to give him access to his children and associates. There's plenty of good material, particularly on Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, 39, who appears to have shifted her husband's politics slightly left. Actually, and despite his association with the Fox News Channel and the Weekly Standard, Murdoch's politics seem to shift with his interests. These days he's equally comfortable with Tony Blair and the Chinese Communist Party. What's fascinating is the way Murdoch —- King Lear-like —- seems to be setting his progeny off for just the sort of dynasty-wrangling he's exploited in so many other companies, including Dow Jones.
There's something amusing about hearing that old joke about Ovitz recycled to involve Murdoch, because during his brief interregnum as an "entertainment executive," he lived in Los Angeles and loathed the place and its people. Wolff is particularly good on that brief phase in the Murdoch rampage toward world domination.
Wolff, for all his breathless, irritating mannerisms, excels in his acute eye for the various accoutrements of status as instructive social detail and in his flawless ear for the dramatic in the ebb and flow of business deals. Nobody currently working at business journalism describes the actual art of the deal with quite Wolff's engaging verve. His account of the dialogue across the table during the secret lunch in which Murdoch made Dow Jones head Richard Zannino the offer for the Journal ultimately accepted by the Bancroft family is worth the price of the book.
Wolff ultimately paints a portrait of Murdoch as not just the pre-eminent tabloid journalist of our age but perhaps its first tabloid business giant —- a consummate miner of human weakness from the newsstand to the boardroom, an idiot savant who instinctively understands that people want a justification for giving in to their lowest impulses.
And beyond winning, what does Murdoch derive from all this probing and acquiring? At heart, he, too, remains a tabloid proprietor. Two of Wolff's telling anecdotes make the case strikingly: An unnamed News Corp. executive told the author that Murdoch went to the bar of London's Dorchester Hotel the day after Princess Diana died in 1997. Murdoch "was obviously shaken by what the death would mean to Fleet Street" and proceeded to get drunk "on a bottle of French Chardonnay, passed out, and had to be carried out to Harry's Bar around the corner, where he was due to meet a group of bankers." Why this grief from a lifelong anti-monarchist? The answer, of course, was that "the internal cash flow of News Corp. [had become] highly dependent on the [tabloid] Sun's obsession with Diana."
Later, when Wolff asked Murdoch whether he should vote in the presidential election for John McCain, whom the mogul supported and who was endorsed by News Corp.'s New York Post, or for Barack Obama, the mogul unhesitatingly said "Obama" —- because he'd "sell more newspapers."
In the end, for all its sympathetic edges and consciously softening details, the portrait of Murdoch that emerges from Wolff's reporting calls to mind something less like the joke about his spirit and more like the picture W.B. Yeats recalled in one of his great late poems, "The Municipal Gallery Revisited." The poet summons to mind the image of the Irish politician Kevin O'Higgins, who was right about so much but who had the former best man at his wedding executed in a crackdown. His "gentle questioning look," Yeats wrote, "cannot hide a soul incapable of remorse or rest."
NONFICTION
"The Man Who Owns The News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch" by Michael Wolff, Broadway, $29.95, 464 pages
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured