The Man Who Owns the News Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch
The Man Who Owns the News Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch
If Rupert Murdoch isn’t making headlines, he’s busy buying the media outlets that generate the headlines. His News Corp. holdings—from the New York Post, Fox News, and most recently The Wall Street Journal, to name just a few—are vast, and his power is unrivaled. So what makes a man like this tick? Michael Wolff gives us the definitive answer in The Man Who Owns the News.
With unprecedented access to Rupert Murdoch himself, and his associates and family, Wolff chronicles the astonishing growth of Murdoch’s $70 billion media kingdom. In intimate detail, he probes the Murdoch family dynasty, from the battles that have threatened to destroy it to the reconciliations that seem to only make it stronger. Drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews, he offers accounts of the Dow Jones takeover as well as plays for Yahoo! and Newsday as they’ve never been revealed before.
Written in the irresistible stye that only an award-winning columnist for Vanity Fair can deliver, The Man Who Owns the News offers an exclusive glimpse into a man who wields extraordinary power and influence in the media on a worldwide scale—and whose family is being groomed to carry his legacy into the future.
From the Hardcover edition.
User Ratings and Reviews
4 Stars And Now, Pay Homage to the Villain
I recently finished a book about Hunter S. Thompson and submitted a review here on amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2C0VWKDHA1MON/ref=cm_rna_own_review_more?ie=UTF8&sort%5Fby=MostRecentReview#R1H4GMOLZY7J0A.
How fortunate I was to find as a X-Mas present, this particular book and I feel delighted to have the opportunity to study the Villain of news media, now having read a book about its Hero.
To say that there is animosity towards Murdoch would be an understatement. I doubt that anyone remotely interested in Murdoch has not heard more negative than positive. A pariah King?
I can understand that journalistic purists cannot stomach the idea that a man who can be likened to a great white shark can devour the most influential and bankable newspaper like the WSJ. I can also empathize with those who criticize that Murdoch has consistently reached out to the lowest common denominator in society to stoke the flames of fear and perversity for the achievement of mass circulation. There’s alot not to like, but we must also accept our responsibility in the spectacle. We’ve known about sharks for a while now, can we really blame the shark for what happens when we step into his waters? Really, is the shark in fact evil, lacking morals, compassion etc.?
Much like a Shark, Murdoch keeps moving, always hungry, a creature both capable and willing to fulfill its apetites with no afterthought or self-congratulations. We see enough of his mastery at play throughout this book.
The book itself is an excellent representation of the man in all of his fullness (in the civic sense of significance). Why would Murdoch enable us to view this of him, knowing full well that others could see with greater contempt his way of being? Simple, the man doesn’t REALLY care whatsoever what you and I, his contemporaries, rivals, enemies or subordinates think of him. A pragmatist archetype par excellence. Here it all is, spelled out. In fact, our collective disapproval is likely to fuel him further, so long as it means more coverage.
Wolff has captured the genius of Murdoch. He is not a rational man, driven by the same needs as others. At heart, he has the same motivations of any reporter or journalist: pushing for greater and greater audience, and he knows how to exploit the ego’s of everyone in attendance but only for the sake of achieving his aims. Unlike the idealistic reporter however, Murdoch is honest with himself about his real intent. He doesn’t whine about the news and why his is better, he makes the news.
Wealth is an afterthought, reputation is a liability and getting sucked into it all so as to lose the edge, is to be avoided at all costs as he remains the ultimate outsider. He works the room by surveying the emotional terrain and whenever he finds the opportunity, feasts with abandone. But I can’t hate the man, anymore than any other predator for that matter. I simply don’t step in sharke infested waters, watch Fox Channels or read any of his papers.
Wolff in the final analysis would probably feel differently to the way I do, but that doesn’t change the fact that his biography is useful to people of differing opinions because it posesses the attributes of all great journalism. It is factual, it is well written, the motives of the characters are represented well, events and how Murdoch handled them are also shared. Altogether, this book enables the reader to truly reflect on Murdoch, the enigmatic force of nature and to then form individual opinions in an informed way.
The book is, brilliant.
2 Stars Author seems to be envious
It’s obvious the author never talked to Mr. Murdoch, since one who has watched Charlie Rose on PBS where Mr. Murdock has been a guest, can see Mr. Murdoch is indeed civil, talks well about others, answers questions about himself his wife and young children and grown children.
Why is it those who envy, Mr. Murdoch, Ted Turner, even Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, have this need to bad mouth them. What business has the author ever build? Met a payroll? Had to wheel and deal to make money, and become an authentic success?
3 Stars No secrets here
I kept looking for the “secret world” and really didn’t see it. The author tends to show a disdain for newspaper people and a total lack of what newspaper families are really like. His description of the newspaper business in the fifties was totally off the mark. I know. My family owned newspapers in the fifties.
Is Murdock a hateful person? Probably. But that can be said of a good portion of the population. The fact is, regardless of what Murdock is, he knows what people want and he provides it. His publications far outsell the “elite” publications and, quite frankly, are more enjoyable to read.
- Susanna K. Hutcheson
5 Stars Cheeky, irreverent, revealing
Wolff, in that snarky New York way, does a wonderful job of slicing and dicing the Murdochian world of News Corp., Rupert’s confused family life, his outsider status and rapacious instincts, and his stalking the Wall Street Journal. His buccaneering negotiations for the Journal and the clueless disparate Bancroft family are center stage with fascinating detours on Murdoch’s upbringing, his foray into the staid world of London journalism and then his invasion of America. Wolff’s characterizations of the world of modern media are priceless; for example, Fox News that ” very odd combination of mischief and sanctimony – the perfect tabloid formula.” One might read this book as a long magazine piece but it misses its entertainment value and the strong undercurrent of accuracy and insight Wolff brings to his portrait of Murdoch and the iffiness of modern media and news.
4 Stars Unflattering, lively and compelling portrait of a global mogul
“Pull up a comfortable chair, here; have a glass of this great wine I’ve discovered, and let me tell you all about Rupert Murdoch…”
Those lines never appear in Michael Wolff’s chatty and engaging biography of Rupert Murdoch, the decidedly un-engaging media titan who most of the world loves to hate. But they might as well, because Wolff takes just that kind of unstructured and original approach to his task, telling the tale of the transformation of Murdoch from Australian newspaper proprietor to (he argues) the world’s first global media titan as if he were breathlessly recounting it to friends by the fire after a good dinner. Darting back and forth in time and location, Wolff goes in quest of what makes Murdoch tick, digging into everything from his relationship with his father (who helped expose the folly of the Gallipoli landings in 1915, which cost the lives of thousands of Australian WW1 troops — a key element of the family myth) to his often-troubled ties to his children.
Murdoch-haters will find lots of ammunition here, from his indifference to those rules of common courtesy that the rest of us feel we have to live by (Murdoch discards subordinates, alienates wives and children, plays power games at an advanced level with great aplomb, but almost unconsciously) to his political views (conservative/libertarian) and his refusal to step back and let the journalists run the newspapers he owns. After all, why should he? He owns the news…
Wolff’s narrative revolves around Murdoch’s 2007 acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, a purchase that Murdoch had dreamed of for decades. Together with the author’s unprecedented degree of access to Murdoch himself, his family members and closest aides, that structure takes what otherwise might have been a mundane biography of a 77-year-old empire-builder (a historical retrospective, in other words) and makes it more dynamic. This Murdoch, in Wolff’s portrayal, may mumble in a thick Australian accent, wear a singlet under his shirt and die his hair orange in a futile bid to look younger beside his third wife, half his age — but he’s still able to pull off a $5 billion deal to acquire a paper that, famously, was thought to be un-acquirable at any price.
There are surprising insights here — at least to someone who doesn’t scan Gawker and follow every twist and turn of the Murdoch empire. Roger Ailes at Fox may have portrayed presidential candidate and now president-elect Barack Obama as a domestic terrorist of some sort — but meanwhile, Wendi Murdoch was having dinner with him; Wolff, asking Murdoch who he should vote for in the Democratic Party primary, is told Obama. The reason? “He’ll sell more papers.” (That, in a nutshell, is Murdoch as seen through Wolff’s eyes — what matters is what is good for the newspapers.) Meanwhile, Ailes, far from being the media baron’s alter ego, is, as Wolff reports “Murdoch’s monster — but a very profitable one.” Indeed, Fox News — whose approach to newsgathering is one of the primary reasons for a lot of hatred of Murdoch — makes the man itself uncomfortable a lot of the time, particularly Bill O’Reilly, for whom, Wolff writes, he can barely restrain his loathing. With Wendi at his side now, “Murdoch’s life is … largely spent around people for whom Fox News is a vulgarity and a joke”, Wolff reports — and he even raises the possibility that now he has acquired the Wall Street Journal — a newspaper, his true love — Fox News may go up for sale.
But while marriage to Wendi Deng has changed him, it doesn’t seem to have softened any of his rough edges. His eldest daughter suggests he get his hair professionally colored to a more natural shade; he retorts that she needs a facelift. He treats veteran Wall Street Journal editors, such as Marcus Brauchli, with visible scorn. When Wolff shows him at his desk, eagerly pursuing a news story, it’s not one in the broader public interest. Rather, Murdoch has heard a rumor that a Hillary Clinton aide he greatly dislikes may be a partner in an online pornography venture, and has set himself — and a New York Post reporter — to trying to confirm it at all costs; it’s a personal vendetta disguised as ‘news’.
No, Murdoch does not emerge as likeable or even moderately congenial in this biography, much less a hero. But nor are the more conventional newspaper proprietors, who beside Murdoch look lazy and slightly witless (even as, in some media circles, the tendency is to view their ownership as if it were some kind of golden age.) Indeed, the Bancroft family (former controling shareholders of Dow Jones), seen through Murdoch’s and Wolff’s eyes, emerge as a bunch of ineffective buffoons, neglecting their responsibilities to the organization they control until it’s too late. It’s an intriguing implicit comparison with the Murdoch family: however dysfunctional their internal relationships may be, Murdoch, his wife and four adult children all emerge as intelligent and driven to succeed in their different ways — set any one of them against a Bancroft, and it would be a very unequal competition indeed.
Wolff’s ability to get inside the Murdoch inner circle, his style (which gives the book a sense of immediacy and momentum that many biographies lack) and the creative structure make this book more than just another media mogul biography. But it’s not flawless — hence the missing star in this review. It’s not a book that anyone looking for insight into how Murdoch views the nitty gritty of his business dealings will find satisfying — the complex details of the business itself are scattered here and there throughout the book and sometimes addressed or mentioned only in passing (as with the reference to Murdoch’s reliance on single-copy sales rather than advertising to fuel revenues and profits.) He mentions several times Murdoch’s strategy of using his higher profile as a way to get access to better dealflow, but doesn’t go into details of how that works, any more than he is able to give fresh insight into the story behind how Murdoch narrowly escaped bankruptcy less than two decades ago. How did he deal with bankers (beyond, Wolff reports, kow-towing to them?) It’s about A deal — the deal the acquire the Wall Street Journal (which is deftly recounted), but not about the art of THE deal, in broader terms, which is how Murdoch manoeuvered himself into a position where he was a viable bidder and ultimately THE ONLY viable bidder for Dow Jones. A bigger issue is the difficulty Wolff grapples with throughout the book — answering the question of what makes Murdoch, Murdoch? We hear he is impatient, ambivalent, difficult — and get a lot of evidence to support that, in most cases — but no clear idea of why, despite Wolff’s tangential efforts to address the question. It would have been interesting to be witnesses to Wolff challenging him on just these questions — How would Murdoch answer the direct question of “why are you so impatient?” But then, perhaps the problem lies as much or more with Murdoch himself than with the author; as Wolff notes, Murdoch is very bad at explaining himself (even his grasp of dates is shaky enough that he can be out by a decade or so in recalling an event). Murdoch just doesn’t do introspection. He doesn’t understand it, even on a conceptual level. Perhaps he is Nike’s motto personified — “Just do it”.
(One side note — I was impressed that Wolff laid out all previous connections with Murdoch’s empire up front in the main body of the biography, rather than leaving the reader to wonder. While Wolff does occasionally seem awed by the fact of being in such close proximity to such a formidable business presence, his ability to be scathing and dispassionate seems to signal that his objectivity remains intact. His final notes — identifying the sources of some comments that initially appear very sweeping and editorial in tone — further reinforce his credibility and professionalism, IMO.)
As the book ends with a “giddy” and triumphant Murdoch taking possession of Dow Jones and its prize, the Wall Street Journal, Wolff returns to look at the question of his family and the issue of ‘legacy’. That’s an intriguing twist, given that the saga of the Dow Jones transaction is the end of the Bancroft family ‘legacy’. Murdoch himself has no intention of ceding control to any of his children until he’s unable to avoid it, but two of the four elder ones have left the family firm’s embrace (at least for now) in response to familial tensions. What will happen to Murdoch’s empire when the emperor is dead and gone? Will Murdoch’s personality flaws lead to the same kind of family implosion that the Bancrofts experienced? Will Wendi really allow her two toddler daughters to be kept out of the family business, or will their be a coup d’etat?
Hopefully, when that day comes, Michael Wolff will be the one telling us all about it…
