Last of the press barons

BIOGRAPHY: Hugh Linehanreviews The Man Who Owns The News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdochby Michael Wolff, Bodley Head, 446pp, £20

IN A BATHROOM somewhere in New York City, an old man in a cheap white vest bends over a sink and rubs orange dye into his thinning hair before going out to face the world. Or run it. Or ruin it. Take your pick.

From his first ventures into publishing, more than half a century ago, when he fell foul of Australian political grandees over a miscarriage of justice campaign, to the moment last summer when he sat down with Barack Obama to discuss a peace deal between Obama and Fox News, Rupert Murdoch has understood the intertwining of news media, money and political power. In that sense, he is the last, and most successful, of the old-style press barons – the Northcliffes, Beaverbrooks and Hearsts – but has managed to exert that power at a time when, received wisdom has it, media is more important and all-pervasive than ever before.

According to his many enemies, Murdoch has contributed to the coarsening of public discourse and the hegemony of the political right in Anglophone countries since the 1970s. But ideology for him has always been subordinated to business and self-interest, according to Michael Wolff’s new, quasi-authorised biography. Based on extensive interviews with Murdoch himself, along with close family members and key employees of his company, News Corp, The Man Who Owns the News claims to be the most intimate and revealing portrait to date of a man who more than any other represents the power of media in the Information Age. “A vital element in understanding his political consciousness is understanding its shallowness,” writes Wolff convincingly. “For an ideologue, he’s done little of the reading. Ideas are of marginal interest to him; he’s a poor debater (although he can raise his voice and pound the table).”

In those early days in Australia, Murdoch’s newspapers were slightly on the left of the political spectrum. Moving to London in the late 1960s to take over the News of the World and the Sun, and then on to New York in the 1970s to start building his American power base, his natural personal inclination to support deregulation and survival-of-the-fittest capitalism put him in a perfect position, as the political and intellectual tide turned against corrupt trade unions, ineffectual centre-left governments and decaying pillars of the old, pre-1960s establishment.

Leveraged debt propelled him into the super-rich stratosphere in the Reagan-Thatcher years, and almost bankrupted him at the end of the 1980s. But he picked himself up and made a fresh fortune out of satellite and cable television at an age when most of his contemporaries were hanging up their pinstripes for good.

When, to the dismay of his existing family, he divorced his wife of 30 years to marry Wendi Deng, a Chinese woman 40 years his junior, he emerged again, revivified (and with that orange hair), to take on the new challenges of the internet. Little wonder those enemies mutter darkly about stakes and hearts.

For a self-proclaimed libertarian meritocrat, Murdoch seems remarkably keen on keeping the loot in the family. He increasingly looks towards his own children, particularly Elisabeth, Lachlan and James. Not for him a Bill Gates-style relinquishing of wealth to philanthropic trusts.

The dynasty (five children from three marriages) will prevail. Wolff devotes much loving attention to the ever-changing pecking order between these royal princes, who are all in daily contact with their father.

Elisabeth’s husband, the London PR svengali Matthew Freud, suggests one more interviewee who might contribute to a more rounded portrait of the subject: so Wolff duly trots off to London to meet Tony Blair, a meeting worthwhile if only for the following paragraph, which, as is occasionally the case in The Man Who Owns the News, transcends satire: “Tony liked Wendi and was therefore willing to get along with her difficult husband,” writes Wolff. “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.”

At times like these it can be hard to tell how firmly the author’s tongue is lodged in his cheek.

It is quite remarkable how little insight Wolff gleaned from his 50 hours with Rupert himself. The much-trumpeted exclusive access appears to have yielded slim pickings. Murdoch, we learn, is entirely unreflective. The past for him has few lessons to offer. In fact, he doesn’t have a very good memory and frequently confuses dates and events. He shrugs off accusations that he manipulates the news to further his own business interests. Of course he does, he says, and so does everyone else. They just don’t admit to it. There’s little or no sense of a grand plan or vision. Perhaps that’s part of his strength – in an industry crammed with blue-sky thinkers, new media gurus and other snake-oil salesmen, Rupert just looks after business and crushes whoever gets in his way.

Unfortunately, Wolff has chosen to structure his narrative around a dull and over-extended account of Murdoch’s successful 2007 takeover of the Dow Jones company and its crown jewel, the Wall Street Journal, “the second most important newspaper in the world”. One can see why this might have seemed a good idea. The Dow Jones battle offers a framework for the larger tale of Murdoch’s life: storming the battlements of good taste and respectability with ruthless skill and indefatigable energy; taking control of the world’s most powerful media organs and submitting them to his will.

The Bancroft family, who held control of Dow Jones, epitomise everything Murdoch despises. Dilettante relics of a bygone era, they were content to be paid off with an enormous offer which significantly overvalued the company.

But Wolff wastes far too much space on the ditherings of the preposterous Bancrofts, as they try to wriggle their way off the News Corp hook, and not enough on more significant milestones, such as Wapping, BSkyB or Star TV in China.

Besides, who breaks the bank to pay over the odds for an American newspaper these days, when the US newspaper industry is at death’s door? Well, Rupert does, because, Wolff argues, newspapers are what Rupert knows best and loves most. Forget the Hollywood studios, the first new US network in 50 years, the purchase of MySpace.com, the Asian TV empire, the domination of British sport. Murdoch doesn’t understand television, detests movies, has no interest in sport, can barely turn on a computer. He’s an old-style newspaperman.

If you want to see Murdoch in his element, apparently, watch him turn a newsroom to quivering jelly by his sheer presence, or observe as he personally takes charge of a potentially career-wrecking allegation (ultimately unproven) against a senior member of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff.

This is why, according to the book, Murdoch has been happy to lose hundreds of millions of pounds on the London Times since he acquired it in the early 1980s. It’s not just an old man’s sentimentality; he firmly believes newspapers have a future and he still sees them as the source of his power. In this, as in other things, Wolff writes, Murdoch is a man of his time, the 1950s.

For the most part, Murdoch has been an acquirer, not a creator. He gobbles up flailing media businesses and turns them into weapons in the News Corp armoury. In the process, he has, almost accidentally it seems, assembled an enormous multi-media business, worth $50 billion at its height in 2007 (though a lot less now) and spanning print, broadcast and the internet.

Some, bedazzled by visions of multi-media convergence, see News Corp as the blueprint for the future. But as Wolff relates it, there’s no great plan at work here. Murdoch has seized opportunities, pursued obsessions and followed hunches as they came his way. Some of these led to great wealth and power; others left him teetering on bankruptcy, others again may yet drag him down. Few of them are particularly original or groundbreaking.

The two great exceptions are the Sun in the UK and Fox News in the US. Each of these offered something quite new to its marketplace. Each represented itself as anti-establishment, yet acted as cheerleader for the government of its day. And each, in its way, represents Murdoch’s gut instinct: to muckrake, to provoke, to shock the most easily shockable (who usually turn out to be found amongst those wishy-washy liberal elites).

For Wolff, who’s never afraid of a bit of pop psychology, that instinct goes back to Murdoch’s relationship with his father and fellow newspaper publisher, Sir Keith Murdoch. The only way Rupert could get Sir Keith’s attention, he writes, was to shock, and from this he learnt the lesson that, “if you annoy the establishment, it listens to you”.

SO, WHAT IS THE ESTABLISHMENT,if you're one of the world's most powerful men? It's whatever suits you at the time, it seems. If the EU, say, or the BBC, pose a threat to your business plans, then they're fair game at every opportunity.

But if it suits your purposes to be on friendly terms with a Labour prime minister like Blair, or a nominally Communist government in Beijing, that poses no problem, writes Wolff. “ A key point about Rupert’s anti-establishmentarianism is that he’s never removed from the establishment – or, that is, never removed from power.’’

The Man Who Owns the News, while full of interesting titbits and insights into Murdoch and his empire, is written too hastily and edited too shoddily to be a definitive portrait. That probably won’t be written until Murdoch, who celebrates his 78th birthday in a few weeks’ time, finally decides to lay down his red pencil for good. And, going by the evidence, you shouldn’t hold your breath for that.

• Hugh Linehan is Online Editor of The Irish Times