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The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch Paperback – May 4, 2010
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If Rupert Murdoch isn’t making headlines, he’s busy buying the media outlets that generate them. His News Corp. holdings—from the New York Post, Fox News, and 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.
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateMay 4, 2010
- Dimensions5.19 x 1.09 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100767929527
- ISBN-13978-0767929523
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Burn Rate has a terrific feel for the crazy deals, the characters, and the clashing bicoastal cultures of the Internet.” —Deborah Stead, New York Times
“Burn Rate is the real deal: a smart, thoughtful, funny, knowing, clear-eyed, candid and altogether exhilarating insider’s chronicle of the new media business—that is, the new media ‘business.’ If there’s a more honest and entertaining book on the digital revolution, I haven’t seen it.” —Kurt Andersen, columnist at The New Yorker
“Wolff has given us the best account of both the lure and the frustration of the Internet.” —Peter Martin, Financial Times
“Burn Rate is a hilarious and frightening account of the life of an Internet startup.”
—Amy Cortese, BusinessWeek
“Wolff, a nimble writer with a knack for spotting colorful details, moves the story along at movie-of-the-week pace.” —Katie Hafner, New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
FALL 2007—WINTER 2008
Rupert Murdoch, a man without discernible hubris–or at least conventional grandiosity–had nevertheless begun to believe that his takeover of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, something he’d dreamt about for most of his career, might actually indicate that he and his company, News Corporation, had a certain destiny, a higher purpose of which the world should be made aware.
He’d started to think that his triumph in the quest for Dow Jones was an opportunity to rebrand–the kind of marketing frippery he usually disdained. He was even toying with the idea of changing the name of News Corp., that oddly boring, genericsounding throwback to the company’s earliest days–his first paper in Adelaide, Australia, was the News–to something that could better indicate his and News Corp.’s philosophical reason for being.
What that reason for being exactly was . . . well, um . . . that was still hard to actually put into words. But it had something to do with . . . well, look at these:
He had mock-ups of full-page ads that, he was thinking, should run in all the Wall Street Journal’s competitors–particularly the New York Times and the Financial Times–on the day he took over the paper.
One of the ads had the big headline “Agent Provocateur.” Another pursued the idea of pirates–the notion being that for more than fifty years the company had been . . . well, if not exactly outlaws . . . not literally, still . . .
When, after many hours of conversation with Murdoch, I despaired of ever getting an introspective word out of him, his son-in-law Matthew Freud, the PR man from London, advised me to ask him about “being a change agent.”
This conversational gambit prompted Murdoch’s enthusiastic unfurling of these ads and eager, if far from concrete, ideas–“We’re change agents,” he kept repeating, as though new to the notion–about the meaning of News Corp. and, by extension, himself. It also prompted dubious looks from some of the executives closest to him. Murdoch’s sudden search for an ennobling and guiding idea was a vexation not just because it called attention to exactly what News Corp. executives often despaired of–that image of runamok ruthlessness that the battle for Dow Jones had stirred up all over again–but also because it was distinctly out of character.
Soul-searching wasn’t, to say the least, a part of the News Corp. culture. So it was curious, and unsettling, to have the veritable soul of the company trying to figure out why he’d gotten where he’d gotten, and for what good reason.
Such a statement about his fundamental righteousness (and even, perhaps, relative coolness) was, significantly, being urged on him by his son James, a Harvard dropout who had started a music label and then spearheaded News Corp.’s new-media initiatives in the 1990s, and who had become the CEO of British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), the News Corp.—controlled company that operates the Sky satellite TV network in the United Kingdom. Not long before, Murdoch had favored his older son, Lachlan, and before that his daughter Elisabeth, to eventually run News Corp. But now it was James. In fact, unbeknownst to the rest of News Corp., James was about to be given responsibility for the U.K., Europe, and Asia by his father–who wanted to spend more of his time at the Wall Street Journal and, in addition, wanted to use the opportunity to put James in reach of the top spot in the company (without having to actually turn over the top spot).
James had been, much more so than his father, particularly aggravated by the terrible press heaped on his dad and on the company because of the Dow Jones bid. Alternately aggressive and defensive, James was looking for a way to fight back. In fact, it was not entirely clear that the father’s sudden enthusiasm for brand development wasn’t about pleasing his son, clearly the apple of his eye at this moment. (He was very excited about showing off BSkyB’s annual report, for which his son was responsible and which he thought was the kind of thing they could be doing at News Corp.–every employee, he said, as though new to the novelty of an expensively produced annual report, could get one!) There was enough triumphalism around News Corp. to please everybody.
Gary Ginsberg, News Corp.’s executive vice president for global marketing and corporate affairs and one of the executives most frequently attending Murdoch, while worried about the particular branding initiative of the ads, had his own brand idea that he was pushing. He had, of late, vastly expanded his portfolio beyond just being the company’s PR guy to include, among other things, big-concept brand-awareness thinking. In this role, he was helping spearhead the bid News Corp. was making with the Related Companies, a major Manhattan real estate developer, for the rights to build a massive complex (larger than Rockefeller Center) on the biggest undeveloped piece of land in Manhattan. News Corp., with its naming rights to News Corp. Center (unless they changed the name of the whole company), would become the anchor and one of the main brand names of midtown.
In light of the fact that Rupert Murdoch now owned the most important–all right, the second most important–newspaper in the world, not to mention having created the world’s most successful media company and being quite possibly the most influential businessman of the age (certainly the most influential for the longest time), why wouldn’t he want to figure out just how he’d done what he did and claim credit for it? (Of course, another reasonable view, one that Murdoch–for so long a deal-a-minute guy–also seemed to subscribe to, was about how little meaning or calculated direction or vision there had been in the growth of News Corp. But no matter.)
Murdoch was, frankly, impressed with himself. Delighted. Giddy. He couldn’t believe how exhausted he felt once the deal was done. He’d held his anticipation and excitement “all inside,” and as soon as he could relax, he felt “wiped out.” Perhaps more than any other accomplishment, getting the Wall Street Journal was, in and of itself, the big one, and not just a next step toward something else.
And there was the other stuff. Legacy stuff. There were his two young children–Grace, six, and her sister Chloe, four–and how they would think of him in, well . . . the future. There were his older children and the importance of defining the meaning of the company he would be leaving them. That was James’ point. That was also what he was always hearing from Matthew Freud, the Svengali-ish marketer, who was now married to the
family. Brand was legacy. The bigger the brand message, the bigger the legacy.
Plus there was Murdoch’s wife, Wendi, thirty-nine. Her energy, her sense of possibilities, her urge to take over the world, to leave her mark, might be as great as his own. Perhaps they were competing.
Not to mention that at nearly seventy-seven, even a man without hubris should get a chance to make a statement. If not now, when?
On the other hand, it also seemed a potentially great mistake to attribute too much sentiment or craving for positive recognition to his motivations.
For one thing, the branding statements toward which Murdoch seemed to gravitate were not so much about News Corp.’s greatness or vision as they were about kicking dirt in people’s faces. His true message about his acquisition of the Wall Street Journal was that he was the winner.
A month or so after the Bancroft family voted to sell him their great-great-grandfather’s company, Murdoch invited the Journal’s fifteen top editors to lunch at the Ritz-Carlton downtown and brought along as the featured guest Col Allan, the profane, harddrinking and foul-tempered editor of the New York Post. (Not too long after the sale went through, Allan was dressing down a subordinate so heatedly that he slammed his hand on the desk and cracked his cuff link–a gift from the police commissioner.) In journalistic terms, Allan might be as different from a Wall Street Journal editor as, say, a pit bull from a spaniel. Allan’s very presence at the lunch announced that the Wall Street Journal had been taken over by News Corp. (Not to mention that it was just delightfully evil of ol’ Rupe to bring ol’ Col along to scare the bejesus out of his new charges.)
Murdoch’s march into the Wall Street Journal newsroom with his two lieutenants–loyal Les Hinton, who ran News Corp.’s U.K. operation and who would be coming to run the Dow Jones business, and inscrutable Robert Thomson, the London Times editor, who would be taking over the Journal’s newsroom–was not the arrival of someone who wanted his great purpose and historic destiny to be roundly applauded. Rather, with the back of his hand, he let it be known that theWall Street Journal was his most recently conquered nation–the staff at the Journal, many of whom were soon to be displaced persons, were merely history’s flotsam and jetsam. They were the impediments to change. He was the change agent. “We might,” he said one afternoon as he considered his new conquest, “have to let people go just to make a point.” He summarily replaced Dow Jones’ top executive, Richard Zannino, and the Journal’s publisher, L. Gordon Crovitz. He was purposely brutal with the sitting editor, Marcus Brauchli–who was, in theory, protected by the editorial agreement Murdoch had entered into with the Bancroft family in order to buy the paper. Doing an easy end run around the agreement that precluded him from unilaterally firing the existing editor, Murdoch had brought in his own editor
of choice, Thomson, an Australian, and called him the publisher. The News Corp. people were bemused that people didn’t immediately understand that Thomson’s arrival as publisher was a demotion of Brauchli. The News Corp. people did not even let Brauchli speak at Murdoch’s first meeting with the entire newsroom.
“Doesn’t he understand it’s our paper now?” said one of the executives closest to Murdoch, smacking his head. And if publicly disregarding (and dissing) Brauchli didn’t make the point, “the fact that Rupert will stop speaking to him will,” the executive chuckled. Although Murdoch offered some begrudging words about working together when he spoke to the staff, what he actually meant, News Corp. people were explaining, was that if you had a problem, leave. There was work to do, a paper to put out. A Murdoch paper.
For many journalists, hatred of Murdoch had come to define the profession. As the Dow Jones takeover progressed, both Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, and his boss, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher, were busy characterizing Murdoch in cocktail party conversations as the worst thing that had ever happened to journalism. That’s how Keller earlier confronted Ginsberg: “How can you work for the Antichrist?” The New York Times more and more defined itself as “not a Murdoch paper.”
That characterization paralleled how Murdoch defined the profession too: there were the elites, whose contempt for him encouraged him to regard them as all the more contemptible, and there were those who worked for him, who were, necessarily, true believers in him.
Of note, the journalists most unhappy about Murdoch taking over the Wall Street Journal were often unhappy themselves. Unhappy because their jobs were insecure–the Journal, itself, had had waves of layoffs–their influence waning, workload increasing, and paychecks going down, indeed unhappy always knowing that they had to worry about Murdoch taking over. The people who worked for Murdoch were, arguably, among the happier people in the media business. As a newsman at News Corp., your influence increased rather than dimmed. Both Fox News and the New York Post took a manic delight in their influence. And Murdoch himself was fiercely loyal–even if you talked dirty to underlings, as the Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly had, or took money from sources, as New York Post “Page Six” editor Richard Johnson had.
Murdoch’s intention, which he began to announce everywhere with something like a sadistic glint, was to use the Wall Street Journal to go to war against the New York Times, not least of all because the Times was ground zero for the journalists who held him in contempt.
He’d acquired one of the two best papers in the world–which every journalist who didn’t work for him assumed he would ruin–in order to destroy the other. It was a kind of personal revenge as well as, possibly, a viable business strategy.
It would be a true, and perhaps final, newspaper war.
Product details
- Publisher : Crown; Reprint edition (May 4, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0767929527
- ISBN-13 : 978-0767929523
- Item Weight : 13 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.19 x 1.09 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #748,130 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,098 in Journalist Biographies
- #2,210 in Business Professional's Biographies
- #2,481 in Communication Skills
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He mixes three main themes with skill: the stalking and capturing of the Wall Street Journal; the high points of Murdoch's long and storied business career; and his famously dysfunctional family (though, as daughter Elisabeth points out, it was Murdoch himself who guaranteed dysfunction by blowing up his marriage to long-time spouse Anna in favor of Wendi Deng).
Yes, you need to swallow here and realize that Wolff himself is part of the tale: the fact that Murdoch has opened up to him without constraint - and opened up access to all his children as well - injects Wolff into the story because of the sheer audacity of Wolff's gambit and the stone-cold acceptance by Murdoch of Wolff's terms. As a result, we get the fascinating spectacle of Wolff interviewing the four adult Murdoch children and having each of four use the sessions as a way to telegraph a message to their father. The author clearly revels in the role.
Wolff writes with a clear zest for his subject and a love of good gossip and journalism. He takes the reader on a brilliant ride. Wolff also gives just and full credit right from the very start for the enormous contributions of his researcher, Leela de Kretser. Indeed, the first words from Wolff that one encounters open cracking the book are a page+ of prose on de Kretser's considerable role. Wolff generously and genuinely opines that "(t)his book rests as much on her shoulders as mine."
Good show, Michael and Leela!
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...