Review of Rupert Murdock

December 28, 2008
Plowing Through the Door
By DAVID CARR
'The Man Who Owns the News'
Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch
By Michael Wolff
446 pp. Broadway Books. $29.95.
With continent-spanning business successes, multiple marriages and generational strife roiling beneath him, Rupert Murdoch would seem to be a perfect running story for a tabloid, but the man who owns the means of production rarely becomes grist for his own mill.
As proprietor of The New York Post, Murdoch is — in Michael Wolff’s new book — “the man who owns the news.” Murdoch has made some as well, upending the television business by creating Fox News and more recently stalking The Wall Street Journal — a newspaper that was not for sale — with the relentlessness of Ahab, but with the wrinkle of ultimate triumph.
That hunt and capture serves as the backdrop for Wolff’s portrait of Murdoch. The book is a strangely alluring artifact, with huge gaps in execution and stylistic tics that border on parody; it will nonetheless provide a deeply satisfying experience for the ­media-interested.
They are a pair, these two. Both adore gossip and revel in their unpleasantness, and neither gives a rip what anyone else thinks of him. Murdoch has achieved improbable business success, and Wolff has made no secret that he covets same. In a hybrid career that continues to this day — Wolff is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a founder of a news aggregator called Newser — he has somehow managed to both float above a demimonde of wealthy titans and seek to enter at every opportunity.
His chronicle of Murdoch’s purchase of The Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft family last year — this tale constitutes the narrative armature of the book — is full of the kind of detailed ticktock that makes business seem brutally exciting, but in general, Wolff has never distinguished himself as a reporter. Over the years, he has succeeded in cutting through the clutter by being far less circumspect — and sometimes more vicious — than other journalists, whom he views as archaic losers about to go the way of the Walkman.
“The Man Who Owns the News” attacks its subject with casual delight, but contains shockingly few actual quotations from Murdoch himself: a snippet here and there, nothing more. He remains disconcertingly spectral, even though Wolff spoke with him for many hours over many months.
Wolff drops a prophylactic mention of Murdoch’s conversational shortcomings, saying he is “not good at explaining himself and gets annoyed and frustrated when he’s asked to do so,” adding later that “he grips and clutches and descends into muttering and murmuring when forced to talk about himself.”
That may explain Murdoch’s unwillingness to sit on his own couch or one of Wolff’s making, but it does not excuse the general failure to give the reader, as the subtitle promises, a look “inside the secret world of Rupert Murdoch.”
Instead, we get Wolff’s own ineffable takes on how Murdoch became Murdoch: “He tends to create a disturbance, or pick up the tremulous motion of a disturbance, that in the chaotic motion of the atmosphere becomes amplified, eventually leading to large-scale atmospheric ­changes . . . or some such.”
This sort of protective irony, walking slowly up to a conclusion and then summarily dropping it, is mannered to the point where you can almost visualize Wolff licking his paws between sentences. But he’s smart, a wiseguy really, and often wanders his way toward insight. In the same passage, he observes that Murdoch possesses “the business equivalent of superb hand-eye coordination — of knowing when the opportunity presents itself and how to snatch it.”
Murdoch, for all his lack of an inner life, at least in this book, is an extremely engaging man to listen to. At investor conferences where other media titans drone on defensively, he is far and away the most fearless and factual. But not here. Wolff, who has the columnist’s tic of being far too struck by the fragrance of his own prose, draws attention to the Boswell at the expense of the Johnson.
“They are the substantial historical personages in the room; everybody else is . . . well, everybody else,” he says at one point. At another he writes, “He’s almost never there — except when he is, overwhelmingly, there.”
But the moment the reader is tempted to leave Wolff to marvel at his own de­vices, the author steps in and reminds us that his primary value is to speak the unspeakable. As he did in his delicious and prescient “Burn Rate,” an early book about the dot-com fantasia, he often just says it: “Every second working for Murdoch is a second spent thinking about what Murdoch wants. He inhabits you.”
And more substantively, Wolff makes it clear that as Murdoch woos the Bancrofts with negotiations over guarantees of editorial freedom for The Wall Street Journal, his cynicism is without bottom: “Murdoch is amazed these people are actually taking this seriously. Really, given everything — not least of all his own well-known history — it is preposterous that they would.”
Much was made of Wolff’s alliance with Murdoch, that it would lead to complicity and sycophancy, but Wolff remains true to his nature, which is joyously nasty. It is a baked-in reflex of a kind that Trollope described: “His satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.”
Wolff takes no specific offense at Murdoch’s willingness to use his media properties to cold business ends, but depicts him as a cranky, monomaniacal newspaper hack, a con man with bad hearing, no interest in new media paradigms and no real friends to speak of. It is also pointed out that he is “a good family man — even if he has three of them.” Like the man he writes about, Wolff is a gossip who is very skilled at extracting information and sensing weakness.
The rest of the gang at Murdoch’s News Corporation fares no better. According to the book, Bill O’Reilly “talked dirty to underlings” and is loathed by everyone, including Murdoch. Wolff writes that Richard Johnson, the Page Six editor of The New York Post, “took money from sources.” And Roger Ailes, the ferocious creator of Fox News, is feared by all, even Murdoch himself.
All of which makes the reader wonder why Murdoch would, in practical terms, drop a hungry ferret down his own trousers. Wolff, a guy with a lot of theories, has one about that: “Possibly his willingness had something to do with his perception that I regarded many of his enemies — particularly the journalistic priesthood — with some of the same contempt with which he regarded them.”
More broadly, Murdoch would clearly like his legacy to be cleansed by his acquisition of The Journal. That story, told with a mixture of contempt and awe, is rendered through the prism of family fecklessness and brute business tactics. It makes Murdoch’s globe-trotting history of buying tabloids and collecting politicians with equal facility seem a little beside the point, which might have been the gesture to begin with.
Characters in the Journal saga are quickly introduced and put in a riveting, ­present-tense motion. Richard Zannino, then the chief executive of Dow Jones & Company, decides to put a toe in the water next to Murdoch and soon finds himself soaked from head to foot. Andy Steginsky, a money manager and “a Rupert Murdoch groupie,” is the Zelig-like figure putting an arm on the Bancrofts, who are played like patsies from the jump. “They seemed like fools even to themselves,” Wolff writes.
A lot of people come off as fools and flunkies, including me: “New York Times media writer David Carr censoriously opined during the takeover that Murdoch ‘has demonstrated a habit over time of using his media properties to advance the business interests of his organization.’ Then, with the takeover completed, Carr pronounced him one of the most admired figures of the new media class precisely because he integrated all his business interests.” It’s much more complicated than that, but subtext is always missed when you’re the one being gored, no?
Historically, one of the problems with Wolff’s omniscience is that while he may know all, he gets some of it wrong. He opens Chapter 12 with a lovely set piece about John Lippman, a Journal reporter who wrote rugged articles about both Murdoch and his third wife, Wendi Deng, running for his life as the deal is about to be consummated in June 2007.
“Not a bad indicator of which way the deal will go is that John Lippman writes his last piece for The Wall Street Journal on June 22 and will shortly head for The Los Angeles Times,” Wolff writes, adding later on the same page, “His long-term paper is being pursued by a man whom he has written about in derisive, cruel, scathing, innuendo-laden terms.”
Lippman left The Journal in June 2006 and soon after went to work for Sitrick & Company, a public relations firm. It’s true he had a byline in The Journal on June 22, 2007, but it was atop a freelance review of a book by Jack Valenti, the longtime chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America. Lippman has since gone to work at The Los Angeles Times.
And Wolff also writes that The New York Times canceled a series on Murdoch after two articles were attacked by News Corp. Only two articles were scheduled, and none were canceled, according to the paper’s editors. Wolff prefers the purity of his constructs — one of which is that The Times is a deeply flawed artifact that is doomed to be crushed by the more nimble, less morally constricted Murdoch.
Obsessed by newsprint and digitally clueless, Murdoch is depicted as a remarkable modern figure. The issue of succession is dealt with in the book as it is at the company: people either put their fingers in their ears or cross them in hopes that Murdoch, who was born in Australia in 1931, will live forever. His unusual relationship with a crew of very talented, able children — pull them close in business matters and then humiliate them — is artfully described in the book, as is his somewhat henpecked relationship with his third wife, who reads his e-mail messages after business hours because he doesn’t use a computer.
Should I/we/you feel dirty for enjoying a little quality time with a man who believes that giving the impression of morals is better than actually having them and whose atavistic corporate impulses are put to contemporary, acquisitive ends? Probably not. Many before us have covered their eyes and waited for Rupert Murdoch to go away. Rupert Murdoch does not go away.
David Carr, the author of the memoir “The Night of the Gun,” is a culture reporter at The Times and writes a media column for the paper’s business section.