The Man Who Owns the News (36 page)

One of Rubenstein’s methods is to arrive in the
Post
’s newsroom and to cross it slowly, in public view—sometimes with a client in tow—making his way directly to the editor’s desk. The message to
Post
reporters is clear: Howard has grease.

If you’re embroiled in scandal, that scandal might well be mitigated at the
Post
if you hire Rubenstein. In 2006, for instance, the
Post
got wind that a student at the prestigious Collegiate School had threatened “to go Columbine” with
Post
reporters at its door, the school was savvy enough to hire Rubenstein and have the story downplayed.

There are greater and lesser agents of
Post
power. When in 2003 I wrote a book that had some less than kind things to say about the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, I was the butt of a ferocious attack on the
Post
’s “Page Six.” “What gives?” I asked, calling up the page’s editor, Richard Johnson, with whom I’d been on affable terms. “Never underestimate the power of Harvey Weinstein on this page,” said Richard, more matter-of-factly than threateningly. (Weinstein, actually, had hired Johnson as a screenwriter.)

So, if designees and hustlers and bullies can come to have extrajournalistic influence and power in Murdoch newsrooms, imagine the power Murdoch himself has. It is direct from Murdoch’s lips to the page. There’s an excitement, an electrifying sense of accomplishment, when you give Murdoch what he wants, when you know that it comes directly from the boss. (It doesn’t really matter that Murdoch is often full of inaccuracies and self-serving rumors; he’s full of juicy gossip and good stories too.)

Simon Jenkins, in his book
The Market for Glory,
about the great newspaper proprietors, makes a point that would never be made by an American press critic—that dubious motives and good journalism might coexist. Beaverbrook, for instance, whose
Daily Express
displayed calculated “malice towards often innocent ‘enemies,’” as well as not necessarily warranted “generosity to friends,” was nevertheless “a master journalist,” in Jenkins’ view. “He had an instinct for news and a belief in the authority of a good reporter to command the reader’s attention.”

That’s the Murdoch position: News Corp. has to represent its proprietor’s (and, by extension, its shareholders’) interests while at the same time giving consumers what they want.

It’s a position at diametric odds with that of what Murdoch would call—using his catchall term for the sanctimonious—the “Bishops” of journalism, who, you cannot convince him otherwise, merely hide their interests while continuing to flog them, and, quite possibly because they’ve so internalized their own phoniness, more often than not fail to hold their readers’ or viewers’ attention.

The entire rationale of modern, objective, arm’s-length, editor-driven journalism—the quasi-religious nature of which had blossomed in no small way as a response to him—he regarded as artifice if not an outright sham.

Even as the discussion proceeded about the protections for the
Wall Street Journal
’s editorial independence, Murdoch would go through the paper every morning slashing and stabbing its pages, full of annoyance, contempt, and incredulity.

Is there a way for a Murdoch editor not to submit and be trammeled—not to be wholly Murdochified?

Actually, it’s become something of a subgenre of literature—editors who have worked for Murdoch and gotten out alive (often just barely) and then written a book about it.

There are so many of these accounts that it can start to seem as if the point of journalism, or the central experience, is to have dealt with Murdoch. The details of your dealings with the other powerful men of the age pall in comparison—Murdoch is the ultimate test.

Former
News of the World
editor Piers Morgan, who clearly anticipates someday going back to work for Murdoch and who remains on good social standing with Elisabeth Murdoch and her husband, Matthew Freud, has written what is meant to be a fond memoir. “He truly is Citizen Kane, though from my experience so far nowhere near as malevolent. It makes me laugh when I read what a vile monster he is,” he writes, while at the same time helplessly making a pretty good case for Murdoch’s malevolence. There is Murdochian vindictiveness, implacableness, and a corrosive disposition (however masked by courtliness) that Morgan is, during his editorship, constantly trying to weigh and anticipate and dodge. When he leaves News Corp. to edit the
Sun
’s main competitor, the
Mirror
—ostensibly because he wants to run a daily paper—what it feels like in his account is that he’s fleeing Murdoch. Not out of any specific antipathy—he’s clearly fascinated by him and has no issue about journalistic scruples—but because he can’t relax with Murdoch as his boss. Every second working for Murdoch is a second spent thinking about what Murdoch wants. He inhabits you.

JUNE
4, 2007

Editorial integrity suddenly somehow becomes for the Bancrofts the paramount issue. It’s beyond price, beyond the issue of continued independence, beyond the fraying family relationships, beyond a developing antipathy for the family advisors (there is the not incorrect feeling that the advisors are steering them to sell). This has become the pride issue—the face-saving issue. The moral stand: editorial freedom.

Murdoch, of course, had seen this countless times: an impossible, or, even pathetic, effort by the
ancien régime
to try to ensure the good behavior of the new regime. If you really want any of this, you keep control. If not, you don’t. The rest, Murdoch understands, is just guilt (or feckless superiority).

The meeting on June 4—it’s the first face-to-face between Murdoch and the Bancrofts—takes place in the big conference room at Wachtell, Lipton on West 52nd Street. Wachtell may be the most profitable law firm in the country, but its real estate is entirely humdrum. It’s faceless, unprepossessing, discouraging. Soaring ambitions are tempered here.

For Dow Jones and the Bancrofts, it’s Michael Elefante, Lisa Steele, Leslie Hill, Chris Bancroft, Peter McPherson, Marty Lipton, and Josh Cammaker. For News, it’s Murdoch, Dave DeVoe, Lon Jacobs, and, yet to arrive—flying in from Europe—James Murdoch.

Marty Lipton is shepherding the meeting. This is good for Murdoch, whom Lipton is clearly not immune to. Indeed, Lipton and Murdoch are fellow veterans of the great corporate realignments of the 1980s and ’90s—they’ve been made by the same forces. They are the substantial historical personages in the room; everybody else is…well, everybody else.

The News Corp. people, who will leave the meeting some five hours later in a celebratory mood, believe from the start they’ve got a lovefest going. The first two hours are spent in getting-to-know-you chitchat. Mostly, they’re waiting for James to arrive—Murdoch feels James will really carry the day. “I brought in James,” Murdoch recalled to me later, “so they could see that we’re a family company and they might say, ‘Look, you’re an old man, you could drop dead tomorrow and what are we doing,’ and so on. Okay? So I thought I’d have James there.” (In somewhat typical News Corp. fashion, although James is the secret weapon, he’s a last-minute one. In fact, Jimmy Lee says he was the one who asked that James be there: “That was actually my idea. I called Rupert the day before the meeting and said is there some way to get James there. It was tough but he did it.”)

But meanwhile, he thinks he’s putting on his best charm offensive. Leslie Hill is asking—grilling—him about China. Has he bent over backward to accommodate the Chinese government? What about booting the BBC off Star TV? What about the HarperCollins China book he canceled, the one by Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong? Murdoch feels he’s on, he’s handling this all very deftly. But Hill, who has actually gone into the meeting with a pretty open mind, decides Murdoch is ducking the issues.

They’re at a huge table—they’re all sitting miles from each other. Murdoch isn’t really listening to them and they can’t really understand him. He’s monologizing, slipping in and out of his heavy mumble and unfinished sentences. Elefante finds himself thinking,
The guy is really old
. He was anticipating being impressed—it’s Rupert Murdoch, after all. Instead he’s impressed by how unimpressive Murdoch is.

Then lunch, catered in the conference room. And then—finally—James arrives. James takes the floor. Elefante understands that James is there to snow them. Elefante isn’t unimpressed. If James doesn’t end up adding much, he’s at least got presence—youth, good looks, confidence. But glib. Scarily glib. He can say anything well (unlike his father, who appears to them to say nothing well). Murdoch, for his part, proudly believes James has really impressed Lisa Steele with, particularly, a bit of “tree-hugging” talk.

After almost three hours, they finally get to the editorial-protections discussion. It’s James who lays out how the
Times
of London agreement works. Now, Murdoch’s letter about editorial protections was sent almost three weeks ago. But nobody seems to have done any research about what the agreement entails. Nobody has even looked up the details of the
Times
agreement. They’re hearing about it here, really seeing it, for the first time. They even say, dumbly,
Well, it looks good on paper
. They ask how it will work, even having read in the
Journal
that in key instances at the
Times
papers it hasn’t worked at all.

Lipton asks the News Corp. guys to leave the room while they confer.

It’s a basic negotiating trick—let the other guys cool their heels. But, in fact, the News guys are so pleased with how things are going—reassured by the Bancrofts’ lack of focus and general cluelessness about the most basic notions of editorial process—that they don’t mind at all that they’ve been sent out. Indeed, they sit happily in another Wachtell conference room for nearly two hours before they’re asked back in. They feel this meeting is the great leap forward; they’ve connected.

It’s during this time, with the News guys out of the room, that Marty Lipton tries to give the family members, along with Elefante and McPherson, a context for thinking about editorial protections—trying to tell them what’s realistic from a legal point of view and what’s in essence ritualistic. What he does not tell them is that it’s baloney—that any such agreement is and will be only what Murdoch wants it to be. In some sense, by maintaining the artifice that this is a discussion among equals, among like-minded men of goodwill, Lipton is selling the idea of the agreement. (He certainly isn’t saying,
Listen to me, you fools, this is all chump stuff!
)

In fact, when the News guys return, Lipton says of the editorial protections, “Are you prepared to give it the force of law?”

“Sure,” says Murdoch, ready to hug them all. He’ll say whatever they want him to say if they’ll sell him the paper.

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.

And yet, “It ended up,” Murdoch will later recall, “with Elefante and Lipton seeming to be helpful and all the others very happy. We thought that it was a great afternoon. We never expected it to turn out like this.”

Chris Bancroft asks, in a more gentlemanly than antagonistic sense, if he can trust Murdoch. Murdoch, somewhat hilariously, says that he should just ask around to see if he’s a trustworthy person or not.

The Bancrofts promise to respond in writing with regard to the editorial protections. And the meeting is adjourned.

The News guys repair, in a self-satisfied mood, to the Grand Havana Room, a cigar bar atop 666 Fifth Avenue, around the corner from the Wachtell, Lipton offices—though only Lon Jacobs actually has a cigar.

TEN
Rupertism

JUNE
2007

In the
Wall Street Journal
’s narrative of events, significant potential bidders are circling the company. There’s a conversation between Microsoft and GE about a partnership to buy Dow Jones. Then there’s talk of a GE-Pearson hookup. GE, the parent of NBC, also owns CNBC, which Murdoch’s new cable business channel will compete with. What’s more, CNBC has a long-term content relationship with the
Journal
that a Murdoch takeover will imperil. Pearson, for its part, owns the
Financial Times,
which will face a new competitive threat from a Murdoch-owned
Journal
. Another rumor has Pearson merging its
Financial Times
with the
Journal
to create a new, separate company.

Then there’s Warren Buffett, the storied investor who is on the board of the Washington Post Company, and is thus perceived to have an interest in newspapers. Buffett is suddenly—apparently through no fault of his own—considered to be one of the
Journal
’s possible saviors. (The irony here is that Buffett has invested heavily in Dow Jones after the announcement of Murdoch’s proposed deal and is actively calling directors and urging them to sell.)

The source for most of the optimism about Murdoch alternatives is Leslie Hill, the Dow Jones board member and former airline pilot, who has developed a single-minded belief that she can save Dow Jones from Murdoch and that she herself might be a reasonable choice to head the company. The reporters with whom she’s speaking encourage her in this—“I Fly with Leslie” signs appear in the newsroom.