The Man Who Owns the News (55 page)

On the other hand, he was trying to smear somebody. At the dinner party he’d attended—now that he was an unlikely fixture at fashionable tables—he’d heard that a senior Hillary Clinton operative was a partner in an online porn company. He didn’t like the operative, and he didn’t like—no matter how much he had tried—Hillary. So it didn’t much matter that the story itself seemed far-fetched and tenth-hand, it was juicy and would slime somebody he thought was…a slime.

True, it didn’t pan out—and that was the end of it. Well, sort of. Because he kept recycling it. It became a staple in Murdoch’s repertoire of whispers and confidences and speculations. (He also had a
New York Post
reporter chasing, unsuccessfully, the story.)

Rupert Murdoch doesn’t necessarily need to print or broadcast the news to make it news. He may be among the biggest gossips in New York. In my many months of interviewing him, I found that the most reliable way to hold his interest was to bring him a rich nugget. His entire demeanor would change. He’d instantly light up. He’d go from distracted to absolutely focused. Gossip gives him life (and business opportunities).

This is, I believe, how the rumor about Michael Bloomberg buying the
New York Times
got legs. I offered it to Murdoch as a bit of speculation, conflating two of his favorite subjects—Bloomberg, whom he greatly admires, and the
New York Times,
which he does not—in suggesting that a Bloomberg Times deal could be possible. He paused, considered, opened his mouth, seemed blissed out for a second, processed this information against his own needs and interests, and then said, “I think it makes sense. I’ll ask him.” And suddenly the rumor was everywhere—he was telling everybody, which made it “true.” In fact, the mayor’s people seemed to like the rumor so much that they began to talk it up themselves. Bloomberg himself seemed to fancy it (offering only a tepid denial), and Murdoch thought he might act on it.

Murdoch is a troublemaker—one of the last great troublemakers in the holier-than-thou, ethically straitjacketed news business.

In August 2007, after News won Dow Jones, Gary Ginsberg told his boss that he was planning to go to Paris for the wedding of his friend Doug Band, Bill Clinton’s chief aide, to the handbag designer Lily Rafii. Ginsberg reported to Murdoch (Ginsberg too knows that Murdoch likes—
needs
—gossip) that the wedding was going to be a party-hearty affair with Ron Burkle, Steve Bing, and of course, Clinton himself. So Murdoch, onto not just a good story but also a way to annoy Ginsberg, called
New York Post
editor Col Allan and, busting the expense budget, had “Page Six” send a reporter to Paris. Headline (to Ginsberg’s consternation): “Bill and Pals Do Paris (The City, Not the Bimbo).”

Eight months after he had taken over the
Wall Street Journal,
the paper arguably was a better one. On a daily basis it seemed to metamorphose in the subtlest of ways into a sharper, less fussy view of business and of the events shaping markets and economies. The
Journal
’s foreign coverage was, suddenly, as good as any paper’s in the United States—as good as the
Times
. Within a few months of his takeover—even after Murdoch forced out the editor, thereby doing the one thing he’d agreed with the Bancrofts he wouldn’t do—most of the talk of his tabloidizing the paper, undermining its credibility, or bastardizing the brand went quiet. (As a further poke at the Bancroft family, in fulfillment of his agreement to appoint a Bancroft family representative to the News Corp. board, he selected Natalie Bancroft, a twenty-eight-year-old would-be opera singer who lives in Europe—who’d contacted her family only twice during the takeover drama.) Suddenly the only debate that remained was the business issue: Might his stated plan to turn the
Journal
into a national paper mean it would lose its focus on business? Was that really a good idea, to go from a specialized publication to a general-interest one?

And, actually, was that even the true plan?

Murdoch might be talking about a national paper covering politics and foreign news, but his editor, Robert Thomson, was hurrying to assure the
Journal
’s readers and advertisers that it would remain a business paper, that there would be no dilution of its focus. In separate discussions they were describing separate papers.

Part of the curiousness of the takeover was not just that Murdoch seemed to have no immediate Murdoch stamp to put on the
Journal
but also that he seemed in fact to have no specific plan at all for it. Not that he was adrift, but more in the sense that it was a new day. The world was fresh. He was marveling at what he held in his hands.

The truth was that he had strikingly little idea about what he had bought. He was uninformed about Dow Jones’ businesses—comprising more than half of the company’s revenues—beyond the paper. He had a vague and mostly incorrect idea of what Factiva, Dow Jones’ news database, did. He was all for making the
Journal
’s subscription-supported Internet business free until someone pointed out the immediate P&L hit that would cause. His idea was to sell Dow Jones’ chain of smaller newspapers until he found out there were no buyers (News Corp. quietly put the Ottaway papers on the block, and then, with no interest above their minimum asking price, announced that they had decided how wonderful it was to own these papers and what a strategic fit they were). And he and everyone else at News were gobsmacked by the sorry state of the U.S. newspaper business—especially in the face of a sudden economic downturn, which Murdoch was particularly gloomy about. (His vision of a great new News Corp. Center dominating midtown Manhattan was, as a result of the real estate melt-down, taken off the table.)

If
panic
was not the right word to use,
concern
certainly was. Murdoch, whose playbook for buying a newspaper was invariably to cut its price, thereby boosting its sales against the competition, upped the newspaper price of the
Journal
from $1.50 to two bucks—50 cents more than the
Times
. (And he doubled the price of the
New York Post
to 50 cents.)

Eight months after Murdoch & Co. walked in the door at Dow Jones, the News Corp. share price was down by 35 percent, with News executives putting the blame directly on Dow Jones. Indeed, not only was Dow Jones a certain culprit, but blaming Dow Jones made everybody else’s business less responsible. It was, although no one would have quite said it this way, Rupert’s fault. Indeed, at the rate the newspaper business was imploding, if he had waited six months News Corp. could have saved a billion or more on the deal. Ginsberg and Chernin, with gallows humor, sat on the phone together discussing the relative fortunes they’d each lost on their News Corp. options.

The question remained: How come? Why the
Journal
? What was the point? His children and some of his executives had begun to speculate that it was a sort of retirement move. That Murdoch wanted to stop traveling so much; that he wanted to spend time with his wife and youngest children and needed an excuse to stay put in New York; that the
Journal
was a place he could go to in the afternoons. As much to the point, he had effectively divvied up the rest of the company. Peter Chernin ran the U.S. entertainment assets; his son James ran the European and Asian assets; Australia, specifically carved out of James’ purview, awaited Lachlan’s return; Roger Ailes ran Fox News. Murdoch himself was left, in a manner of speaking, with only the
Wall Street Journal
and the
New York Post
.

And yet this view seemed likely to be about his children’s wishfulness—to see their father content and to have him understand his natural, compartmentalized place in the world. Too, it seemed to buck more than fifty years of evidence about how Murdoch used newspapers.

From the
Adelaide News
to the
News of the World
and the
Sun
to the
New York Post
to the
Times
of London to his father’s old company, the Herald and Weekly Times, each of the newspapers he’d bought had been a transformative catalyst, turning him into something beyond what he was. Indeed, one central criticism of Murdoch—that he uses the clout of his newspapers to further his personal agenda—misses the larger point: He uses his newspapers to change
himself
. It’s as though he can’t quite express himself without one—or can only express himself with one. Nor, accordingly, can he truly see a paper as separate from himself.

What he got, what the shareholders of News Corp. got, for $5.6 billion would be a newer, fundamentally transformed Rupert Murdoch.

It’s even possible to say that we really might not have the old Rupert to kick around anymore.

The change in Murdoch could not be missed. At the same time, nobody acknowledged it. You couldn’t say he had changed, because that might imply that he’d needed to be changed before—that, for instance, he had long been among the must obdurate and knuckle-headed of right-wingers. Another reason you couldn’t say he had changed was that Murdoch didn’t do or understand that kind of talk—that psychological stuff. And finally, saying that he’d changed might imply he was mellowing—which might imply he was getting old.

But he
had
changed.

This was about Wendi. While Murdoch says she has no politics, what he means is that she has no bias, no prejudice. She does not think in the binary ways in which Murdoch had always thought. She has had to be so open and so plastic and so take-what-may in her own life’s adventure that her natural disposition has become enthusiasm, satisfaction, joie de vivre, and a big embrace of the opportunities and pleasures of the world. In other words, just the opposite of the disgruntlement, antipathy, and embattlement her husband cultivated for so long.

The girl whose American adventure started, before she could speak English, in a kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and took her to the Yale School of Management and then into the arms of Rupert Murdoch is a compelling heroine. Her adventure, in a way, may be as great as his. And he’s obviously captivated by it and by her ambition (their pillow talk, one might suspect, is business talk). You can see this as comic: no fool like an old fool—his gray hair bursting into colors not found in nature. But I think that misses the true quality of the change. Of the plot twist. Rupert Murdoch is, characteristically, seizing an opportunity. The zeitgeist is changing and he’s after it.

She has turned him into…well, almost a liberal. At least she has introduced him to liberals. The angry outsider, the anti-elitist, the foe of airs and pretension has become part of the achieving, glamorous, clever, socially promiscuous set. Davos, Cannes, Sun Valley, Barry Diller’s yacht—this is now Rupert Murdoch’s world. The people around him debate how much this is real, how much he might have gone over to the other side; and how much of it is for Wendi—how much he’s just the put-upon husband.

Surely he remains a militant free-marketer, is still pro-war (begrudgingly—he’s retreated a bit) and uncompromisingly anti-Europe. And then there are his views on the inbreeding of Muslims.

And yet he’s come to like the liberals more than the conservatives—and many of them have come to like him too. Bono and Tony Blair and the Google guys and Nicole Kidman and David Geffen are his and Wendi’s circle. Liking Wendi’s friends so much better than his own (indeed, never really having had friends of his own), he finds himself with an increasingly conflicted temperament.

Along with Wendi, it is also his four adult children, all more or less liberal, certainly more liberal than he has ever been, pulling him in new directions. It’s very simple: Going his own way, he seems to sense, however ruefully, is the way of being old; going their way is young.

Like Wendi, his children are perfectly integrated into a more or less limousine-liberal world. And for all the griping he continues to do about such “values,” and all the ways he eschews talking that kind of talk, he’s in another place now than he was when, in the world’s eyes (particularly the liberal world’s eyes), he became Rupert Murdoch.

His own awareness of this seems tinged with both resignation and curiosity about the new game. One day as we spoke, he tried, with some determination, to describe his son James’ conservative bona fides. Of course then there was the problem that James is also a “tree hugger.” And then too, in a kind of double political reversal, there’s the situation in Britain. Murdoch continues to like Gordon Brown—he might be the Labour prime minister, but he’s conservative, particularly in the Murdoch sense of no pretense, no frills. But then there is James’ infatuation with David Cameron, the Tories’ cool, glam former PR guy, whom Murdoch knew he was, however begrudgingly, going to have to accept.

As I was finishing this book, Wendi urged me to do one more interview. To see Tony Blair.

The arrangement with Blair to sit down with me in his office in Grosvenor Square—John Adams’s old house in London, converted now into a set of minimalist conference rooms—was clearly a family affair (Matthew Freud is one of Blair’s longtime PR consultants). He was doing this at the Murdochs’ request and to buff the Murdoch image—and happily so. They have become brothers in arms, united not just by political wars but by longtime familiarity and even intimacy. By the time I spoke to Blair the Murdoch family was abuzz with consternation of how indiscreet Prue Murdoch might have been with me, which Blair had been fully apprised about (by Prue herself) and which indiscreetness he tried gently and generously to help smooth, “She told me what she said to you,” he laughed.