The Man Who Owns the News (56 page)

The Murdoch-Blair relationship, which began as one of convenience—of Blair the supplicant and Murdoch the cynical, realpolitik manipulator—has morphed into a relationship of philosophical identification.

Blair, curiously, sees the old man in much the same way as his children see him, partly understanding Murdoch as the product of a generational divide: “For someone of his generation—he doesn’t—he breaks out of traditional right-wing thinking at points and he is—he’s not somebody who admires position or wealth unless it’s been made by that person. You know what I mean by that?”

They like each other—and these guys are disliked by many of the same people. Over the thirteen years of this relationship, the tabloid right-winger and new Labour exponent have gone from opportunistic alliance to fast friendship—against which each, with evident humility, leavens his views. For each of them, this began in no small way as an effort to please Wendi. Tony liked Wendi and was therefore willing to get along with her difficult husband, 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.

Just before the New York Democratic primary, when I found myself undecided between Clinton and Obama, I said to Murdoch (a little flirtation, like a little gossip, softens him): “Rupert, I don’t know who to vote for—so I’m going to give you my vote. You choose.”

He paused, considered, nodded slowly, then said, “Obama—he’ll sell more papers.”

Even though his wife had been attending fund-raisers for Obama in Los Angeles—as his daughter, Liz, and her husband, Matthew, had been raising money for him in Notting Hill—this was a leap for Murdoch. Murdoch has traditionally liked politicians to come to him. His historic shift in the 1990s to Tony Blair came after Blair made a pilgrimage to Australia.

Obama, on the other hand, was snubbing Murdoch. Every time he reached out, nothing. (At one point, Gary Ginsberg knew Caroline Kennedy was riding in a car with Obama and begged her to show Obama the
New York Post
’s endorsement.)

It wasn’t until early summer 2008 that Obama relented and a secret courtesy meeting was arranged. The meeting began with Murdoch sitting down knee to knee with Obama at the Waldorf-Astoria. The younger man was deferential to Murdoch—and interested in his story. Obama pursued: What was Murdoch’s relationship with his father? How had he gotten from Adelaide to the top of the world?

Murdoch, for his part, had a simple thought for Obama, which he’d prepared ahead of time. He has known possibly as many heads of state as anyone living today—has met every American president since Harry Truman—and this is what he understands: Nobody gets much time to make an impression. Leadership is about what you do in the first six months.

Then, after he said his piece, Murdoch switched places and let his special guest, Roger Ailes, sit knee to knee with Obama.

Obama lit into Ailes. He said he didn’t want to waste his time talking to Ailes if Fox was just going to continue to abuse him and his wife, that Fox had relentlessly portrayed him as suspicious, foreign, fearsome—just short of a terrorist.

Ailes, unruffled, said it might not have been this way if Obama had come on the air instead of giving Fox the back of his hand.

A tentative truce, which may or may not have historical significance, was thereupon agreed.

There is, possibly, also another motive behind Murdoch’s interest in Obama. Peter Chernin was one of Hillary Clinton’s most significant backers. Murdoch, with his support of Obama, was putting it to Peter. He was denying him. There was something good-natured here, but there was something much less good-natured too. Murdoch’s Chernin problem remained a significant one—it was just good corporate politics to get in the way of Chernin being the one whom the president owed.

And then there was Fox News. Murdoch’s life is now largely spent around people for whom Fox News is a vulgarity and a joke. And if he has happily spent much of his career being regarded as a rude vulgarian, the people who feel this way about his most significant news operation have never been so close to him.

It’s life with Wendi versus life with Fox News.

The embarrassment can no longer be missed. He mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it. He barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not that he would give Fox up—because the money is the money; success still trumps all—in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.

And call it restlessness, too. He has done this—done Fox. You can’t do it any more than he’s done it.

He needs a new chapter, a new plot twist to keep the story going.

His purchase of the
Journal
was in no small way about wanting to trade the illiberal—the belligerent, the vulgar, the loud, the menacing, the unsubtle—for the better-heeled, the more magnanimous, the further nuanced. He was looking for better company.

Also, it is, with a little critical interpretation, perfectly in character. Taking over the
Journal
, actually becoming a respectable publisher, is the ultimate fuck-you to the people who have always believed
they
embody respectability.

Characteristically, his experiment in respectability may yet become an avaricious and all-consuming one if he pursues the
New York Times
, too.

Which he will be temperamentally compelled to do.

Business exists, continues to exist, as a series of fantasies he makes come true.

There was the moment, in the car heading out to the airport in the weeks before the
Wall Street Journal
formally became his, when the news broke that Merrill Lynch was going into the tank. Its CEO, Stan O’Neal, had just been fired. Anticipating events—Merrill’s need for cash, its inevitable sale of assets—Murdoch became, for an hour or so, the presumptive buyer of Merrill’s 20 percent stake in Bloomberg (Murdoch cultivates obsessions, and Bloomberg is one). Soon to have the
Wall Street Journal
, now soon to have his mitts on Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, at least in his own mind, would control worldwide financial information. It was management by fantasy—even though this one, like so many, was shortly to pass.

There was the Yahoo! moment. Or the several Yahoo! moments. During the Dow Jones battle, Peter Chernin, on the West Coast, was trying to talk about a MySpace-Yahoo! combination with Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel (this was, in part, Chernin’s effort to distract attention from the
Journal
deal). But then Semel got ousted. Then, after the Dow Jones deal, as Microsoft was trying to corner Yahoo!, Murdoch, creating a story for a day or two, put it out that News Corp. and Microsoft might have convergent interests in the deal—which would be true only in a parallel universe. But hey, you never know.

Buying the
Wall Street Journal
was surely an exercise of pure fantasy. To think he could take over a company absolutely controlled by a family that had repeatedly said it would never sell was fantasy. To think it was worth what he was paying for it was fantasy. And yet…now it’s his, and if his shareholders are puzzled and grumpy, so be it (he’ll ignore them as much as he ignores his other critics). He’s in it for the long haul—even at seventy-seven.

Everybody around him continues to tell him that buying the
Times
is pretty much impossible. There will be regulatory problems. The Sulzberger family would never ever…And then there’s the opprobrium of public opinion. But it’s obviously irresistible to him. It would be the realization of his destiny. Not just because the
Times
represents the ultimate in newspaper proprietorship and he believes he is the ultimate newspaper proprietor. But because he believes he is the last person to love newspapers—the only person who is willing to treat them right. He thinks the
Times
, with its soft stories and newsless front page and all its talk of being a news
brand
instead of a newspaper—has forsaken what a news
paper
is. He is, he believes, the real white knight of newspapers.

Of course, however plausibly virtuous he’s been so far as the
Journal
’s owner, he’s still the same ol’ Rupe. I’ve watched him go through the numbers, plot out a
Times
merger with the
Journal
’s backroom operations, and fantasize about the staff quitting en masse. He has conjured, too, how, in Murdoch style, he might convince the Sulzbergers to let him in if he promises to leave Arthur in charge—and how he could then make Arthur his puppet.

Shortly after the
Journal
takeover,
Newsday
, the paper that dominates Long Island, was put on the block by its owner, Sam Zell, the real estate magnate who had just bought
Newsday
’s parent company, the
Tribune
. It was a rare opportunity. Murdoch could finally, after thirty years, see a way, by combining operations with
Newsday
, to make the
Post
pay for itself. But he was ambivalent. Because he was dubious about Long Island (real estate, the economy, etc.). Or because he really didn’t want to think about the
Post
—he had other things on his mind. Still, he wouldn’t let Mort Zuckerman, the owner of the
Daily News
, grab
Newsday
—that would hellishly squeeze the
Post.
On the other hand, he might not have minded if Cablevision, the cable company based on Long Island and run by the Dolan family, famous New York numbskulls, suddenly and unaccountably interested in the newspaper business, got it. He went back and forth. His intermediary was David Geffen, Wendi’s close friend, who’d gotten close to Zell because he was interested in the
Los Angeles Times
. It looked good. And although buying
Newsday
would exacerbate Murdoch’s regulatory problems if he were, ultimately, to go after the
Times
, he suddenly rationalized this—the
Times
, after all, was really a national paper now.

But in fact, the Dolans, numbskulls that they are, bid up
Newsday
beyond reason. He didn’t mind—they’d run it into the ground, so no threat. But what seemed to happen here as well was that the
Post
became further unfixed in his mind. He’d traded up. So, suddenly, coldly, his beloved
New York Post
was in an awkward position. With decisiveness and some clandestine business craft, he began a discussion with the
Post
’s number one enemy, Zuckerman. (There is an unbecoming setback with some landscaping in front of News HQ at 1211 Sixth Avenue, where, after an interview one afternoon, I spied Mort Zuckerman waiting on a bench.) Everything was suddenly on the table: a possible joint operating agreement, combining ad sales, merging, selling—all scenarios which would lessen the
Post
’s cash drain on News Corp., his identification with it (as opposed to his new identification with the
Journal
), and its regulatory drag if he decided to go after the
Times
.

His world was new—and getting newer.

But of course it was the same one, too. By the fall of 2008, having stoked great expectations among his liberal executives and family about his growing Obamaism—“He’s going to do it,” said Ginsberg; “He is a rock star. It’s fantastic,” Murdoch had said about Obama at a conference in May—he began to pull back. Obama was wishy-washy, insubstantial, lacked clarity.

Indeed, Murdoch was responding to suggestions about his nascent liberalism—in September I discussed his Obama leanings in
Vanity Fair
—with grumpiness and contrariness.
He
wasn’t a liberal! Who said that? He was, stubbornly, what he wanted to be, what
he
decided he would be.

He could give. He could take. Indeed, the
New York Post
endorsed McCain in September. Everybody around him who had been reminded of this so many times, was reminded again. He was not a product of circumstances. He created the circumstances. He wasn’t anybody’s foil.

On the other hand, he couldn’t help muttering. John McCain was so…
old
.

By the summer of 2008, with News Corp.’s stock sinking to a six-year low—some people in the company were arguing that this meant Dow Jones hadn’t cost $5.6 billion but rather something like $25 billion, thanks to lost market cap—the unique, and perhaps ridiculous, aspects of News once again came into high relief. No other public company of its size was—or had ever been—such a singular reflection of one man. He had managed to make history’s most unbusinesslike business. He had re-created the idea of monarchy. He had figured out how to monetize his deepest hankerings and whims. He had created a vast, occasionally brilliant, often incoherent, still-unfinished personal statement.

Murdoch, in August, was in Beijing—for the Olympics—when he had to do News Corp.’s quarterly earnings call with Wall Street analysts. Murdoch, treated by the Chinese with all the pomp and deference due a dictator, was perhaps at his most inflated—feeling both righteous and indestructible. And he was at his most jet-lagged—hence at his most irascible and peremptory and with the most-winnowed attention span. Pure Murdoch, in other words: immortal and irritable—and not about to listen to anybody.