The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch

2.0 out of 5 stars
The Most Distracting Writing…Ever
When I reached the 2/3rd mark of this book, I had to quit. Will someone please take Michael Wolff back to school to learn how to write correctly?

“Pull up a comfortable chair, here; have a glass of this great wine I’ve discovered, and let me tell you all about Rupert Murdoch…”

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…

1.0 out of 5 stars
A book about Wolff, not Murdoch?
Potentially interesting subject but the author’s ego looms larger than that of his subjects. Wolff has so many opinions that Rupert and co barely get a word in edgeways.

Here’s a book that wouldn’t even make a half way decent very short article in Vanity Fair. Most of the story-telling and characters run from flat to downright boring. In light of the back WSJ acquisition story, influential if not colorful people Wolff got access to, big media world knowledge that he keeps reminding you he has, etc. there’s no excuse for such a poor outcome.

5.0 out of 5 stars
RUPERT AND WARREN SO MUCH ALIKE
IF THE AUTHOR’S HAUGHTY ATTITUDE WAS NOT AS OMNIPRESENT THE BOOK WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER. WISE CRACKS AND SLANDER ASIDE THE LIFE OF MR.

2.0 out of 5 stars
A Poorly Written, Unorganized, Gossipy Waste of Time
This poorly-written book is supposed to be about Rupert Murdoch but it is more accurately about two aspects of Murcdoch’s life–his recent marriage to a Chinese woman and his…

1.0 out of 5 stars
Boring … No Quotes
For all of the vaunted access that Mr. Wolff was granted to Murdoch, how is it that the book has almost no quotes from the man? Or from anyone else for that matter.