F or nine months, I’ve been interviewing Rupert Murdoch, in an unlikely spirit of openness precipitated by his great satisfaction in having bought The Wall Street Journal, about journalism, his business, politics, his family, and the future for a new biography. I was warned about his charm by many other journalists—warned not to fall victim to it. So the surprise was his lack of it. He’s without introspection and self-analysis and doesn’t like to talk about the past. What’s more, he mumbles terribly (and with a heavy Aussie accent) and seldom finishes a sentence. For the first three months of our interviews, he never addressed a word to or even looked at my research assistant, Leela de Kretser, who was at each of the sessions, and ignored her questions—perhaps because it’s not necessary to acknowledge a girl, or possibly because it was embarrassing for him that she was, at the time, a pregnant girl. (She had the baby. He eventually warmed up.)
But his odd lack of seductiveness or felicitousness—contributing to his aura of villainy—became after a while alluring in itself. There’s no spin, because he really can’t explain himself. Rather, what you see is what you get. He’s transparent. The nature of the beast is entirely evident.
One morning when Leela and I arrived at Murdoch’s office for another interview session, we found the 77-year-old News Corp. chairman and C.E.O. hunched over the phone reporting out a story. He’d been out the night before and gotten a tip. Now he was trying to nail it down. His side of the conversation was straight reporter stuff: Who could he call? How could he get in touch? Will they confirm? Barked, impatient, just the facts. Here was the old man, in white shirt, singlet visible underneath, doing one of the same basic jobs he’d been doing since he was 22, having inherited the Adelaide News in Australia from his father. And he was good at it. He was parsing each answer. Re-asking the question. Clarifying every point. His notepad going. He knew the trade. Of how many media-company C.E.O.’s could that be said? This wasn’t a destroyer of journalism—this was a practitioner.
On the other hand, he was trying to smear somebody. At the dinner party he’d attended—since his marriage to Wendi Deng, he’s become an unlikely fixture at fashionable tables—he heard that a seniormost Hillary Clinton operative was a partner in an online porn company. He didn’t like the operative, didn’t like—no matter how much he had tried—Hillary Clinton. 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, to his credit, that was the end of it. Well, sort of. Because he kept recycling it. While it did not end up on the Post’s “Page Six,†it became a staple in Murdoch’s repertoire of whispers and confidences and speculations. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t need to print or broadcast the news to make it … news.
He may be among the biggest gossips in New York. In the 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, I believe, is how the rumor about Michael Bloomberg’s buying The New York Times got legs. I offered it to him as a bit of speculation—conflating two of his favorite subjects, Bloomberg, whom he greatly admires, and the Times, which he does not—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, “It makes sense. I think I’ll ask him.†And suddenly the rumor was everywhere—he was telling everybody, which made it true. 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 thinks, could act on it.
He’s a troublemaker—maybe the last troublemaker in the holier-than-thou, ethically straitjacketed news business:
Gary Ginsberg, Murdoch’s chief aide and one of News Corp.’s highest executives—and a former Clinton White House staffer—told his boss that he was planning to go to Paris, in August 2007, for the wedding of his friend Doug Band, Bill Clinton’s chief aide. Band was marrying the handbag designer Lily Raf?i, and the wedding was going to be a party-hearty Clinton affair with supermarket magnate Ron Burkle, real-estate-heir-film-producer Steve Bing, and Bill Clinton himself, Ginsberg reported to Murdoch (Ginsberg too knows that Murdoch likes—needs—gossip). So Murdoch, onto not just a good story but also a way to annoy Ginsberg, secretly called the 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 & pals do paris (the city, not the bimbo).
The great fear about Rupert Murdoch, among journalists and proper liberals everywhere, beyond even his tabloidism and his right-wing politics, is that he acknowledges no rules. He does it, without mercy, his way. If you watch him up close, this certainly seems true. He sits in his office and plots and schemes and figures out ways to get (to take) what he wants.
Although he’d agreed with the Bancroft family, Dow Jones’s former owners, to accept a strict structure for protecting The Wall Street Journal’s editorial independence, I watched how blithely he paid no attention to it. It barely figured into his plans or consciousness. Except that he seemed briefly tickled to have figured out that if he merely called his chosen editor, Robert Thomson, the publisher, then he’d have his choice. He was only slightly confounded (and a bit bemused) that it took Journal editor Marcus Brauchli four months to get the message that he was out.
Still, up close, such lack of restraint doesn’t necessarily seem so threatening. It seems, in fact … fun. There’s no artifice. There’s no bureaucracy. There’s no pretense. There’s no corporate this and that—Murdoch’s truly the anti-corporate man. It’s all determination and enthusiasm. It’s all about his passions and the effect he can have. (Of course he was going to replace the Journal’s editor. What was everybody thinking?)
It’s his adventure. Part of the reason so many of the people around him are so loyal—such true believers—is that they’re caught up in it. It’s a grand enterprise.
Though not necessarily such a well-organized or even rational one.
There was the moment, in the car heading out to the airport in the weeks before The Wall Street Journal formally became his, when Merrill Lynch was going into the tank. Its C.E.O., Stan O’Neal, had just been fired. Anticipating events—Merrill’s need for cash, its inevitable sale of assets—Murdoch, for an hour or so, decided he ought to be 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’s management by fantasy—even though this one, like so many, was shortly to pass.
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 (News Corp. shares are down by more than 30 percent since he bought Dow Jones), 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 77.
