Wolff's great new biography portrays Murdoch as 20th century fox
Michael Wolff's irresistible new biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch
No, wait! It's actually a clever hagiography of Murdoch that whitewashes his role in the destruction of American media and presents him as some kind of acquirer-savant who helped transform a moribund news business ... and might be turning liberal, anyway.
Either of the above interpretations would be perfectly acceptable takeaways after a reader breezed through Wolff's entertaining 300-page treatment of Murdoch.
Unquestionably Murdoch is the most important media titan in the English-speaking world today, as the force behind News Corp., which now controls 25 newspapers, 27 TV stations (though not WDAF-TV, which it owned from 1997 to 2008), the Fox network and movie studios, satellite TV companies abroad and, need I even add, Fox News Channel.
Despite extraordinary access to and through his subject -- Murdoch not only sat with him for many interviews but urged family and close associates to talk to him as well -- Wolff in the end simply doesn't have enough information to draw definitive conclusions about the man, except to say that his fiercest detractors probably paint too cartoonish a picture. His subject is a “game but difficult subject … not good at explaining himself and gets annoyed and frustrated when asked to do so.” Plus he mumbles in Australian.
Still, it's fun to watch Wolff leap back and forth across the fence as he collects his opinions, in a manner that fans of his monthly column in Vanity Fair are accustomed to.
Murdoch, Wolff argues, is not a man of his times -- if his news products seem arch, that's because Murdoch is arch, a "Fifties Dad" whose right-wing sympathies are well known. But his timing has always been impeccable, whether jumping into British journalism as a conservative just as the labor-socialist establishment is crumbling, or backing Ed Koch for Mayor just as New York City is on the verge of bankruptcy, or bidding $60 a share for Dow Jones just as the nutty Bancroft clan that controls the Journal is open to selling for the very first time.
Wolff recapitulates with considerable relish the decades that Murdoch spent building his brand: breaking London's notorious print unions, emerging as the surprise bidder again and again as prized media properties go on the market, getting into movies despite his complete disdain (which persists) for moviegoing, getting into video and then, as recounted here in great detail, buying a newspaper that was famously not for sale, especially to him.
When Wolff uses his access to burrow deep inside the Murdoch clan and News Corp., he finds, surprise!, dysfunction galore.
In 1998 Murdoch divorced his wife of more than 30 years and married an ambitious Chinese woman half his age. In The Man Who Owns the News, Wolff challenges the prevailing journalistic orthodoxy about Wendi Murdoch with a persuasive counter-narrative that makes her out to be not a golddigger but a smart, vivacious, all-business gal (which Anna, the ex, was not) who makes Rupert's life better (which Anna, it seems, did not).
Wolff also credits Wendi with building the high-powered social network around him that includes David Geffen and Bono and all kinds of folks that 1980s Rupert probably wouldn't have been caught dead with. As for the News Corp. news, much of it gleaned from not-for-attribution interviews with insiders, the juiciest tidbit involves Fox News and Murdoch's supposed disdain for it and the fact that Bill O'Reilly and Bill-o's boss, Roger Ailes, scare him -- but also make piles of cash for News Corp. The role of Peter Chernin, Murdoch's No. 2 at News Corp., who occupies a gigantic office in Los Angeles, near the glamor of TV and movies, and is so unlike the rowdies and the righties who helped Murdoch build his brand, is a topic Wolff chews on at great and almost schadenfreudy length.
Wolff's gossipy tone, his psychoanalytical bent and his sweeping conclusions, which are not always well supported by the footnotes, don't entirely seem worthy of an author whose subject, as Wolff writes in the acknowledgements, "opened every door I asked him to open," and left him alone to write his book.
What keeps The Man Who Owns the News from lapsing into the weird experimental territory charted by Dutch -- Edmund Morris' infamous semi-fictional life of Ronald Reagan -- is its author's prevailing fondness for his subject, particularly Murdoch's undiminished ardor for print and his conviction (as Wolff puts it) that newspapers are in trouble because their owners don't love newspapers the way he does.
It is strange to realize that this empire builder of the electronic media age would consider a career pinnacle the acquisition of a dowdy, underperforming 20th-century broadsheet like the Journal. But that's what Wolff argues … unless, he adds, Murdoch goes after the New York Times next.
