The Man Who Owns the News (15 page)

“You’ve got Wendi holed up in a hotel in Sydney, and you’ve got Anna here hating you. Why is it my fault?”

“Did you not see the front page? You’ve upset them all.”

And yet she is in some ways the child Murdoch is most comfortable with—or at least the child who is least afraid of him. Within News Ltd., in Australia, people remark that she treats her father more like a husband—an irritating husband she has to beat some sense into.

For her part, she finds it just slightly unsettling that he regularly mistakes her for one of his sisters.

Prue is the only ally he has when Wendi comes into the picture (still, she tells an Australian documentary filmmaker, he was a “dirty old man”). And indeed, during the divorce negotiations with Anna, who is trying to guarantee that neither his new wife nor possible new children would gain an interest in News Corp., Anna tries to assign Prue a lesser position in the family trust.

ELISABETH

Murdoch’s ideas about girls seem to change substantially with Elisabeth, born ten years after Prue. This is partly about the broad cultural change that’s happening as Elisabeth is growing up. But it’s also that Elisabeth is growing up in New York—a particular age in New York when so much of the focus, especially in the circles she and her family move in, is on the success, achievement, advantages, and connections of the children as well as the parent.

Elisabeth goes to The Brearley School, where Murdoch is hardly the only billionaire father and where Elisabeth is not even the most notable heiress.

It’s a hothouse of competition—academic and social and, not least of all, for ultimate worldly position.

He begins raising her with an idea of how he was raised. When Elisabeth is in the ninth grade, he sends her to Geelong Grammar, the same school his parents sent him to that he hated. It isn’t any better an experience for Elisabeth. She’s back within a year.

She is often uncontrollable—including a suspension from school for drinking. She fights more with her strict, formal mother than with him. Away so often, he’s the good guy.

He doesn’t actually want to know what she’s up to. He’s careful not to know.

Petronella Wyatt, the daughter of his friend Woodrow Wyatt, has Liz, in her memory of a teenage summer trip, climbing on the back of a Vespa and roaring off with an Italian man who chatted them up in a Roman bar.

She goes to Vassar College from Brearley. In her senior year, she falls in love with Elkin Kwesi Pianim, the son of a Ghanaian political prisoner. Murdoch sends Elisabeth to work for News in Australia after she graduates—not without thinking the distance might end her relationship with Elkin. But she wants to come back. In September 1993 she marries Elkin in a huge Catholic wedding in Los Angeles. Elkin, of course, goes to work for Fox.

But Elisabeth remains restless. She convinces her father to help her do something on her own. He suggests that television stations are a good bet. The following February, weeks away from having her first baby, Cornelia, with a loan from Australia’s Commonwealth Bank facilitated by her father, she and Elkin buy two small NBC affiliates in California for $35 million. She’s a harridan of a manager—ripping through the staff, sacking many old stalwarts, and slashing operating costs. Eighteen months later, she and Elkin sell the stations for a $12 million profit.

She gets into Stanford Business School, but her father says he can teach her much more than she could learn in any old MBA program. “I called my dad and said, ‘I’ve gotten into Stanford and I’m going.’ He said, ‘Are you fucking crazy? No, you are not. I can give you a much better MBA of life than anybody at Stanford can give you, you know. Come work for me.’” She joins BSkyB, based in London, in 1996, reporting directly to the CEO, Sam Chisholm, then promptly becomes pregnant with her second child. She also becomes a high-profile figure in the London media social scene. Meanwhile, Elkin, who is running the couple’s small venture capital company, Idaho Partners, along with his brother Nicholas Pianim, launches an upmarket Afro-Caribbean weekly and buys the sponsorship rights for London’s annual Afro-Caribbean Hair and Beauty Exhibition. He also tries to launch a television station specifically for black audiences.

At Sky, she clashes publicly with Chisholm, who refers to her openly as a “management trainee.” Murdoch, in this instance, chooses his child over his manager, and in 1997 Chisholm resigns. But Murdoch, annoyed by Elisabeth’s failure to get along with Chisholm, her latest pregnancy, with her second daughter, Anna, and the increasingly critical reports of her London life, doesn’t give her the top job. Elisabeth “has some things to work out,” he tells Mathew Horsman, a reporter from the
Guardian
. “She has to decide how many kids she is going to have, where she wants to live.” He adds of his children, “Currently it is their consensus that Lachlan will take over. He will be the first among equals, but they will all have to prove themselves first.”

Elisabeth starts working with Matthew Freud, great-grandson of Sigmund and the most notorious PR man in London, on a rebranding campaign for Sky—and, not incidentally, on an effort to improve her profile in the press. Their affair shortly becomes public.

Disappointed by Lachlan’s ascendancy within the company, and taking her mother’s side in the marital battle with her father,
and
once again pregnant—by Freud—Elisabeth resigns from Sky in May 2000, saying that she plans to start an independent production company.

The tabloids revel in details about her on-again off-again relationship with Freud and her breakup with Elkin. Freud even briefly walks out on her when their daughter Charlotte, born in November 2000, is three months old. Over both of her parents’ objections, she marries Freud in the British wedding of the year at his family’s country home in August 2001.

Although she has publicly said that she will be primarily a passive investor in Shine, the independent production company she is backing, and that she intends to spend more time with her children, by the time her father is thinking about buying the
Wall Street Journal
she’s running the biggest independent television production company in the United Kingdom.

Two months before he bids for the
Journal,
she will finally give birth to a boy, Samson Murdoch Freud.

LACHLAN

He’s the first son, which has a profound pull on Murdoch. It also may be that frictionless, affable, constant Lachlan is easy to get along with. Uncomplicated. This is what makes him, in the eyes of the many Murdoch-philes, not Murdoch enough. Curiously, though, it makes him more Australian, which has become his adopted, or in a sense reclaimed, home.

Within a few months of his abrupt and emotional leave-taking from News in 2005, he and his wife, Sarah, have not just settled into Sydney but have become pop culture figures—he as famous in Australia as Prince William in England, and she the head of the major Murdoch charity, and in 2007, the fetching hostess of a popular morning show. They’re the king and queen of Bronte Beach. Australia is his place.

He was born in London in 1971 but grew up in New York. It was a wholly upper-class, establishment—
liberal
Eastern establishment, to be sure—American upbringing. Dalton and Trinity in Manhattan. Then Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Then Princeton.

After Princeton, Lachlan spends a couple of months at News Corp.’s Sydney headquarters as a management trainee before it’s announced in August 1994 that he will become the general manager of Queensland Newspapers, the Brisbane-based publisher of the
Courier Mail
. This is, remember, the newspaper that the Herald and Weekly Times trustees convinced Dame Elisabeth to sell to the company after Keith Murdoch’s death. So at twenty-two—the same age at which his father took over the
Adelaide News
—Lachlan takes his management role. (Not incidentally, in the rival Packer dynasty, Jamie Packer, who is four years older than Lachlan, has begun to take over duties from his father.) Three years later—Lachlan’s preternatural good looks, signature tattoos, motorcycle, and famous name having made him an iconic Aussie—he’s promoted to running all of News Corp. in Australia.

That year, 1997, the Murdoch children are summoned to New York, where Rupert tells them that he’s settled the issue of succession and that Lachlan will end up running the company.

In 1999, Lachlan marries Sarah O’Hare—all of the Murdoch children get married young—who is the face (or bottom, actually) of Bonds, the most famous Australian underwear brand. The wedding at Cavan, at which Prue blows up at her father, is front-page news in Australia—the romance of the year, an Australian fairy tale. At Anna’s request, Wendi Deng isn’t invited and waits in a hotel room in Sydney.

Lachlan is a constant newsroom presence in Australia, carefully modeling himself, just as his father had done decades before, as the boy publisher. Among his closest friends in the company is Col Allan, the boozing, bad-tempered editor of Sydney’s
Daily Telegraph,
whom Lachlan later appoints as editor of the
New York Post
.

In 1999, his father brings him back to New York as the head of U.S. publishing and then eighteen months later gives him the title of deputy chief operating officer—officially the number three guy at News Corp.

But, other than the
Post,
he has no real job—he’s resisted everywhere else at News Corp. in the United States. It’s a lesson that his brother and sister both take keen note of: Being too close to their father, and the people who want to be close to him, isn’t a propitious move. Quite the opposite: To be at a distance, at a far remove from the old man, makes them the Murdochs everybody who is also distant from the old man wants to get close to.

Officially, Lachlan will say he’s moving to Australia to give his sons, Kalan, born in 2004, and Aidan, born in 2006, a better life.

JAMES

Unlike Lachlan, James
is
like his father, News Corp. people believe. Or at least he tries to be. But it may not be so much his father that he’s emulating as some generic idea of the advanced business figure. In open-necked white dress shirt and steel-rimmed glasses, he’s aggressive, implacable, focused, remote, fit, precise. His father is obviously proud, even perhaps slightly afraid of him, but, one might suspect, a little confused by him too.

His father, being a more clearly primitive business creature, is perhaps most mystified by James’ self-conscious MBAisms—even more mystified because James does not have an MBA. He is so effortlessly programmatic, reductive, and process-oriented. And he’s a marketer—the one thing his father has never been.

Counterintuitively, James’ diffidence or contrariness, his relative shunning of the family business, is what seems to have paid off. At fifteen, while working for the
Daily Mirror
in Sydney, he was famously snapped sleeping during a press conference, and the photo appeared in the rival
Sydney Morning Herald
the next day. A bleached-blond hipster, with various piercings, he drops out of Harvard in his junior year, after spending time in Rome, vaguely thinking about a career as an archaeologist. Instead he decides to make the hip-hop label he’s started in college, Rawkus Records, his full-time career. He swaps out the bleached-blond hair and earrings for a rugged beard and eyebrow stud.

Rawkus is a critical if not quite financial success, with Mos Def and, early in his career, Eminem on the label. His father agrees to buy Rawkus in 1996, and James goes to work in News Corp.’s music and tech division.

In 1997, he’s made the head of News America Digital Publishing, a job he will later describe as “doing triage” as he attempts to fix the old empire’s missteps into digital media (though he does not particularly fix anything). His wardrobe changes to sharp suits and thick black glasses in his new persona as the young entrepreneur.

When the Internet bubble bursts, James is shipped out to Hong Kong to run the ailing Star TV business, where he becomes, echoing his father, an apologist for the Chinese government. Among the Murdochs, not a famously verbal bunch, he develops a reputation as the family polemicist. In 2000, he delivers the Alternative MacTaggart, the formal contrarian address, at the Edinburgh Television Festival, and excoriates both English-language centricity and Hong Kong’s democracy movement. The next year, with his father sitting in the audience, he delivers a speech at the Milken Institute in Los Angeles accusing Western media of being unfair to the Chinese government and describing Falun Gong as a “dangerous” and “apocalyptic cult.” (Tunku Varadarajan, in the
Wall Street Journal,
characterizes James as a college dropout involved in the “craft of craven submission to the communist regime in China.”) Sky Asia turns its first profit in his third year of running it. His father promptly moves him to Britain to run BSkyB.

Around this time, inside News Corp., James becomes “the real thing.” Among the reasons James has come to be described in this language (usually when phrases are repeated at News Corp. it means that Rupert has said them first) is that he is not his brother. The consensus that has formed around James as the better successor comes, at least in part, from the fact that he was farther from the company and from the top job. So the more James was praised, the more that took from Lachlan’s inevitability. The more James was praised, the more his father had an alternative. This reinforces the idea that staying away from the epicenter of News Corp. is the better strategy—one now being followed by Lachlan.