The Man Who Owns the News (20 page)

The almost instantaneous success of Murdoch’s
Sun,
which will become one of the two most profitable and most powerful media outlets in Britain, is due to Murdoch’s big investment in television advertising (“Pussy Week in the Sun”—a whole week of coverage about British cats—was one of its especially successful promotions) and his positioning of the
Sun
as a working-class antidote to the fusty
Mirror.

It is an entirely new sort of package, a kind of inky precursor to
Married with Children,
the lower-middle-class gross-out comedy that will launch the Fox Network in the United States. The
Sun,
celebrating downmarketness—it’s fun to be
us
rather than
them
—directly makes the British connection between the working class and sex (Page 3 girls) and, indeed, between alcohol and sex. It also makes a bolder grab at popular (i.e., media and celebrity) culture than any British paper before it—and it takes a combative, bold, political line.

In addition to suddenly giving Murdoch a power base, the
Sun
’s startling success turns Murdoch, in the establishment view, into England’s most disreputable and dangerous media figure. He’s some commercial genius at a time when it’s just beginning to become clear, in an unsettling sort of way, that this is a powerful thing. That others sense this power makes him all the more disturbing and noxious.

It’s almost impossible to exaggerate how quickly Murdoch becomes the bogeyman in Britain. He is at this point practically the antithesis of British manners and virtue. The reaction to Murdoch, at first from the most conservative parts of British society but then more and more from the left too, is a mixture of apoplexy and British resignation. He is the rough beast.

There is nobody who better embodies that mood than the queen’s husband, Prince Philip, who for the next forty years will use Murdoch as his personal bête noire. Indeed, at a moment when the British royal family is at nearly the zenith of its popularity, Murdoch is always full of casual disparagements and nasty gossip about it.

To the left, Murdoch represents rampant commercialization—he becomes
Private Eye
’s archetype for vulgarity (“Thanks for the Mammaries” is the
Private Eye
headline inspired by the
Sun
’s chesty Page 3 girls)—and this is even before he becomes stridently right-wing.

It bothers him hardly at all. As for
Private Eye,
of course it would be after him. “They were almost a sort of Establishment in a strange English way” is his almost fond dismissal when he recalled
Private Eye
’s campaign against him for me almost forty years later. There are even elements of being the “Dirty Digger” that he clearly takes as a compliment. Prince Philip’s ill regard is to him an accomplishment.

He’s not conflicted. The disapproval directed his way is, in a sense, negative reinforcement of epochal proportions. The more everybody disapproves, the more he succeeds.

What’s more, he’s working all the time. Or he’s in transit, that other leitmotif of his career, shuttling between continents. He often doesn’t get what people are saying because he’s not around to hear it. The excitement and motion of his life dwarf the heckling. He’s running back and forth to Australia, a regular diet of twenty-five-hour flights. Also, he’s beginning to go to America. For an adrenaline junky, for a success junky, for a newspaper junky, he’s living the life. This is the more-more-more moment:
This is the feeling I want to sustain and keep re-creating.
He had a similar feeling back when he was traversing Australia. Decisions, action, money.

Still, while such a feeling can, perhaps, handily sustain you, the pointed snubs and low-level contempt are likely more difficult for the people closest to you.

It is, after all, a dramatic relocation for his family. When they uproot from Melbourne and land in London in 1968, Rupert and Anna have been married for little over a year. He is thirty-seven. She is twenty-four. Like his first wife, Anna is undereducated, provincial, not yet ready to be a would-be international press lord’s wife. Her calm forbearance is a kind of stoicism. She’s the interloper’s wife.

Later it will be hard to conjure the closed-down, hidebound, judgmental, highly nuanced sense of manners in almost any particular stratum of late-sixties British daily life, high or low. If it is changing, if Murdoch himself is a symptom of that change, actual daily life has yet to be fully informed.

The Murdochs are simply not invited anywhere. They have no friends (except Rupert’s employees). They have money but no entrée.

Anna is the pornographer’s wife.

Then, in the last week of 1969, something happens that will further stain the Murdochs’ life in London: There’s an attempt to kidnap Anna. The Murdochs, returning to Australia for the Christmas holidays, lend their car, a Rolls-Royce, to Alick McKay, one of Murdoch’s executives. McKay’s wife, Muriel, takes the car one day on a shopping trip and is never seen again. The kidnappers, issuing million-pound ransom demands, have mistaken Muriel McKay for Anna.

Oddly, this is the incident that makes Murdoch internationally famous. What’s more, the kidnapping and the bizarreness of the mistake become tied to the Murdoch brand. There’s a massive publicity moment, provoking a torrent of conspiracies and invective against Murdoch. One letter: “I will let Mrs. McKay go if the
News of the World
and the
Sun
publicly announce that they will not corrupt our kids any more by printing all that filth.”

Murdoch is not just the Dirty Digger: To him dark, threatening things attach. Indeed, Mrs. McKay is murdered and fed, possibly, to pigs.

And then another incident. In 1972, at their country place in Ealing, Anna Murdoch, on a rainy night, accidentally runs over an elderly woman in her BMW and kills her. (The Murdochs end up giving the car to Bert Hardy.) It’s a story that’s almost wholly covered up—but it leaves Anna feeling all the more isolated.

Murdoch, single-minded, without self-doubt or equivocation, is nevertheless at this moment in an unnerving position. He has a business that every day is more successful. It’s a success that, in itself, is making his life, and his family’s life, more difficult. In order to manage his life, he will have to negotiate the terms of his success. There is such a thing as being
too
successful.

It will be difficult to continue to be the Dirty Digger. He’s pushed the envelope too far. England is too small.

His solution to the problem of his outsiderness is to make himself, in a sense, the ultimate outsider—a kind of exile.

The literary exile leaves his geographic home to be free to write. There is a similarity to the way Murdoch leaves first Australia and then England to create this separate sphere in which he operates as the man apart.

You can never really catch him.

MARCH
29, 2007

It’s the provocation. He gets people to react to him. And he doesn’t fear or even, apparently, worry about the reaction.

The
Wall Street Journal,
along with the
New York Times,
has stayed safe, in part, because people fear having their good names compromised if they go after it. This touches the media’s sense of propriety. And you offend the media’s sense of propriety, particularly its sense of propriety about itself, at your own great risk. Among the most galling and confounding aspects of the Dow Jones bid is that Murdoch is so blithely willing to violate the norms. He has no institutional respect. He has no fear of offending the community. How do you deal with someone who doesn’t care what you think of him, who is somehow beyond public sanction?

During most of the winter, his people on the eighth floor continued to analyze the Dow Jones business. The company is trading no higher than the mid-thirties; Murdoch has heard about Rich Zannino’s estimate of getting the share price to, tops, $45; Merrill Lynch, in its presentations to the Bancrofts about selling down their holdings, advises that $45 seems optimistic (Murdoch has heard this too). On News Corp.’s eighth floor, even understanding that Murdoch wants to be able to make the most attractive offer possible for Dow Jones—if he decides to go ahead with an offer—they put an uppermost value on the company of $50 a share.

But Murdoch insists they should offer $60. It is a decision to violate the norm—to be the unreasonable, disruptive, fuck-you outsider. Dow Jones management and the Bancroft family might act sanctimonious and high and mighty. But he is calling their bluff.

He leaves word with Rich Zannino’s secretary in New York that he’d like to speak as soon as possible. He’s apologetic when Zannino, on vacation at the Ocean Club in the Bahamas, calls him back, but says he’s eager to see Zannino. How about March 29 at News Corp.?

Zannino’s reaction: “Uh-oh! Why is he calling me directly and why now? Does he want to offer me a job, does he want to have another benign meeting, or is he getting ready to strike?”

Suspecting something large, Zannino might here too have consulted with others at the company. If the goal is not to sell the company—and there is no reason, at this point, to assume that this mandate has changed or will change—Zannino might have headed this off.

If he has any doubts, as he pulls up outside the News Corp. building that morning he gets a call from Jimmy Lee, saying, “Have a good breakfast.”

It is, again, for Zannino an “Uh-oh!” moment.

They have breakfast in one of the nondescript dining rooms on News Corp.’s third floor. Murdoch, for a provocateur, actually tends to beat around the bush. They spend the first forty-five minutes again discussing
American Idol
, Murdoch’s plans for the Fox Business Network, and declining advertising revenues at newspapers.

But finally, he turns to it: “Well, I’m thinking about making an offer to buy Dow Jones.”

Zannino demurs a bit: “You know, Rupert, you know as well as anybody, this isn’t my call, it’s the family’s call. And the family has consistently—and Rupert, even as recently as our last board meeting—said that they’re committed to the independence of Dow Jones and they have no interest in selling the company.”

Murdoch says, “I know that. I was thinking I’d take the offer directly to the board. I know the family feels that way. I’ve called Elefante in the past. He won’t even take a number. The number I’m thinking of is…sixty.”

Zannino: (internally)
Holy shit!
(externally) Silence.

Murdoch goes on, “So I’m thinking I’ll just take that directly to the board to try and get that through the board. Should I call Hockaday, should I call McPherson, should I call Harvey Golub? I think I’ll call Harvey Golub.”

Zannino responds, “Well, you know Harvey’s chairman of the governance committee. He’s one of the most savvy board members we have, so you know. So that’s who you would call.”

Zannino: (internally)
I’ve got to get the hell out of here.

Murdoch: “So that’s what I’m going to do—I’m going to make an offer to the board. Did I just make an offer to you?”

Zannino: “No, you didn’t. You mused about wanting to buy Dow Jones. I told you the family has the call and it’s not for sale, and you told me you were going to contact the board.”

Zannino is trying to find his balance—he’s walked out to the farthest point, and now, teetering on the precipice, he’s trying to come back. Zannino tells Murdoch he isn’t going to tell his board about the offer, because it’s really not an official offer, suggesting to Murdoch that if anybody asks him about it, he should say he was just joking about the $60.

But, in the car, Zannino understands that the breach has just occurred—that he’s let Murdoch in. He breathlessly calls Joe Stern, the Dow Jones general counsel, and tells him: “He gave me a number.” And, mindful of his driver: “I’ll tell you what it is when I get to the office. It’s nuclear.”

Back at the Dow Jones office, each successive person let in on the news understands that the breach is real—and that they can’t close it. More to the point, no one is strong enough to close it.

Murdoch has correctly analyzed that Zannino, who might have blocked his access to the board, has not. And that Michael Elefante won’t block his access to the Bancroft family. Zannino and Stern first call the Dow Jones outside lawyer, Art Fleischer. Then they call Elefante. Both Zannino and Stern note to each other that Elefante doesn’t say “Hell, no,” on the phone, which Roy Hammer would have said. Hammer, Zannino adds, would certainly have said, “Fuck him and the horse he rode in on!” Elefante, instead, says: “I have to consult with family members, my fellow family directors and other family members, before I can give you a reaction on this.” And to himself (after
Oh, shit!
):
Great price, but it’s from the master of evil incarnate.

When Kann arrives at work that afternoon, Zannino and Stern tell him about the $60 offer.

“Boy, that’s a big number,” Kann says. “What did Mike say?”

Zannino tells him, “Mike didn’t shut it down.”

Kann’s real question, however, is: “Why the fuck was Rich going for breakfast with Murdoch?”

The outsider is practically in.

SIX
His Art

APRIL
17, 2007