The Man Who Owns the News (31 page)

Still, it is exactly this lack of process, or lack of traditional news sense, that has made Allan in News Corp. parlance and context a “genius.” Having no news, he can take a press release or AP wire story of no consequence and package it with a great headline and terrific picture into a perfect tabloid crisis. In Australia, a minor upturn in the census figures for unwed mothers became NATION OF BASTARDS. For a pro forma report about lower test scores in schools, Allan singled out a local high school class and, over its picture, slapped the headline THE CLASS THAT FAILED US. At the
Post,
France, Germany, Russia, and Belgium voting against the UN Iraq War resolution became THE AXIS OF WEASELS. James Baker and Lee Hamilton, who chaired the Iraq Study Group, became SURRENDER MONKEYS.

The other part of his genius, of course, is his devotion to Murdoch. (One day, according to News Corp. legend, Allan and Roy “Rocky” Miller—who will retire in 2008 after forty-seven years at News Corp.—were sailing with Murdoch, and Murdoch took a sensitive phone call. Murdoch cupped the phone and said to his boys, “Would you mind…?” Naturally, they both jumped into the water, then swam in circles until Murdoch invited them back on board.)

The point, distinct in corporate America, is about the kind of flamboyance that makes for shameless and sensational journalism, or about having people who know they exist only at the boss’s sufferance (he’ll tolerate them and nobody else will)—or, perhaps most of all, about his own personal amusement.

A News Corp. executive in London sits next to Murdoch at a dinner and, boldly, brings up the subject of Rebekah Wade, whose continuing rise in the company is confounding to other more disciplined players. He explains fondly, “She’s a larrikin,” the Australianism for a much-loved rogue.

Perhaps most vividly, in the larrikin regard, there’s Judith Regan—the ultimate News Corp. product who, in fact, is sacrificed in part for the
Wall Street Journal
.

She may be the only American Murdoch has ever met who instinctively got the Australian and English tabloid thing—that mix of combativeness, extremism, sexuality (or not sexuality so much as dirty talk), and sanctimony. If there were a Pulitzer Prize for tabloidism, Judith Regan would have certainly gotten it.

Her abrupt end at News Corp. comes in December 2006, not long after Murdoch’s second meeting with Richard Zannino. The scandal that is blowing up around her—the kind of scandal that Murdoch almost never runs from—is something that everybody else in the company (just as anybody in any company would) wants to rid themselves of as quickly as possible. Only Murdoch himself might be able to save her—and in the past, he would have. He’s saved her many times.

He hesitates here, and then folds. He is choosing the
Wall Street Journal
over the ultimate tabloid confection—the staged confession of O. J. Simpson in book and television form.

There was a concerted and telling effort at News Corp. to disappear Judith, or at least the Judith of Murdoch’s affections. To distance Rupert from her. In the telling, she was just an HR problem. The greater truth was that she was not just a News Corp. employee but its creation. Not just unemployable anywhere else, but Rupert’s pet. Not just his pet, but an example to him of what a journalist should be—the last of the tabloid originals, a throwback, full of piss and vinegar, larger than life.

Book people, no matter that he owns one of the world’s largest book publishers, put Murdoch into a sour and impatient mood. Their sensibility is not just different from his but the sensibility he is most against—snobbish, literal, phlegmatic, establishment.

Judith Regan, however, is a working-class Irish-Italian from Long Island, who acquired poise at Vassar and then, in some down-wardly mobile twist, went to work for the
National Enquirer
. She had a child without getting married (well before this was respectable) by a man who’d shortly end up in prison for dealing drugs. Needing a more stable life than following tabloid stories, she got a part-time job at Pocket Books, one of the Simon and Schuster paperback imprints, where, spectacularly, and almost immediately, she started to produce bestsellers, and where she became in no time at all a fabulous irritant to the book publishing business. Hers was a level of vulgarity and fury perhaps never before seen in the book world. Murdoch, who met her in early 1993, took to her right away—and hired her, not least of all, to annoy the people at HarperCollins. With Murdoch’s protection, she not only got away with her obscene, grotesque, often funny, not just politically incorrect but reprehensible, not necessarily truthful monologues (definitely monologues—she doesn’t really engage in conventional conversation) but expanded their range and frequency.

What she communicates most forcefully, and what Murdoch has always found so appealing, is that she both hates authority and loves power.

The proximate cause of why she is fired in late 2006 involves charges that she made anti-Semitic comments to a News Corp. lawyer, but the truth is, she regularly squared off against myriad ethnicities, sexual orientations, genders (she actually manages to be both anti-women and anti-men). Murdoch either loved her bilious, vitriolic, manic, gynecological, anti-everybody-and-every-propriety conversation or loved the effect it had on everybody else at News Corp. who had to put up with it. Her inappropriateness was, in a sense, a demonstration of his power.

Indeed, she was the perfect demonstration that inside News Corp., if you have Murdoch’s nod, you have vast powers of your own. It’s quite impossible to imagine her fantastic and improbable career being possible without someone exactly like Murdoch in her corner.

A year before her final tumble out of favor, in a state of pique and hubris notable even for her, she made the unilateral decision to up and relocate her publishing company, Regan Books—a division of Regan Media, itself a division of HarperCollins, a division of News Corp.—to Los Angeles from New York, a move the
New York Times
found significant enough for a front-page story. In the
Times
’ view, Judith’s moving her boutique publishing imprint to Los Angeles was possibly a harbinger of a major shift in the media landscape (the view inside HarperCollins and News Corp. was, as always, substantial marveling and vexation at her uncanny publicity talents).

But more to the point, one the
Times
entirely missed: She had become anathema at HarperCollins headquarters in New York—not just a reviled figure but a mocked one—and had to get out.

In the tumble of ethics charges surrounding Bernard Kerik, former New York City police commissioner and business partner of former mayor Rudy Giuliani, when he was nominated by President Bush to be homeland security chief in December 2004, it emerged that Judith was one of his two mistresses (he was cheating on his wife with Judith, but on Judith with another mistress), trysting with him in a special Ground Zero apartment and working out at the gym together. It was part of her tough-guy thing: Men are brutes, so go with the most brutish of them. She herself had a thing for cops and underworld types—as tabloid people usually do—talking often, and not necessarily in an amusing way, about having her former husband bumped off. When Judith lost a cell phone at the office, she had Kerik send out New York City police to the homes of Regan Books employees whom she suspected of snatching the phone.

The Kerik debacle officially made Judith a tabloid figure herself. There was the paranoid part: She’d threatened the unfaithful Kerik with what she had on him, then began accusing people, including News Corp. people, of threatening her because of the way she might hurt Giuliani’s presidential chances. (After she is fired, this becomes the central charge she levels against News Corp. in a $100 million lawsuit—it canned her to protect Rudy.)

“Judith” became, as much to News Corp. insiders as to anyone else, a punch line.

And yet her corporate bad behavior (or otherwise self-destructive behavior) continued to hold the interest of the boss.

Part of the tortured explanation at News Corp. about how the O. J. affair happened involves separating Rupert—who is now said to have soured on her earlier, during the Kerik affair—from Judith. Rupert, News Corp. people say, started to regard her as a “really embarrassing aunt you keep at a distance.”

“He did not seek out or relish her company,” is the official, dyspeptic status report on their relationship. Indeed, Murdoch will later maintain he spoke to her only “once every couple of years.”

And yet Rupert personally approved the O. J. deal.

Indeed, he would: O. J. Simpson confessing, or even seeming to confess, to two of the world’s most famous murders would be one of the greatest tabloid stories ever told.

The Fox network took on the O. J. project with Judith as its central figure—if she wasn’t exactly a television celebrity, she was, after all, a News Corp. celebrity—without dissent from anyone at the network or at News Corp., and, in fact, with apparent approval from News Corp. COO Peter Chernin. The appetite for both O. J. and television confessions being constant, Fox had every right to expect that an O. J. confession might do some of the biggest numbers of the year.

The furor over the book and show erupted in the week before Thanksgiving. Murdoch was at his ranch in Australia when the announcement of the book and the interview was made on November 14, 2006. Gary Ginsberg was on his way back from Australia. By the time Ginsberg landed, his BlackBerry was going crazy.

Arguably, the tabloid landscape in America had suddenly shifted.

O. J., who had begun the present tabloid epoch, was in a sense ending it, causing a sudden, mass reversion to a shocked-and-appalled bourgeoisie sensibility. Judith’s market value took a direct hit.

While this was evident to Ginsberg, it was not yet evident to Judith—or, for that matter, yet to Murdoch. She continued to work the publicity levers. This was going to be the biggest on-air interview since Michael Jackson confessed to sleeping with little boys. Potentially way bigger. Meanwhile, O.J.’s victims’ families—the Browns and the Goldmans, astute media practitioners—went into full attack mode.

Fox affiliates began to react, expressing distaste and reluctance to air the two-part interview.

What’s more, Fox News, in an almost insurmountable internal political complication for Judith, turned its vaunted media venom on the project. The possible reasons for this slap were varied: tensions between Fox News chief Roger Ailes and News Corp. COO Peter Chernin; an effort to distance Fox News, with its version of heartland moralism, from the Fox network (always a dicey branding issue), with its outréness; or Ailes’ antipathy to Regan—he’d moved her short-lived talk show off the air. It’s also worth noting that Ailes, among the most formidable people in modern media, had, after his marriage ended in the nineties, once gone on a date with Judith, describing it ever after as “the scariest three hours of my life.”

In some sense, News Corp. had joined the rest of the American media in being against Judith. Murdoch was her only holdout. And it is not at all unlikely that he might have continued to protect her were it not for knowing that soon the battle for Dow Jones would begin and the last thing he needed was to be harboring the woman who was trying to give O. J. Simpson blood money.

And then there occurred the raging, loaded, fraught, contemptuous, abusive, allegedly anti-Semitic conversation—this one with Mark Jackson, the HarperCollins lawyer. They must have been waiting for it, could have counted on it like the sun rising—Judith going bananas.

When she did, the cooler corporate heads at News Corp. went to Murdoch—one can only imagine with what satisfaction—and, finally, he ended it.

After she’s fired, Judith begins telling friends that something has changed at News Corp. That it isn’t the same company anymore. Rupert himself has changed. The treatment he received for his prostate cancer several years ago has made him soft. And Wendi Murdoch is part of the problem. It’s Wendi’s craving for respectability that has made Rupert weak. She’s…liberal! Peter Chernin is a Democrat! Gary Ginsberg worked for Clinton! Rupert is forsaking his tabloid heart in the quest for mainstream, yuppie respectability. The greatest media company of the age has become like any other—pathetically concerned about what people think.

Of course, there might be something to this.

Still, in the aftermath of all this, it is Judith who is left representing the psychopathology of the media—its shameless self-promoters, so without a moral center, so motivated by their own grandiosity and need for attention that they have bankrupted the culture—not Murdoch.

There is one other not insignificant point in the tension between Murdoch’s tabloidism and other more elite, if you will, kinds of journalism: How much does he realize, or accept, the difference?

The
Australian,
his respectable, mostly money-losing 1964 start-up—it would eventually make a slight profit—is thought by many to be the best paper in Australia. But in lots of ways it has been a dogged act of good behavior, churchgoing rectitude—a kind of philanthropy. His stated mission, from the beginning, was to create a paper that his father would have been proud of. Then, along the way, it turned into something to deflect his mother’s disapproval. Along the way too, it has clearly become a personal point of pride—and part of the proof offered to the Dow Jones shareholders that he can, indeed, do “serious” journalism. But it is a calculated anomaly—and not a model that he has chosen to repeat.

The
Times
of London is the other example of Murdoch on a higher plane. The
Times
is usually crisp and straightforward—without affect, and without much personality. It’s utilitarian. What he seems to have no feeling for, or a resistance to, is a high-end sensibility—the conceits, the snobberies, the look and feel, and the attention to detail that help create a more articulated, nuanced, and exclusive voice.