The Man Who Owns the News (34 page)

It’s instructive to consider the legacies of Murdoch’s three most direct owner-operator peers (each of whom he helped destroy): Robert Maxwell, whose likely suicide by drowning in 1991, off the back of his yacht
Lady Ghislaine
as it cruised around the Canary Islands, happened just as his empire was about to implode; Conrad Black, whose trial for looting his own company was in progress during the Dow Jones battle; and Ted Turner, who made a fortune almost as great as Murdoch’s but lost his company.

Maxwell owned the Mirror Group in London, which he over-paid for, and then, obsessed with doing what Murdoch did, over-paid as well for the
Daily News
in New York. Maxwell wanted to own newspapers and media outlets for many of the same reasons Murdoch wanted them—for influence, for cash flow, and because, like Murdoch, he had a chip on his shoulder and owning media was a best-revenge scenario: You had the last word. But Maxwell was an exaggerated and comic figure. A tyrant—an obese tyrant. And a needy one. All his appetites were out of control. He was, in fact, a type of proprietor that newspapermen have a secret fondness for: an aberrant being, a ridiculous figure whose excesses provide a dramatic and amusing narrative—and whom you don’t have to take seriously. Maxwell confirmed what everybody knows about proprietors: They want to own, but they don’t really want to pay attention.

Conrad Black, like Murdoch, emerged from a small market—provincial Canadian newspapers—looking for a larger stage in London, where he acquired the Telegraph Group. Like Murdoch, he was an inveterate right-winger, intent on retailing his conservative views—and on gaining political influence for himself. He was, in this case like Maxwell, the proprietor as comic fool: grand, dismissive, self-important, striving, humorless, full of social and political zeal (“bullying, bombastic, verbose and vain,” the
Guardian
called him). And yet he would come to be, as proprietors go, an idealized, even cherished one, because he could be handled, appeased—“a benign, applauded beast,” according to one British press commentator. (His idea of interference was to write famously turgid and pompous letters to the editors of his publications—for publication.) To own a newspaper, a fancy newspaper, was for him about being elevated by it, to be seen in its reflection, to have a lifestyle appropriate to it. The newspaper, and the people who worked at the paper, indulged him. Indeed, when the
Daily Telegraph
found itself going head to head with Murdoch’s
Times
—with Murdoch cutting the newsstand price by half and costing the
Telegraph
500,000 readers—Black was unable to stop being indulged (or even able to cut back on his indulgences) and began to loot the company to support his various homes and high social standing. Black, who took particular pleasure in appearing in ermine robes after being appointed to the House of Lords, had, leading to his downfall, perfectly normal human needs and weaknesses—to be liked, respected, praised. It is not clear that Murdoch—who could not be less interested in the House of Lords—does.

With CNN, Ted Turner outflanked Murdoch—he created the first truly electronic counterpart to a newspaper. Murdoch would assiduously try to buy CNN and then would eventually start Fox News to compete with it. Turner became as associated with his news operation as Murdoch is with his. A television guy, he reinvented himself as a newsman. This had never quite been done before—wherein a fundamental entertainment/distribution guy takes command of a news operation. This worried Murdoch. In the contest of media alpha proprietors—men who were directly shaping the news they owned—Murdoch finally had a doppelgänger. On the other hand, Turner was roguish, larger than life, liberal, more often than not operating at the edge of self-control. In a way, Murdoch seemed to envy Turner’s charisma—particularly since even Turner’s newsroom appeared enthralled by Turner. But Turner, Murdoch could also see, wanted to be liked. He was a press hound. A mascot—like Maxwell and Black, a comic figure. In some strange sense, CNN had become so strong and so successful and so branded that it was larger than Ted, so he could not interfere with it. And then, like Maxwell and Black but minus the criminal complications, he lost financial control of his company and, ultimately, of his newsroom.

Victory has allowed Murdoch to be somewhat generous in his assessments of his former enemies. When asked which newspapermen he admires, Murdoch thinks for a good thirty seconds before answering: “He’s gone now, but in London I’ve got to say Conrad Black. He backed his editors, backed his writers, they loved him, and he pushed the paper very hard.”

About Ted Turner he says: “Mike Milken said to me, ‘You don’t know the advantage you’ve got in this country. Nobody can guess what you’re going to do next and that you’re nuts. And there used to be two of you. That one’s finished. Ted Turner.’” Murdoch bursts into laughter.

About Maxwell: He rolls his eyes.

However much each of these proprietors was personally difficult, there was a set of formalized routines that developed around them. The
Mirror
newsroom in London could deal with the corrupt, irascible, and none-too-stable Maxwell in relatively practiced fashion. It was easy to make Black happy—with praise or social cachet. It was always easy to distract Turner—most of all with more press.

But Murdoch’s management style is oddly unpredictable, partly because of his spectral quality. He’s almost never there—except when he is, overwhelmingly, there. Hence, when he’s
not
there, he’s there as a palpable absence. Given the hundreds of separate news organizations he’s running (together with the hundreds of other non-news organizations) at any given time, you never know when you’re on his mind; you never know when he’s going to walk through your door.

What’s more, he appears so often without announcement—a controlled, quiet, mostly polite (alarmingly polite) presence, suddenly involved in the details of your work. “Murdoch drifted in like a ghost,” says Piers Morgan, who edited the
News of the World
for Murdoch. “Literally creeping up on us without any fanfare at all. I’d heard this was his deadliest weapon, his ability to just appear and scare the daylights out of you.”

Here is a real-time report on Murdoch in the
New York Post
newsroom, detailed as it occurred, sent to me minutes after it happened:

He slips into the newsroom just after 3:00. Rupert looks exactly like any other guy in the newsroom—rolled-up blue shirtsleeves, not too fancy, slacks. And he walks top-heavy too—that way news editors have of leaning forward into their stride, on a mission. But unlike newsmen who stomp around, gesticulating loudly, abrasively, drawing attention to themselves—Murdoch is silent. Even his steps—not a sound. Really, nobody is noticing him.

He’s standing behind a new reporter. Four seconds pass before the reporter feels eyes on him and turns around. I’m not sure he even knows it’s Murdoch.

Murdoch (quietly, matter-of-factly): “Where does Richard sit?”

The reporter gets that it’s Murdoch, stiffens, responds with some panic and confusion: “Richard who?”

Murdoch looks around and spots Richard—Richard Johnson, of course; there’s only one “Richard” at the
Post—
at the end of the floor and walks off.

Murdoch quietly stops behind Johnson—and waits. Ten seconds. Richard turns from his computer and looks surprised—and Richard never looks surprised.

Politely, matter-of-factly, Rupert says: “Could you do me this favor?”

Murdoch hands Johnson something—it’s an invitation to Ivanka Trump’s jewelry collection launch (I check it out as soon as he leaves).

“I see her in the gym every day and she looks nothing like that photo you ran of her the other day.”

Mr. M turns and walks back the way he came, down the newsroom corridor, past the managing editor offices, looking at no one. And no one looking at him.

Such appearances are reported throughout the empire. He’s not there, and then he is there. He’s not engaged, and then he’s caught up in the most basic details, overly focused, abrupt, nagging. Or gossiping—his habit is particularly to hang around the business section reporters looking for a tidbit, or looking to drop one. It may be that his shyness makes it a problem for him to integrate into a situation—so he doesn’t arrive and acclimatize, doesn’t get the lay of the land, the sense of the situation, but rather just begins, awkwardly, from his own point of reference. Not being socialized, he just starts off on what he’s thinking about. The effect of this is that somehow everybody feels
they
have been adrift and
he
is the solid mass.

His moods, or his mood swings, are frightening. This is not because, like Maxwell, he can veer easily into grandiosity or petulance, but because his moods occur in a finer range—so that you don’t quite know
what
his mood is, other than to sense that his attention and humor and purpose have rather shifted. The moods may be subtle, but they’re also intense—the moods of a relatively inexpressive person.

Constant jet lag doesn’t help. This cordial, even courtly man can, at times, suddenly seem dangerous. Out of nowhere he can be cranky, impatient, short. “Old Grumpy,” they called him, only half affectionately, in the office of Star TV, his Asian satellite operation. (He’s at his most jet-lagged in Asia.) He cuts you off. You know—or suspect you know—when he’s lost interest in what you’re saying (because he’s a polite man, he keeps listening even through his evident distraction—causing panic in whoever is speaking to him). What’s more, he’s on uppers and downers to deal with the jet lag, which makes his glass of wine quite lethal. “He gets completely legless, he’s a real bloody two-pot screamer because he’s always taking sleeping pills,” says a former Australian executive who has drunk with Murdoch at bars and in his homes around the world.

One effect of all his travel is to reduce almost everything to its immediate moment in time. It’s in front of him now and he deals with it—giving him extraordinary decision-making reflexes. But it also means that everything is a surface, just one dimension. He walks into a situation and plays it as it lays. It is not really that he has a system of thinking—like a Jack Welch–style methodology or formula to impose—but rather a set of reactions.

Depending on his mood and his level of sleep deprivation, his reactions often come with prickliness, a hectoring or carping quality, a rat-a-tat-tat of complaints and put-downs and contempt. A certain piercing sense of dismissal and disappointment. You have not approximated or anticipated what is in his head at that moment, so you’ve failed him.

And then he is gone.

Interestingly, the result among the News Corp. faithful is often not ill will toward Murdoch, but self-doubt.

After he moved Harry Evans, in 1981, from the
Sunday Times
to the
Times,
he appointed Evans’ deputy Frank Giles to the
Sunday Times
editor slot. It was obviously a matter of expediency. Giles was sixty-two—a caretaker. He was there to hold the fort and maintain some consistency while Murdoch figured out what to do in this most substantial and complicated takeover of his career.

But it was a terrible mistake. Giles’ memoir,
Sundry Times,
is a horrifying portrait of upper-management cruelties, of a pervasive atmosphere of mockery and contempt, of the collapse of all newsroom ritual and propriety. You read it with a constant cringe, awash in Giles’ hurt and desperation. The point, most of all, seems to be about the cost of standing your ground. Giles, an upper-class sort, was the ultimate anti-Murdoch figure—as in antimatter. The two simply couldn’t exist together in the same universe. He was at Times Newspapers for more than thirty years; he came out of a tradition of watchfulness, objectivity, quiet judgment. He was, in his laconic way, as contemptuous of Murdoch as Murdoch was of him.

Here was the editor who had been promised, by force of law, his independence and who was trying to claim it.

Here was Murdoch, “intemperate and disagreeable,” with his “bitter animus, stridently voiced,” “deliberately seeking, through extravagance of language and extremity of views, to get a reaction or a rise,” when not otherwise “non-communicative,” appointing lieutenants who egged him on “in his impulsiveness and ape him in intolerance and rudeness,” who were constantly engaged with him “in muttered conversation,” with Murdoch’s face “framed in a scowl which seemed to stop not far short of malevolence.” Every memo from Murdoch, every conversation with him, was meant to disturb, undermine, unman, threaten, criticize, and harass. The portrait is all the more grim for Giles’ obsessive understatement:

It is important here, for the sake of accuracy, not to exaggerate by suggesting a perpetual state of guerrilla, or sometimes open, warfare between me in my office, on one side of the street, and Murdoch and Gerald Long [his lieutenant] in their offices on the other side, each visible to the other. Evans tells the story of how Murdoch would amuse visitors to his office by firing imaginary pistol shots at my back, clearly discernible through the big plate-glass windows across the street.

But finally, what Giles is describing is not a new plan or forceful business strategy being implemented by Murdoch and company, but instead a world without any plan at all, without any particular endgame other than the constant expression of Murdoch’s “restless temperament” and the implementation of his “authoritarian management” style. Which is, in part, what led to Murdoch’s biggest editorial debacle,
The Hitler Diaries,
which is among journalism’s all-time greatest hoaxes. Indeed, here is an important nexus: For serious journalists, Murdoch’s 1983 publication of
The Hitler Diaries
is a mortifying, inexplicable, credibility-destroying event; for Murdoch, it’s just one of the cons and flimflams that happen in the ad hoc, impromptu, on-the-fly news business, so why beat yourself up about it?