The Man Who Owns the News (40 page)

If Murdoch likes talking to you, if you can hold his attention, and if you’re the last one to have talked to him, then often your opinions can be his, no matter that you might be odd, pompous, ludicrous, or flat-out nuts—especially if, additionally, you have a simple argument to make and are also a suck-up.

The liberal people who are now closest to him have come up with a construct for his politics, which are so often just this side of offensive or even intolerable to them: He’s a libertarian. Fundamentally, they’ll point out, he’s not really even political because he hates politicians (or if he doesn’t hate them, he at least generally regards them as weak-willed tools). He’s on his own tangent, so pay no attention.

And yet, with his politics, he keeps the people around him in some state of fright and discomfort. Which is also part of the point of his politics: He likes the people around him to submit.

Here’s something else that’s key: It’s painful for him to speak personally. He grips and clutches and descends into muttering and murmuring when forced to talk about himself. Politics is his substitute for speaking personally. Politics, in his testing and teasing, is his way of connecting to somebody. At the family dinner table, it’s his way of engaging with his children. It is not so much indoctrination—his children have all become relative liberals, after all—but, arguably, a way to express concern, disapproval, curiosity, and affection, and to get attention. It’s like how other men use sports as their replacement for not talking personally.

And then there is Anna Murdoch and her politics, as there will be Wendi Murdoch and her views.

Anna Murdoch is a Catholic conservative. In his role of dutiful husband, as it was as dutiful son, he’s a practiced mollifier of determined and irritated women (he’s away so much that Anna is pretty much always irritated). He’s striving to make peace. He gets along better with Anna when his conservative positions are in order. He spends not a small amount of time discussing with Anna and various retainers whether or not he should become a Catholic (he does not). His conservatism helps offset the irreverence, even calculated sacrilege, of his tabloids, which offend Anna (as they do his mother). When the
Sunday Herald Sun
runs a cartoon that makes fun of Pope John Paul II for his encyclical restating the Church’s prohibition on birth control, the paper’s editor, Alan Howe—the longest-serving Murdoch editor—receives a handwritten fax from Murdoch telling him how appalled he is by the criticism of the Vatican and how disappointed he is in Howe’s decision to run the cartoon.

And then there’s conservatism as it reflects on his feeling that he’s a big swinging dick. It’s alpha, macho, aggressive. He’s at his most conservative in the mid-to-late eighties—just when he’s become the world’s biggest, baddest businessman. He’s playing to his brand. He’s a straight-down-the-line social conservative—against abortion, gay rights, immigration, you name it. A fiscal conservative—the smaller the government, the better the government. A warrior conservative—in the eighties he’s all for Thatcher threatening to nuke Beijing as a tenable position during the negotiations over the future of Hong Kong (this, of course, before he tries to win the favor of the Chinese for strategic business reasons in the 1990s). He even supports Pat Robertson—the wing-nut television evangelist and Christian-right politician—for the Republican nomination in 1988.

If there is a moment of dangerous grandiosity in his career, it’s in the late eighties. His dealmaking frenzy represents the triumph of Reaganism and Thatcherism and the free markets and the collapse of so many regulatory impediments—and it represents his own triumph. Indeed, his conservative politics track the manicness of his dealmaking. The more deals he makes, the more conservative—the more strident, pugnacious, out there—he becomes. It’s his free market and he’ll make the rules for it.

But News Corp.’s banking crisis in 1990, his being-and-nothingness moment, changes him. It’s a personal ending of the eighties for him. He’s forced into a vastly more conciliatory and accommodating mood. Humility in all walks is part of the price of his bailout. The crisis brings new discipline not just to his business but to his political views. He isn’t an independent state after all—he learns that he can’t function like one. In a way, he’s getting a grip.

Also, he sees the fate of Reaganism (it turns into George Bush–ism) and particularly of Thatcherism (an ignominious end for her, and then the shift to John Major–ism)—not to mention the fate of so many of his eighties cohorts, including Michael Milken, who’s off to federal prison. He’s running scared. He has to not just escape his own financial predicament but survive a zeitgeist shift.

Not only does he not like George H. W. Bush or John Major very much, they don’t like him. What’s more, they owe him little. If they’ve been made by the forces he’s helped create, he hasn’t helped them directly. He’s distant from them.

And so he turns—if not on a dime, in a wide swing.

He may be losing his ideological fire, but he’s still left with one of the best political organizations outside of politics. All CEOs tend to have a lower-level function that they’re most comfortable with and which becomes their point of management style and emphasis—so your CEO might be the real CFO, or real marketing chief, or real operations guy, or real M&A person. Murdoch, at News Corp., is the government affairs specialist. (It’s one reason he’s become so close to Gary Ginsberg—because that
is
what Ginsberg does.)

Murdoch’s good at government relations—a rare talent. There is just something about the process here being so character-focused, and about the system being so basic and mechanical—you apply pressure here and yield a result there; weakness responds to power; you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours—that fascinates him. “He spends a few days in Washington and he gets full of energy,” says the Republican pollster and consultant Frank Luntz, who has advised News Corp. and accompanied Murdoch on Washington visits (and gone on to be an on-air commentator at Fox News). “He’s in his element. He knows who everybody is and everybody wants to meet him.”

Again, it’s not ideology. It’s all function—it’s all craft. It’s the investment that he’s made over so many years in politics and in politicians paying off.

Indeed, in the nineties, post-Reagan-Thatcher, he begins to play a profoundly nuanced and plastic game: He figures out that a right-wing guy with even the mildest possible suggestion of moderation can have incredible clout with the liberal guys.

He really can’t stand the Clintons. This is partly because they can’t stand him and partly because they seem so sloppy, so unfocused, so undisciplined. On the other hand, he gets results from them; they jump. He gets the federal waiver he needs to get the
New York Post
back. He manages to have the Clinton FCC close its eyes to the fact that Fox television stations are actually, and contrary to the law, owned by a foreign company. (He has also assiduously courted the Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, including arranging for HarperCollins, the News Corp. book publisher, to give him a rich book advance.)

But it’s in Britain that this ironical fluke of ideology—that the left can be more responsive to him than the right—really pays off. His working of Tony Blair is quite a thing to behold (as is, conversely, the Blair working of Murdoch).

The diaries of Alastair Campbell, Blair’s communications chief, present an almost step-by-step primer on the art of submission to Murdoch—how much you need to give up, how much you can hope to retain. It’s a hard, humiliating business that shapes the Blair candidacy and defines New Labour. The Murdoch in the diaries is an implacable presence: You come to him, and only when you’ve given enough does he give. It begins with Blair coming to address a News Corp. conference in 1995 at a gathering on Hayman Island in Australia. The event is distinguished not just by Blair’s Murdochplacating talk but by everybody in Australian politics warning him about the difficulties of dealing with Murdoch. “Murdoch,” says Paul Keating, the Australian prime minister, whom Murdoch has supported, “is a hard bastard and you need a strategy for dealing with him.” There are the difficulties of dealing one-on-one with Murdoch: “I tried to prise him open a bit about what he was thinking,” says Campbell, “but despite the twinkle in his eyes, and the general warmth, he was very guarded. Any attempt at big talk was reduced to small talk pretty quickly.” And on Murdoch’s address to his own editors: “Chilling, to watch all these grown men, and some women, hanging on every word, and know that an inflection here or there would influence them one way or the other.”

It’s a leitmotif of dealing with the Murdoch media: “In the end, they [Murdoch editors] would do what they were told.” Recounting a meeting at the
Sun
: “Afterward [Blair] said that was not a good meeting and they are not very nice people…I said did you notice the portrait of Murdoch in the room where we had lunch? It was one of those in which the eyes followed you round the room. Hilarious. But they were all a bit Moonie-fied.”

It’s a further irony, which Murdoch enjoys, that his most powerful political statement in the United States, when he becomes most publicly and vividly identified with the right wing and the “vast right-wing conspiracy”—which the Clintons will see themselves as martyrs of—comes just at the point where he is the least committed to the fervent right: Fox News.

Just as Fox News is taking the mantle of Clinton-Lewinsky and crafting its rambunctious, propagandized, intolerant, bar-stool conservatism, Murdoch has become involved with a junior staffer. Not only is his lover vastly younger and more liberal than he, but she will shortly cancel out Anna’s influence. He actually has to mollify now in the opposite direction—he’s got to be more liberal to foster peace at home. What’s more, Peter Chernin, the News Corp. house liberal, continues to gain importance in the company—and importance to Murdoch.

But Fox News is a perfect reflection of Murdochian what-the-market-will-bear politics. It reflects, too, Murdoch’s very odd combination of mischief and sanctimony—that perfect tabloid formula.

Fox is, in so many ways, the ultimate Murdoch product—all the lessons are combined and they all work. He produces, finally and successfully, his American tabloid. Up against CNN, a much larger, much more established, much more respectable competitor, he counterprograms. Fox is self-consciously downmarket, rude, loud, opinionated. This not only defines a lower-end, secondary news market, but does it in a way that’s much cheaper than how the other guy does it. Lack of respectability is cheaper than respectability. That’s tabloid.

It’s all about torturing the other guys too. Your marketing premise is that you’ll push it until you get a rise out of them. The establishment makes the anti-establishment possible. This is simple. CNN is Keith Murdoch and Fox is Rupert Murdoch. This is what he’s learned.

On the other hand, he could not have done this alone, because he’s too respectable; he might even be too liberal by this point.

Hence, his alter ego: Roger Ailes.

In a sense the success of Fox is random, or kismet: almost entirely dependent on the fact that Murdoch lucks into a television guy whose affect—bumptiousness, irascibility, succinctness, obvious outsiderness—entertains him. What happens to Murdoch is that he gets a crush on Ailes. For a very long time, having dinner with Ailes is the most galvanizing thing in Murdoch’s life—it makes him feel in the game, it’s pure pleasure. Indeed, he gives Ailes what he has never given any of his editors—never given the
Times
of London, even though his pledge has the force of law, and likely never will give the
Wall Street Journal,
although he’ll swear he will: fundamental editorial independence. It is understood that Murdoch can’t go behind Ailes’ back and talk to the talent and executives at Fox News without him first talking to Ailes, and that Ailes himself can’t be overruled about what goes on the air.

There is, of course, an exceptional reason for this: It’s television, not a newspaper, and Murdoch doesn’t know from nothing when it comes to television news. At a newspaper, he’s confident about his ability to meddle; with television, he’s, with good reason, not at all confident (he doesn’t even like television all that much). And it’s also a calculated business decision: He needs Fox to be pushed further than even he might naturally go.

Indeed, the apoplexy that Fox News regularly arouses in liberals is aroused too within News Corp. It may be one of Murdoch’s measures of how successful Fox and Ailes are—how much they’re getting to the News Corp. liberals, not least of all Chernin and Ginsberg.

(Ginsberg is Murdoch’s ever-present example of what fun it is to mess with liberals. Ginsberg, practiced in his acquiescence and tolerance, could also be Murdoch’s best indication of going too far. One Christmas, Murdoch, to bedevil the Jewish liberals at News, not least of all Ginsberg, pays for crèches to be placed on every reception desk throughout News Corp. Thereupon transpires a two-hour meeting with Murdoch, Ginsberg, and two rabbis. Ginsberg, being no fool, has evoked the two things that might always be used to counterbalance Murdoch mischief: middle-brow high-mindedness and piety, those quintessential newspaper values.)

In some sense, Ailes is a reflection more of contrariness than of politics. Everybody at the highest reaches of News Corp. shuts their eyes to Ailes. He is a piece of mischief that has gotten out of hand. Without Murdoch, there would be no tolerance for him within News Corp. But Murdoch has to live with him—because Murdoch’s odd piece of mischief, his bit of counterprogramming, has become a success.