Portrait Of An Outsider
Sun Herald
Sunday January 11, 2009
The Man Who Owns The News: Inside The Secret World Of Rupert Murdoch
By Michael Wolff(Knopf, $49.95)FOR any journalist, approaching the subject of Rupert Murdoch, the greatest media proprietor of his age, is fraught. Unless you're one of his coterie of loyal lieutenants, Murdoch is the man many print journalists love to hate, a degenerate influence, the "Dirty Digger", as he was coined by British satirical magazine Private Eye. Yet the man that emerges from Michael Wolff's book is an endangered species in the world of journalism. At his most basic, Murdoch is an old-fashioned newspaper journalist. On one occasion when Wolff arrives at News Corp's headquarters in Manhattan to interview him, Murdoch is on the phone digging at a story, asking his source questions, verifying answers, with all the skill of a seasoned hack.Wolff, a respected writer from Vanity Fair, had unprecedented access to Murdoch and his family for this book and the result is a fascinating and compulsive read, not just about the "old man" as Wolff calls him but the Murdoch empire. Murdoch is the ultimate outsider, initially scorned and then feared in the US and Britain, who has succeeded through instinct, ruthlessness and an insatiable appetite for risk with, unusually for a man of great power, no interest in how he is regarded. All this makes him seem not one of us - almost superhuman. It explains the awe and veneration and not a little fear in which he is held by those in the Murdoch club.Some of that awe rubs off on Wolff himself but he's no sycophant. Wolff describes a man who is unprepossessing - he wears Wal-Mart shirts, is unreflective and "mumbles" during interviews only coming to life when brought titbits of gossip, which he thrives on. He is shockingly uninterested in the trappings of wealth. For Murdoch, "the business isn't a means to an end, it is the end".Murdoch is a man who hates pretence more than anything; he enjoys the company of larrikins (and often rewards them with jobs as editors). He's a "primitive", Wolff says, and this often puts him at odds with his more sophisticated, grown-up children with their New York educations. Ironically, Wolff notes, they are exactly the kind of people his tabloid newspapers enjoy lampooning. But even Murdoch can change and with the 1998 break-up of his second marriage to Anna, mother of Lachlan, Elisabeth and James and his marriage to Wendi Deng, 37 years his junior, there are signs he's mellowing. Murdoch is usually averse to publicity, shy even, but Wolff believes that the media proprietor, at 77, has legacy on his mind. There may be other reasons for co-operating with this biography. Murdoch's audacious acquisition of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal last year, the story that provides the thread holding the book together, was not without its fallout. And Deng has helped to bring Murdoch into the fold, to make him more social and pay more attention to his persona.The Wall Street Journal saga gives the book a US-centric bias, with scant attention given to some of the other big events in Murdoch's career in Australia and Britain, such as the Wapping dispute.Where the book excels is in the revealing portrait of the Murdoch dynasty and succession when the unthinkable happens. The battle lines between his new family - Deng and their two young daughters - and the older children are already drawn.Murdoch instructed the family, for whom he is "patriarch, mentor and strategist", to say whatever they wanted. Wolff encounters reticence but feels that, through him, each is addressing the father rather than the reader. The Murdochs are a loving family, albeit one in which it is difficult to live. As Wolff observes, "everybody is in love with everyone's success and everybody is just a little too competitive about it and oppressed by the demands".
© 2009 Sun Herald
