The Rupert I Know

Chip East/Reuters Longtime press baron and Murdoch frenemy Conrad Black on what Michael Wolff got wrong in his new biography of the media titan.

Rupert Murdoch is the greatest media owner in history because he built a little company into a huge one, cracked the outrageous London print unions, broke up the three-network US television cartel, pioneered the vertically integrated media conglomerate and satellite television, and created the multi-continental media company. These are colossal achievements and an interesting story, but Michael Wolff’s The Man Who Owns The News is a very uneven read.

The author starts out in Charlie Rose mode (he describes Rose as "a deferential and often treacly host") and speculates that Murdoch enjoyed their interviews as much as he did. I doubt it. Wolff wades through a confusing and clichéd account of Murdoch's life, replete with factual errors, serious omissions, mind-reading suppositions, extreme psychological liberties, and the conclusion that Murdoch will be "temperamentally compelled" to try to acquire The New York Times and buys newspapers "to change himself." I don't think so.

Wolff claims Murdoch will be "temperamentally compelled" to try to acquire The New York Times and buys newspapers "to change himself." I don't think so.

We are told by Wolff that Murdoch derived great "fun" from newspapers, but elsewhere that he is joyless, shy, hard of hearing, mumbles incomprehensibly, "unimpressive," and dislikes social contact; still elsewhere we are warned of his "deadly charm." Apart from being contradictory, these descriptions are much exaggerated.

To be fair, Wolff is correct that Murdoch is very perceptive about people. I once asked him what he thought of President Reagan; after a few seconds, he said: "He is a cunning, charming, old peasant." We used to compare views of newspaper people, and if an employee or ex-employee had an overbearing spouse or was too preoccupied with a pastime or a public policy issue, he always picked it up even on minimum exposure. The author accurately imputes the opinion to Murdoch that journalists are "weak, self indulgent and…absolutely sanguine about wasting his money," and adds for his own account that the media’s “shameless self-promoters, so without a moral center…and motivated by their own grandiosity and need for attention… have bankrupted the culture.” (These are tenable assessments, but Wolff doesn't reassure the reader that he is exempt from some of these criticisms himself. And Murdoch, as Wolff points out extensively, has lowered rather than raised journalistic standards.)

It is also true that Murdoch uses his media to further his political and business objectives and to attack his enemies. There is nothing wrong with that, but losses of $1 million a week each at the New York Post and Times of London, for decades, is a high price to lay off on a public company for what he described to me as "psychic income." Indeed, Murdoch does not subscribe to the fraud that the best management leaves the working press to do what it wants with their employers' property; and Murdoch is, as Wolff writes, in sum, "a manipulative bastard" who believes in nothing except himself and his company, and eventually double-crosses almost everyone.

But Wolff also tells us that "two thirds of [Murdoch's] mind" is on newspapers; that Harold Evans, whom he fired as editor of The Times of London, was “really angry at himself”; and that Murdoch, with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, was one of the world "value triumvirate" of the '80s. That honor usually goes to Pope John Paul II. These assertions, and many like them, are bunk.