Murdoch's World (46 page)

Dame Elisabeth watched closely what followed. She saw Rupert establish a new paper of quality for the coverage of purely national issues. In the 1980s she saw him forswear his Aussie citizenship so he could hold onto his American television stations. She had followed his career as he and his editors sought to create the most influential news organization in Australian, English, and American politics. He had proved a worthy entrepreneur as he scorned government models for how things should work. All along, Rupert had acted to acquire more properties, shedding those that had become inconvenient, as he built the most powerful media empire in the English-speaking world. Dame Elisabeth had seen it careen out of control in the UK, half a world
away, where all the corner-cutting and deal-making and law-breaking of his tabloids finally came to a shuddering stop and gave credence to Murdoch's critics.

None of that gave Murdoch his due as an innovator and a patron of public service in journalism. His largess had sustained the
Times of London
, which would not have been viable on its own. The value of the
Wall Street Journal
had been written down by more than half since its acquisition, but Murdoch did not back away from it.

Murdoch's patronage always came at a price. News Corp was a publicly traded company in name only. Whatever title anyone else held, Murdoch was the proprietor. Murdoch's Manhattan office is on the eighth floor of News Corp's headquarters. His office is on the right. On the left, a visitor will see a bank of desks filled with Murdoch's assistants. On the wall nearby is
an oil painting on a bronze background of a newspaper folded in half. The paper's flag, the insignia on top of the front page, bears the legend
The Herald
. Editors who work with Murdoch and have a sense of history think that has to be an allusion to his father's paper, the Melbourne
Herald
, which Keith Murdoch was unable to retain in the weeks leading up to his death. Rupert had acquired it and more than 150 newspapers besides. His mother had seen all that over the decades and wondered why he needed more. She saw a nation of citizens. He saw markets populated by consumers. Rupert Murdoch loved and understood his mother. But they engaged with the world around them very differently. He wanted to explode entrenched models, harness fresh technologies to draw in new customers, and then build some more.

Murdoch was accompanied to the memorial service by his wife, Wendi Deng, and their two young daughters. Lachlan was there, with his wife, the actress and model Sarah Murdoch. James and Elisabeth did not attend.

Rupert still cared about the banished Rebekah Brooks. Her scandals became his disgrace. Her tenure was like the economy in the first
decade of the 2000s: disaster masquerading as runaway success. Yet he had ensured a generous payout: a severance package worth $17.6 million. In April 2013,
Brooks was spotted in Australia yachting and relaxing with the Murdochs. That same month, police in London announced they had discovered hundreds more cases of phone hacking than had been suspected previously. Investigators had initially looked at the now-closed tabloid's news desk for the same reason that Willie Sutton was said to have robbed banks: that's where the money was. Reviewing the news desk records, police found fastidiously ordered accounting. The new charges involved the
features desk, which police claimed had engaged in more subterfuge to cloak the purpose of the expenditures. That had taken more time for police to penetrate.

In her final years, Dame Elisabeth watched as her son and grandson allowed an apparently criminal culture to take root at the family's two most profitable newspapers. In spring 2013,
the company agreed to pay $135 million to settle the grievances of a dissident group of shareholders, led by a union-controlled bank and other institutional investors. The settlement was a small price to pay to make the lawsuit go away.

Through all this the market cap of the company—its value as determined by the worth of all its shares—had risen by 50 percent since the announcement of the split, to the impressive peak of $73 billion. The value of Murdoch's shares in the company had climbed to about $10 billion.

People invariably compared Murdoch to William Randolph Hearst, the American media baron of an earlier age who inspired the great movie
Citizen Kane
. That seems too limited a comparison. Perhaps he was more like the nation's early oil barons who controlled new terrain and pock-marked the countryside in drilling—a man unlikely to ask for permission
or
forgiveness, who provided millions of Americans with a product they came to view as indispensable.

Murdoch similarly could not have accumulated his fortunes without our help. We are all, as consumers of media, involved and even responsible
for the creation of Murdoch's World—those of us who pick up his tabloids at the newsstand, enjoy the cable news wars, subscribe to his prestigious papers, watch a ballgame on TV, buy tickets to a movie, even those of us who are News Corp investors through pension funds or mutual funds. We make up the market that he sought to create and feed. He played us, as much as he played everyone else. And we have rewarded him handsomely for it.

Speaking to investors in New York City, Rupert Murdoch cast the corporate split in personal terms. “I have been given an extraordinary opportunity most people never get in their lifetime: the chance to
do it all over again.” He would soon dispatch the
Post
's Col Allan back to Sydney and swapped editors at the
Sun
, too. But his declaration carried more than one meaning. Two weeks later, Murdoch
filed for divorce from his third wife, Wendi Deng Murdoch.

This union, his lawyers wrote carefully, had “broken down irretrievably for a period of more than six months.” As the years progressed, Wendi had socialized separately from Rupert, enjoying a California lifestyle, circulating with Hollywood, Australian, and Chinese movie stars, and developing some outside ventures. Rumors that she had been romantically involved with several prominent entrepreneurs and other figures had reached Rupert's ears. As long as she didn't embarrass him,
he did not care to learn more, one former aide said. In this case,
an aide to Tony Blair even felt compelled to deny to the
Hollywood Reporter
that the former prime minister had ever had an affair with Deng Murdoch.

Yet the move in June 2013 to obtain a formal divorce marked yet another wrecked personal relationship, the latest in the line. His mother gone, his children alienated and angry, Murdoch turned his attention back to his business—and not his entire business, but particularly his newspapers. Though he was formally the CEO as well as chairman of the new 21st Century Fox, and only chairman of the new News Corp, Chase Carey would run the Fox entertainment and television company capably. The decades-old names of
News International and
News Limited vanished, replaced, respectively, by the brands News UK and News Corp Australia. Rupert would once more lead a company with the newspapers at its core taking up, with Robert Thomson as his lieutenant, the seemingly impossible challenge of how to make newspapers profitable. He wanted to prove the naysayers wrong.

Murdoch has never convincingly shown any capacity for self-reflection. He reaches a fork in the road, chooses a path, and sets off. Another person in his position who absorbed the revelations about the way the company operated might have decided to step down to give the company a fresh start. Someone with a different psychological makeup might have wondered what he had done to create a culture that had so completely severed any connection the people running his British tabloids had with the people they covered and served. But if Murdoch ever had such doubts, he showed no sign of them.

In his eighty-second year of life, disgraced and denounced as “unfit” to lead a major media company by the British Parliament, isolated from his family and challenged by financial forces besetting the entire newspaper business, Murdoch was undaunted. His media enterprise counted many millions as customers and yet had an audience of one.

His father, Keith Murdoch, the absent role model whose memory he always sought to uphold, had made his name by writing about an ill-advised attack in a thankless cause. A century later, Keith Rupert Murdoch was preparing for combat on forbidding terrain, far from loved ones, in the name of his own fading empire, in his case a commonwealth of newspapers.

      
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I HAVE been blessed with friends, colleagues, and family who have squandered no end of time to keep me on course in the researching and writing of this book.

The idea of writing one originated with Jeremy Schaap, who argued that I should translate my years of reporting on Fox News and the cable news industry into a more expansive treatment. In early July 2011, I watched a remarkable press conference taking place in Kabul, Afghanistan, where the British prime minister was forced to answer questions about whether the Murdochs were fit owners of the largest pay television provider in the UK.
Murdoch's World
stems from the stories that ensued and is also based on additional reporting specifically for this project, which broadened the scope of my interest.

Many current and former executives at News Corp's headquarters as well as officials and journalists at its various constituent news organizations sat patiently for interviews, answered late night queries, and offered key guidance. As the Murdoch family and News Corp formally discouraged them from participating, I cannot thank most of them by name, but I am appreciative nonetheless.

Others who spoke on the record to me provided information and insight that were crucial to various elements of my reporting and this book, and I am grateful to them all. Among the many are Tim Arango, Paul Barry, Nick Boles, Rebecca Blumenstein, Chris Bryant, Ken Chandler, Zev Chafets, Neil Chenoweth, James Chessell, John Coffee, Damien Collins, Charles Elson, Paul Farrelly, David Gordon, Roy
Greenslade, Brit Hume, Andrew Jaspan, Simon Jenkins, Ian Johnson, Simon Kelner, Thomas Keneally, Bill Keller, Mark Lewis, Kelvin MacKenzie, Robert Manne, Stephen Mayne, Paul McMullan, Louise Mensch, Anne Schroeder Mullins, Andrew Neil, Freya Petersen, Alan Rusbridger, Graeme Samuel, Vivian Schiller, Mark Stephens, Tom Watson, Ellen Weiss, Juan Williams, and Michael Wolff. Thanks also to Geraldo Rivera, a daily inspiration to journalists everywhere.

My NPR colleague in London, Phil Reeves, was my partner on the hacking scandal and a key guide to the ways of Fleet Street, back-stopped by our producer Stewart Willy. The support of NPR has been outstanding, especially from my editors Laura Bertran and Stu Seidel, even as we have ventured into sensitive areas. NPR's Margaret Low Smith, Kinsey Wilson, and Gary Knell have also been particularly supportive. The occasional frantic query to NPR's resourceful reference librarians always yielded a swift, patient, and comprehensive answer.

Murdoch's World
would not have come together had it not been for my agent, Robert Guinsler of Sterling Lord Literistic, and the team at PublicAffairs. My editor, Clive Priddle, tamed an enormously complicated tale spanning four continents and more than five decades with a literate touch and a welcome sense of irreverence. Melissa Raymond kept the process moving apace. Emily Lavelle planned the book's launch with the precision of NASA. The encouragement of Peter Osnos throughout meant a great deal to me.

Chuck Salter, Isaac Kramnick, Kelly McBride, Mike Pesca, Lisa Pollak, Robert Smith, Robert Tashjian, John Hassel, and Sam Zarifi served as vital sounding boards. Max Folkenflik and Margaret Mc-Gerity kindly opened their law offices to me, enabling me to complete my writing away from home and newsroom. Glenn Altschuler and Michael Ollove gave much-needed scrutiny to various drafts of my manuscript. John McIntyre provided a scrupulous copyedit.

My parents, Robert and Vivian Folkenflik, the most dedicated educators and most intelligent writers I have ever met, made painstaking
suggestions which vastly improved this book. And it would not have been possible to complete the book without the love and support of my wife, Jesse, and the joy of our daughter, Viola. I may have been writing
Murdoch's World
, but I live wholeheartedly in theirs.

David Folkenflik

Laguna Beach, California

July 30, 2013

      
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