Murdoch's World (8 page)

Whenever Murdoch came to New York, he'd duck into the newsroom, and always make a beeline for the business department.
What have you heard?
Murdoch would ask.
Every now and then he'd invite a reporter up, as he did when he beckoned a young Tim Arango, a media reporter for the
Post
in the early 2000s, to eavesdrop as he talked shop with another corporate titan on speaker phone.

He saw the
Post
as one of the chief proving grounds for his older son, Lachlan Murdoch, then enjoying uneven luck in Sydney. Lachlan became deputy chief operating officer of News Corp in 2000, under president and COO Peter Chernin. His father put him in charge of the Fox Television Group, the HarperCollins publishing house, and the
Post
as well as the company's Australian division. Suddenly Chandler witnessed the ejection of top officials at the
Post
around him. Col Allan of the Sydney
Daily Telegraph
became editor in chief. He had been infamous for
periodically urinating in a sink in a corner of his office during editorial meetings as a way of underscoring his authority. Allan protested to a reporter that the sink was actually behind a door. But the mind games worked. The general manager left too, in favor of an Aussie. Chandler's turn followed.

Under Col Allan, the Page Six gossip section developed into
the tail that wagged the dog, brought to heel only by FBI intervention. One of the section's lead reporters, Jared Paul Stern, sought to extort a billionaire buddy of former president Bill Clinton, promising to keep negative items out of the paper if he paid $100,000 upfront and $10,000 a month subsequently. Another former reporter for the gossip section
wrote in a sworn affidavit that many writers accepted freebies from those they wrote about, or didn't write about, to influence coverage, and that Allan was among the worst offenders. The
Post
had to get out ahead of the story; Page Six acknowledged that Richard Johnson, the gossip section's editor, had accepted $1,000 from a restaurateur he was writing about. Johnson's four-day, $30,000 bachelor party in Mexico had been underwritten by Joe Francis, the founder of the soft-core pornography site Girls Gone Wild and a frequent subject of gossip reports.

But Johnson was not the only figure at the paper accused of such coziness with those he covered. In 2007
it emerged in the Aussie press that Allan had taken future Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd to Scores, a popular New York strip club during a visit to New York a few years earlier; the incident briefly clouded Rudd's career. Allan seemed amused by the disclosure, until some of his former colleagues accused him of accepting free drinks, lap dances, and sexual services at the club. He denied those accusations.

Under Allan, the Australian culture of mateship allowed a frat house aura to flourish at the
New York Post
.
Sandra Guzman, a Latina journalist who had been fired as editor of a
Post
magazine section, accused Allan of sidling up to her and several other female employees to show them pictures of a man displaying his penis on his cell phone; she also alleged he rubbed himself lewdly against a female colleague, and that she herself was serenaded with “I Want to Be in America”—an allusion to the Puerto Rican character who sang the musical number of that name in the musical
West Side Story
.

The paper contested her charges. Yet under oath,
Post
editors admitted that Dunleavy had called conservative black columnist Robert George “a token nigger,” saying he would never have his job at the paper if not for his race. The city editor, James Murdoch's closest childhood friend Jesse Angelo, chastised Dunleavy. No other punishment was meted out.

THE
POST
was rigidly ideological, reflecting a conservative populism, except when it chose to diverge from that path. The tabloid had endorsed GOP congressman Rick Lazio in the 2000 race to represent New York in the US Senate, but it did not complicate life unduly for Democrat Hillary Clinton, who ultimately won. Murdoch personally hosted fund-raising events for her fellow Democrat, Senator Charles Schumer, in 2003. The press baron helped her raise money at a dinner three years later as she ran for reelection and
the
Post
endorsed her for Senate that time around, well aware she would win handily and was laying the groundwork for a White House bid of her own.

The Clintons had found ways to make peace with those who had been adversaries. Former president Bill Clinton broke bread with Chris Ruddy despite the former
Post
reporter's seminal role in questioning the official version of the suicide of White House aide (and Clinton friend) Vince Foster. Ruddy's long articles suggested Foster had been murdered and inspired congressional hearings from Clinton's Republican foes. By 2007,
Ruddy was speaking warmly of both Clintons. The Clintons and their surrogates had publicly praised Fox News for what they characterized as its fair-minded coverage of Hillary's historic bid; MSNBC hosts, with a lineup almost entirely male and increasingly dominated by liberals, had favored Barack Obama.

And yet the
New York Post
endorsed Barack Obama in the Democratic primary. Senator Clinton's election would presage, the paper held, “a return to the opportunistic, scandal-scarred, morally muddled years of the almost infinitely self-indulgent Clinton co-presidency.” Obama, the paper wrote, was an intelligent man with a record as a conciliator with whom it rarely agreed on substance, but he still appeared the better choice.

Fox News chairman Roger Ailes interceded with Murdoch, fearful that his boss's more liberal children would convince the News Corp patriarch to endorse Obama in November.
Elisabeth Murdoch and her husband, the British public relations executive Matthew Freud, had raised money for Obama from expatriate Americans living in London. James Murdoch had given money to Hillary Clinton's campaign and his wife was a committed environmentalist.

In early September, for the general election,
the
Post
reverted to form. It tepidly endorsed John McCain, an antitax campaigner, national security hawk, and relative social moderate (on many issues such as gay rights) whose positions meshed decently with the outlook of the paper's readership, if not its own record. The paper cited Obama's intelligence but invoked his “tissue paper thin resume.”

In her lawsuit, Sandra Guzman asserted the paper intentionally sought to undermine Obama after he won. She claimed the agenda was permeated with racial overtones. In February 2009, after Congress had passed a $787 billion stimulus legislation championed by the new president,
Post
cartoonist Sean Delonas drew a chimpanzee shot dead by a policeman. The caption showed another officer saying, “They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

In an editorial headlined “That Cartoon,” the paper insisted it was not racist. “To those who were offended by the image, we apologize,” the paper wrote. “It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill. Period.”

Allan also released a statement: “The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy.” He dug in his heels, dismissing the flap as a stunt driven by activists such as Al Sharpton.

The controversy came at an inopportune time. News Corp had been operating WWOR, a New York City station based on New Jersey soil, without a renewed license. Federal regulators appeared skeptical, if
only because Murdoch already owned a station and two newspapers in the New York market. The company had won the support of many black groups for license renewals at other stations, but some challenged it.

Black journalists protested. Days later, as the NAACP and others called for Delonas's firing,
Murdoch issued his own apology “to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted.” He added: “I promise you that we will seek to be more attuned to the sensitivities of our community.”

Allan then said he would personally be offended by a caricature of Obama as a monkey even though he claimed ignorance of the demeaning depiction of blacks in the US or Australia as monkeys and apes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
“I don't understand the history of the affiliation of black people and primates,” Allan said. “I am not aware of that.”

He could not be racist, Allan insisted. His wife was half Australian Aboriginal.

AMONG ALLAN'S critics in early 2009 was Michael Wolff, author of
The Man Who Owns the News
, a book about Murdoch. Wolff was a writer for
Vanity Fair
magazine, a digital news entrepreneur and media savant who had conducted dozens of hours of taped interviews with the man himself and many more with his family and friends. An advance copy obtained by the Murdochs had caused friction as it betrayed the unease with which the younger generation viewed Roger Ailes of Fox News. Other elements irked various Murdochs as well. According to Wolff, Gary Ginsberg, Murdoch's top adviser on publicity and other strategic matters, told him that they would allow such concerns to pass if he were to do one favor: change the date when Murdoch met his third wife, Wendi Deng.

Deng's story was one of astonishing ambition and opportunism, first chronicled by the
Wall Street Journal
in 2000 (seven years before the paper joined the News Corp fold). Deng had moved to the US with the help of an American couple, then had an affair with the husband. She married the husband, Jake Cherry, roughly three decades her elder. They stayed married for two years and seven months—as the
Journal
noted, seven months longer than needed to obtain the green card necessary for her to stay and work in the US as a legal resident. Cherry told the paper that they lived together “four to five months, at the most.” While working for an Asian satellite television venture of News Corp, she caught Murdoch's eye by confronting him with sharp-edged questions during a staff meeting on one of his trips to China. (A leading Australian newsmagazine termed Deng
a Chinese Becky Sharp, after the conniving antihero of William Makepeace Thackeray's
Vanity Fair
.) A relationship ensued and Rupert and Wendi were married just weeks after his divorce from his second wife, Anna Torv Murdoch, was finalized.
The divorce settlement was reported to have cost $1.7 billion, but
in reality she settled for a nine-figure payout, valued between $100 million and $200 million, to lock in the fortunes of the adult children. (She had raised Murdoch's daughter Prudence, by his first wife, since the girl was nine.)

As Wolff tells the story, Murdoch wanted the timing of his involvement with Deng out of the book, but it stayed in.
The Man Who Owns the News
received scant coverage in any News Corp properties. And Wolff also criticized Allan by name on cable television for the racially charged cartoon. Soon an article appeared on
the gossip website CityFile, and then another surfaced on the better-known Gawker, alleging that Wolff was having an affair with
a younger colleague—a woman just a year older than his daughter. The
Post
pounced, citing, of course, the reporting of others. Over the course of the month,
the
Post
published seven pieces invoking the affair and publishing
another cartoon by Delonas, unfairly depicting the couple, in the words of Wolff's
girlfriend Victoria Floethe, as “a thirteen-year-old girl in bed with an eighty-year-old.” By the end of the coverage, Wolff had moved out of the apartment he shared with his wife and the tabloid was running pieces about a legal fight the soon-to-be divorced couple were having with Wolff's mother-in-law.

Wolff still had the tapes of his conversations with Murdoch. According to Wolff, he called Ginsberg and reminded him of the interest websites expressed in putting the chairman's unguarded musings online. Murdoch typically spoke indistinctly, making reproduction of the tapes of less than clear value. But the
Post
's articles stopped cold at the end of the month.