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Murdoch's Mystique

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By JANET MASLIN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 7, 2008

"The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch," by Michael Wolff (Broadway Books, $29.95)

According to Michael Wolff's supercilious yet star-struck portrait of Rupert Murdoch, the planet's most notorious press baron has a crude, simple, primordial idea of a good time.

"Being warlike is his point," Wolff writes. "He likes to be the cause of the conflict. He likes to set the house on fire and watch all the fire engines drive maniacally down the road."

"The Man Who Owns the News" is larded with examples of that incendiary Murdoch behavior. One of the most illuminating is Murdoch's stealth campaign to acquire The Wall Street Journal and its parent company, Dow Jones, from the Bancroft family, which controlled them. ("Somewhat hilariously," Wolff writes, Murdoch quells the Bancrofts' doubts by suggesting they "should just ask around to see if he is a trustworthy person or not.")

The other is his decision to invite a journalist as barbed and heat-seeking as Wolff, a longtime media columnist, into what this book's subtitle calls Murdoch's "secret world."

How far into that world did Wolff get? Just far enough to appreciate the uncanny, superhuman, impervious, all-powerful essence of the Murdoch mystique, to grasp the absoluteness of his power and come away with a book's worth of choice anecdotes about the Murdoch magic. (The boss's underlings think - no, need to think - he can "see around corners.") And far enough to quote occasionally from the oracle since Murdoch spoke for the record, to the extent that Murdoch speaks.

"His Australian accent is still thick and his Australianisms often opaque," Wolff writes. "He sometimes dips into an alarming reverie in which he is either carefully weighing his words or napping."

One of Murdoch's lengthier and more memorable remarks, about David Frost, who interviewed him a good deal more laceratingly than Wolff has: "I feel like saying, 'I'll get the bastard some day,' but he'll die before I get him."

If Wolff envisioned this book ("written in the irresistible style that only an award-winning columnist for Vanity Fair can deliver," according to its jacket copy) as anything outside its subject's control, he underestimated his already larger-than-life subject's gifts as a control freak.

Although "The Man Who Owns the News" has elicited preliminary harrumphing from Murdoch (and from his son-in-law, Matthew Freud, described by Wolff as "a man of unspeakable craftiness" and "lounge-lizard smoothness"), it is overwhelmingly flattering. Even the man's frailties turn out to be virtues. Wolff's oft-repeated theme is that a remarkable lack of vision has proved to be Murdoch's most visionary quality.

Also discussed in "The Man Who Owns the News," in gossipy if not penetrating fashion: the wild fluctuations in his hair color; the outlaw employees who surround him (there is an ethics test for his tabloid reporters, though "granted, if you don't pass it, you just keep taking it until you do"); whiffs of erratic behavior (when Murdoch drinks and travels, "he gets completely legless, he's a real bloody two-pot schemer because he's always taking sleeping pills," one nameless Australian executive says); and endless examples of what Wolff calls "management by upheaval."

Murdoch's relatively recent transformation into a high-rolling mogul, complete with seven homes and private plane, is duly dissected. Wolff gets as close as he can to all this. But his nose remains pressed against the glass.

Janet Maslin writes for The New York Times.

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