Rupert Murdoch: muck, brass and business savvy

The first contact I had with Rupert Murdoch was in 1969. I was the editor of Insight, the Sunday Times investigative unit. We had just started looking into the suspicious circumstance that Robert Maxwell's company doubled its profits every year, except in the year when he went public, when they quadrupled. Friends in publishing told me that just wasn't possible.

The phone rang. It was Rupert. He had heard we were turning over Maxwell, he said. I muttered something po-faced about how we were naturally interested in such a high-profile entrepreneur. "The bastard," said Rupert, "couldn't lie straight in his bed."

That led to a brief collaboration. Murdoch sent me the pleadings in a lawsuit he had against Maxwell in Australia. A few weeks later, he asked me to lunch. He had just acquired the old Sun, then a broadsheet newspaper previously owned by the unions. No one knew what Rupert had in mind for it. We had a sandwich in his office which, naturally, had round the walls the sloping shelves tycoons install to inspect their own and their rivals' products.

“We’re not having up-market shit of that description in my newspaper”

If I were editing the Sun, Rupert asked me, was there anything in the Daily Mirror I would want to imitate. I muttered something about admiring Mirrorscope, a section in the paper that tried, I thought with some success, to treat serious and difficult subjects briefly and in a lively style.

"I'll tell you one thing," Rupert replied, in a perfectly civil but terminal tone, "we're not having up-market shit of that description in my paper."

So that was how, I tell my friends, I blew my chance to edit the Sun. Instead, I subsided into a life of apostolic poverty as a historian of the United States.

I have, however, always had a more mixed estimate of Rupert Murdoch than most journalists. When he was bracketed together with Robert Maxwell, as he so often was, I knew how ridiculous that was. I wrote the first expose of Maxwell, and I know better than anyone what a bully and a liar he was.

Rupert Murdoch is not like that at all. His most ridiculous pretension, which is something between a neurosis and a business strategy, is to denounce as "the Establishment" anyone who stands in his way. He is a complex man, courteous yet vulgarian, a 21st-century operator with a 1950s value system, by turns crass and subtle, confident and insecure. No wonder so many books have been written about him.

The latest Murdoch biography, The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch (Bodley Head, £20), by the New York media columnist Michael Wolff, is a shoddy book. It is hardly edited at all: there are words missing. It is badly written. Long strings of paragraphs begin with conjunctions ('and', 'but').

The research is absurdly sloppy. Murdoch's father is said to have been the "the most powerful newspaper publisher in Australia", though Wolff shows later that he has heard of the Fairfaxes and the Packers. He says Rupert owns two papers in London when it is four. He spells people's names wrong.

What interests him about Rupert is a New York magazine writer's perspective. Imagine, a foreigner with a funny accent (Wolff exaggerates how "thick" Murdoch's Australian accent is) comes to our New York and take over businesses in the teeth of competition from New Yorkers! And he's rich! A foreigner, and yet rich! Does he know where in town you're supposed to live?

Wolff's world-view reeks of the kind of parochial New York chauvinism, that awful 'My God, don't you just feel the energy in the Big Apple!' boasting, which is looking particularly silly this year. Just feel the energy with which Bernard Madoff helped himself to fifty billion!

Wolff can see that Rupert is not a pornographer but a puritan

What the book is really about is how Murdoch was able to take over the Wall Street Journal, a real New York paper, a paper that really matters because it tells us how rich we are every day, even if we have to plough through some rabid right-wing editorials before we reach the comfort food. This gives Wolff the opening for some sneering, at once populist and snobbish, at the wretched Bancroft clan, who owned the Journal, and needed the money too much to stand up to Rupert.

The WASPS, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Wolff says, "had given up. Capitulated. Just sat down and refused to go". Except of course that Rupert is a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, third-generation, upper class and Republican too, born into the heart of his local Establishment, a living exemplar of the Protestant spirit and the rise of capitalism.

So this is not the greatest biography you ever read. But it does have an absorbing subject, and in its infuriating way it does reach some shrewd judgments about him. For Wolff does see that Rupert is not a pornographer but a puritan; that his secret weapon is his ability to sniff out class resentment and exploit it; that he has played the insider/outsider game all his life with virtuoso skill; and that while he is an obsessive newspaper man who was a fish out of water in Hollywood, his real genius is as a dealmaker.

There is more. Wolff senses that the expansion of his empire may not be over. The New York Times must now be in his sights. Its editorial reputation was smudged by the fabrications of Jayson Blair and the unreliable reporting of Judith Miller about WMD and Iraq. Its advertising revenue is down. Its new building has been sold and leased back. Could it resist a determined Murdoch siege, the barrages of money from without, the sapping and mining of the resentments of disloyal defenders within that he has found everywhere?

The really new thought, though, goes further. Have we ever thought - we, I mean, who don't work for News Corp and never would - that we might one day be grateful for Rupert Murdoch? For he may be the last man standing who still cares about newspapers. ·