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Saturday 26 May 2012

Murdoch’s big secret is that he doesn’t have one

Michael Wolff reveals how he secured Rupert Murdoch’s co-operation for his biography and discovered that this media titan has no interest in posterity. He is, at heart, a city editor

I have sometimes had the feeling, over the past year of talking to Murdoch and News Corp executives, that his people are humouring him. That he is not so much, in Andrew Neil’s formulation, the Sun God, who people cannot question, but instead a sort of long-running joke in which everybody at News Corp — so many of them career employees — is complicit. The joke is that this greatest of modern businessmen, the architect of the synergised, cross-platform, integrated, global media company, has no vision, no method, no strategy. Nor, likewise, does this man, perhaps the individual with the single most powerful political voice of our time, have any politics — save for what makes for good newspaper copy (‘Vote for Obama,’ he advised me, during the presidential primary season, ‘he’ll sell more papers’), or puts money in his own pocket. Rather it’s all made up — what he buys, how he spends, what he believes, who he supports — on the fly.

As I sat with Murdoch, Warren Buffett’s biographer was sitting with Buffett. In a recent reading of the Buffett book, I thought: this is a perfect example of how a titan of industry gets a titan-of-industry-worthy biography — and, perhaps, an enduring myth. Buffett and his people obviously had a clear message to impart, a tale they wanted told, and a mountain of information to shower on the hapless writer.

Murdoch, on the other hand, even though a professional in the media business, was rather more guileless — or ultimately unconcerned. It was a book, for one thing, and, as his mother suggested to me, he might never have read one. What’s more, to think about how he might be portrayed would be to have an idea of his own self — to have to dwell on things he is incapable of or vastly uninterested in dwelling on. And yet he did it — blabbered away for nine months. With hardly a thought he exposed himself, his family and all his executives to a biographer who one day happened to walk into his office. Even prospective immortality is something, at News Corp, which you just throw against the wall and see if it sticks.

More articles from: Michael Wolff | this section

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