Secret world of Rupert Murdoch
September 4, 2008 by grzegorz.piechota
”Rupert Murdoch doesn’t need to print or broadcast the news to make it … news. He may be among the biggest gossips in New York,” writes Michael Wolff.
Mr. Wolff who has written a new book on Murdoch titled ”The Man Who Owns the News” (scheduled to be published in December) shared some thoughts in the Vanity Fair magazine:
About why has Mr. Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal:
”Buying The Wall Street Journal was surely an exercise of pure fantasy. To think he could take over a company absolutely controlled by a family that had repeatedly said it would never sell was fantasy. To think it was worth what he was paying for it was fantasy. And yet … now it’s his, and if his shareholders are puzzled and grumpy (News Corp. shares are down by more than 30 percent since he bought Dow Jones), so be it (he’ll ignore them as much as he ignores his other critics). He’s in it for the long haul—even at 77.”
About his fantasies to own the New York Times:
”He is spending time now in consideration of an even more far-fetched fantasy, The New York Times: he’d really like to own it too. Now, everybody around him continues to tell him that buying the Times is pretty much impossible. There will be regulatory problems. The Sulzberger family would never … And then there’s the opprobrium of public opinion.
But it’s obviously irresistible to him. I’ve watched him go through the numbers, plot out a merger with the Journal’s backroom operations, and fantasize about the staff’s quitting en masse as soon as he entered the sacred temple. It would be sweet revenge—because the Times for so long has made him the bogeyman and vulgarian. And wonderful to own not just one of America’s most important papers but both (he believes in monopolies).”
About his love with print:
”He’s really not interested in all this talk about newspapers as the basis of new information franchises … blah blah. That’s maybe what they say at News Corp. to gull Wall Street. But Rupert Murdoch wants the physical thing. He pokes the paper, slashes at it—move this, reduce that, enlarge this. It may be the ultimate fantasy, his continuing, contrary belief in newspapers.”
About the weaknesses of News Corp.
”His takeover of The Wall Street Journal happened because the family that controlled Dow Jones for nearly a hundred years couldn’t control itself. And while Murdoch both took advantage of the Bancroft family’s weakness and was contemptuous of it (and morbidly fascinated by it), the irony hasn’t passed him by that some variation on this fate will be his family’s, too. (When I asked him in our final interview what he can do to prevent what happened to the Bancrofts from happening to his family, he threw his hands up in the air and said, ‘Oh, simple, I can’t. All I can do is delay it.’)”
And finally, about his meeting with Barack Obama:
”Murdoch, for his part, had a simple thought to share with Obama. He had known possibly as many heads of state as anyone living today—had met every American president from Harry Truman on—and this is what he understood: nobody got much time to make an impression. Leadership was about what you did in the first six months.”
Tagged: book, Case studies, magazine, Marketing, newspaper
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Let’s see what he does to the Wall Street Journal before we start talking about Murdoch buying the NYT before he really does. My 2 cents: watch the Wall Street Journal. I want to see what he does with it [WSJ].
nice post.