The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch

The core of the story is a blow-by-blow account of Murdoch’s purchase of the Dow-Jones Co and consequently the planet’s second most respected newspaper, ”The Wall Street Journal”. Wolff postulates that this buyout represents the final triumph of tabloid journalism over actual news. However, the whole business has been declining and racing down-market for years to save itself. Even ”The New York Times” has been morphing from a dowdy, brainy New York institution to a hipper national paper due to declining classifieds and ad revenue. Wolff labors to breathe intrigue and romance into the Dow-Jones deal but he is a sportscaster trying to convince viewers to stick around to watch a lop-sided athletic contest. Eventually Wolff has to admit the story could be summarized as: the WSJ’s controlling Bancroft family took Murdoch’s offer of double what the declining company was worth and ran. In an effort to entertain the WSJ buyout tale is sliced very thin and spread through the book intermixed with a decidedly non-chronologically ordered biography of Rupert and his relations, 3 wives and 6 children spread over 4 continents and now five decades. The family history of the Murdoch’s are further intermingled with life histories of the Bancroft’s under the concept that knowing the Bancroft family history paints a mosaic explaining why they sold out to the Australian interloper despite swearing for generations the WSJ wasn’t for sale. To the extent it explains that the present generation knew enough to get out while the getting was good despite what some long dead and distant relative said, it adds value.

To the repetitive attempts to capture Rupert’s supposed mystifying nature and the slice-n-dice non-sequential narrative add a third major writing style annoyance: conjunction proliferation. Wolff can seemingly not explain anything once. Every point is followed by a conjunction and then he repeats it in a different way or he adds something to it or he then contradicts what he just said one or two conjunctions ago and then he might add more color and sometimes it is just another unrelated point to any of the points found in any of the conjunctions in the sentence that preceded it or he might clarify what he initially stated or clarify the initial statement and add color to the second conjunction which contradicted the initial statement and then he might summarize the initial point and the refutation of that point and the expansion of the refutation and so on and so forth. Do a tequila shot every time he uses an “and” or “or” and you won’t live out Chapter 1.

In short this is an annoying book with precious little audience. Conservatives will reject anything that paints Australian-born Murdoch as the greatest living American while liberals will see any book about Murdoch as evidence of the vast right-wing conspiracy. Catch the next bio.

By no means has Michael Wolff given the world the definitive biography of Rupert Murdoch. Several critics, especially those in the United Kingdom, felt that he had not even written a factually adequate one, leaving out major episodes and making several major errors. Others wrote that Wolff has written an interesting book but that it never truly penetrates the "secret world" of its subtitle. But like the tabloid newspapers upon which Murdoch built his empire, The Man Who Owns the News o

By no means has Michael Wolff given the world the definitive biography of Rupert Murdoch. Several critics, especially those in the United Kingdom, felt that he had not even written a factually adequate one, leaving out major episodes and making several major errors. Others wrote that Wolff has written an interesting book but that it never truly penetrates the "secret world" of its subtitle. But like the tabloid newspapers upon which Murdoch built his empire, The Man Who Owns the News offers so many titillating details that reviewers found it difficult to put down. Add in the fact that its foundation was an encounter between two of the most enigmatic and controversial characters in today's media elite, and it may not even matter what's true and what's not.

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.