Here are some highlights from this 2013 book:
* one of Rupert’s great attractions is that he rarely thinks hard before opening his mouth.
* Rupert Murdoch is half puritan, half gambler, and that’s the way he has always behaved. His father was from a long line of Presbyterian preachers and moralists; his mother the daughter of a handsome rake who lost a fortune to the bookies.
* Rupert is a prude at heart, with so little sympathy for the sexual antics of his tabloid victims, because the Murdochs come from a long line of churchmen with an abiding sense of sin.
* Rupert’s grandfather Patrick sailed from Aberdeenshire on the far north coast of Scotland to take up a living in East Melbourne in 1884, and went on to become head of the Presbyterian Church in Australia. Though far more liberal than his own fire-and-brimstone-breathing father, who believed in terrifying his flock with visions of hell and damnation, Patrick Murdoch was worried that his children might succumb to sexual temptation, and admonished them thus: “Never do anything with your hands or look at anything with your eyes that you’d be ashamed to tell your mother about. Turn away at once from any picture that you feel to be filthy or indecent…You should get out of bed in the morning and as soon as you are awake, if possible, have a bath.” Taking heed of such warnings, Rupert’s father Keith wrote home from England in his early twenties to express dismay at the moral depravity of London’s streets, where prostitution was rife.
* ‘Part of the Australian character is wanting to take on the world,’ he explained to the New York Times. ‘It’s a hard, huge continent inhabited by a few European descendants with a sense of distance from their roots. They have a great need to prove themselves.’
* ‘Rupert is a power junkie, in the sense that he enjoys the company of people with power. When Rupert first came to New York, he was an Australian of no particular reputation. He bought the New York Post, suddenly he becomes an intimate, so to speak, with mayors, with governors and the president. You can’t ignore a guy who runs a New York newspaper.’
But there were other more practical reasons for Rupert to be picking winners, which was a pastime he would always enjoy. Winners in politics could give him the business breaks he needed, and he was a master at suggesting they owed him their success. As one of his many biographers put it, ‘Politicians live by fragile reputations; they believe that words can propel their careers forward or destroy them. On his visits to their locker rooms, Murdoch does not discourage these beliefs. On the contrary, he fosters the impression that he is able to deliver a kick beyond the professionals’ reach.’
* Rupert is constantly surprised at how he comes across: he has no talent for introspection and has no idea why people hate him. The second is that his editors and executives, and even his family, do exactly what Rupert wants them to do, whether that be attacking his enemies, boosting his friends or keeping radio silence when necessary. Call it fear, charm, charisma, personality or respect, it’s clear he has something that makes people want to do what he asks. Even though almost 90 per cent of the shares in News Corp are held outside the Murdoch family, none of the group’s 51 000 employees or fifteen board directors is in doubt that they work for Rupert, that he’s the boss, and that pleasing him is the way to get on. It’s something that’s worth bearing in mind as a background to the phone hacking scandal, where one of the most tantalising questions is what the Murdochs really knew. You can get an idea of how Rupert runs his empire from any of a dozen books written about him over the years, or from talking to any of a hundred current or former executives. But it’s rarely been better put than by the ex-Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, who was one of Murdoch’s most-trusted executives before he morphed into his most trenchant critic. In his memoir, Full Disclosure, Neil famously likened working for Murdoch to being a courtier of the Sun King, whose light shines to all corners of his kingdom: “All life revolves around the Sun King; all authority comes from him. He is the only one to whom allegiance must be owed and he expects his remit to run everywhere, his word to be final…Normal management structures do not matter…the Sun King is all that matters…The Sun King is everywhere, even when he is nowhere. He rules over great distances through authority, loyalty, example and fear.”
According to Neil and other Murdoch editors and executives, like David Yelland who ran The Sun, Rupert’s courtiers hang on his every word. They wake up wondering what he’s thinking, and how he will react to what they plan to do. Even Rupert reckons they go too far in this. But it’s hardly surprising that it should be so, because he knows his business better than anyone, and he knows their business better than them.
* Murdoch expected his every word to be listened to, but rarely paid the same attention to others. He would ask questions and not wait for the reply, talk over answers, and walk out of meetings in mid-sentence. Executives sharing lunch with him rarely spoke up and got squashed if they did. British MPs who visited him on the Avenue of the Americas in 2009 were struck by the way he banged his hand on the table while making a point. He never shouted; he didn’t need to. His editors and executives knew that the easiest way to advance was to do what he wished. There’s a wonderful moment in the BBC’s excellent 1981 Panorama profile when the nonplussed editor of Sydney’s Daily Mirror, Peter Wiley, is asked whether he follows a line that he knows will please Rupert. He looks left, right, left, right, up, down and up again, then sucks in his breath, purses his lips and eventually agrees that, ‘Yes’, he wouldn’t run anything he thought Rupert might disagree with. Murdoch admitted in the program that he interfered too much with his newspapers when he was around. But it was clear he hardly needed to, because his editors already knew where he stood. He was anti-Communist, anti-abortion, anti-long hair and beards, anti-suede shoes and anti-gay rights. He was pro family and private enterprise, against high taxes, and had no time for poofters.
* At heart, he was also a decent bloke, or at least a part of him was: ‘He was well-raised by Dame Elisabeth, who was a class act,’ says one close aide who worked with him for a decade, but adds that the other half of Rupert was ‘deeply cynical’. Others found him well-mannered and polite, down-to-earth and ‘remarkably ordinary’. Americans in particular were impressed at his very Australian habit of jumping in the front of a taxicab, alongside the driver, and not insisting on a limo.
* And despite all his wealth and fame, he was the same as he’d always been. He had no airs and graces. He’d stop and talk to journalists sent to stake him out, and stand around and chat to reporters at Gretel Packer’s country wedding, while his rival Australian media mogul, Kerry Packer, snarled at the media. He was ‘very normal, very informal, very Australian’, says one of his executives. And so was News Corporation, even as the top levels of the organisation became increasingly American, and the centre of gravity moved more and more to the US. Rupert relied on Australians to run the business because he understood them and trusted them to cut the crap. So he had John Cowley running Wapping; Col Allan in charge at the New York Post; Les Hinton running the British newspapers and then Dow Jones; David Hill in charge of Fox Sports in Los Angeles; Sam Chisholm running BSkyB; Gary Davey in Hong Kong and then at Sky Deutschland; Bruce Dover in China; Tom Mockridge and Jim Rudder at Sky Italia; and Robert Thomson editing The Times, before taking over at the Wall Street Journal and finally ending up in charge of News Corp’s entire publishing division. The members of this expat network could call each other up at any time to have a chat, and tap into a shared mythology. ‘If you were in the loop, it was like a brotherhood. It was loyalty, loyalty, loyalty,’ one of these globetrotting Australians recalls.
* Unlike most tycoons, Rupert Murdoch is no philanderer. He is a puritan, a prude and a serial monogamist. In almost six decades since getting hitched in Adelaide in 1956 he has married three wives, sired six children and enjoyed just a couple of months as a single man.
* Kelvin MacKenzie, the long-serving editor of Rupert Murdoch’s best-selling Sun, was once asked what he thought about tabloid ethics. In a favourite quip he would recycle many times, he famously replied: ‘Ethics? As far as I’m concerned, that’s a place to the east of London where people wear white socks.’ Another lesser-known Murdoch journalist, Greg Miskiw, who was once news editor of the News of the World, and now faces charges of phone hacking, summed up his paper’s culture even more eloquently. ‘This is what we do,’ he explained to a stressed-out reporter. ‘We go out and destroy other people’s lives.’
* Back in the 1980s, when The Sun was running a series of scandalous and unsubstantiated stories on Elton John, he was famously confronted by one of Britain’s popular breakfast TV presenters, Anne Diamond, who asked him, ‘How do you sleep at night, knowing that your papers ruin people’s lives?’ ‘It was just water off a duck’s back,’ Diamond later recalled. ‘He looked at me and said, “I don’t ruin people’s lives. They ruin their lives.” And those were his values…if you somehow get into his newspapers it’s your fault.’
It’s an interesting question whether Rupert Murdoch was aware of this campaign of vilification, or, indeed, responsible for it. His ex-butler, Philip Townsend, told Channel 4 in 2011 that it was the mogul who set his paper onto the TV host by ringing to complain that she had been rude to him. Diamond says she can’t be sure Rupert’s journalists were acting at his behest, but observes, ‘Having asked that one question of Murdoch, I was hounded and vilified on newspaper front pages for many years. The effect upon me and my family truly cannot be overstated…the coverage was persistent, cruel, grossly intrusive and enormously damaging and hurtful. At the time, it did indeed feel as though I was being targeted.’
* His office in Los Angeles was plastered with front pages of The Sun and News of the World, and he loved his tabloids. But he also delighted in telling people about the dirt they had collected on politicians and public figures. ‘We have pictures of him,’ he often boasted to his biographer, Michael Wolff, who found him ‘most entertaining and caustic on the subject of other people’s losses, lapses and screw-ups’. And he loved to trade titbits. ‘There are two currencies in the Murdoch organisation,’ the ex-editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil, once observed. ‘One is money, the second is gossip. He loves gossip.’ And, as we know, Rupert didn’t worry too much about who got hurt.
* MacKenzie, who was then Murdoch’s favourite editor, claimed to understand his readers, and believed, like Rupert, that his journalists should write with their prejudices in mind. ‘He’s the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house,’ MacKenzie once famously opined. ‘He’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdoes and drug dealers.’
* Of course, not all the News of the World’s stories were as vicious, unprincipled and mendacious as its evisceration of Mosley. Nor were all The Sun’s exposes as bad as the attack on Elton John. But they illustrated the culture that prevailed at Murdoch’s British tabloids in the years before the hacking scandal exploded: the absence of doubt, mercy or sympathy for victims, and the lack of moderation or apology when stories were found to be wrong.
Rupert characterised this boots’n’all style as giving the public what they wanted, or democracy in action and freedom of the press, but it was more akin to journalism of the lynch mob, with the Murdoch papers finding the victims and whipping up a frenzy for the public to hunt them down. Sure, it was usually only reputations or livelihoods—and not lives—that were lost, but the principle was much the same, as was the enthusiasm with which his tabloids went about the task of seeking out homosexuality, adultery, infidelity, drug use, alcoholism, depression, a gambling habit, or whatever else befell the rich and mildly famous. This approach was not just tolerated by the boss. It undoubtedly came from Rupert himself, who, to his credit, did not sue if journalists did the same to him. And it was manifest in other parts of News Corporation, right around the world. You could see the same arrogance and aggression in The Australian or on Fox News or in the New York Post, even though the targets were more political in nature. It was a culture where they hit their enemies hard, played the man and left no room for doubt; where it was them and us, we’re right, don’t get in our way. Murdoch’s powerful tabloid editors tended to be particularly contemptuous of their critics and convinced they could do as they liked.
* Paul McMullan readily admits he stole pictures from people, ripped off his sources and impersonated a rent boy in the course of his work. Lying, too, was an essential part of the job. ‘You can’t get through the day on a tabloid newspaper if you don’t lie, if you don’t deceive, if you’re not prepared to use forms of blackmail or extortion or lean on people, you know, make people’s lives a misery,’ said Graham Johnson, who was a reporter on the News of the World in the late 1990s when Brooks was deputy editor.