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

I'm taken aback to see only one other five-star review here. I've read many of the books on Murdoch, most notably Shawcross' seminal Murdoch biography and, most recently, Dover's Rupert Murdoch's China Adventures: How the Worlds Most Powerful Media Mogul Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife. Frankly, Michael Wolff's tale is the best. He mixes three main themes with skill: the stalking and capturing of the Wall Street Journal; the high points of Murdoch's long and storied business career; and his famously dysfunctional family (though, as daughter Elisabeth points out, it was Murdoch himself who guaranteed dysfunction by blowing up his marriage to long-time spouse Anna in favor of Wendi Deng). Yes, you need to swallow here and realize that Wolff himself is part of the tale: the fact that Murdoch has opened up to him without constraint - and opened up access to all his children as well - injects Wolff into the story because of the sheer audacity of Wolff's gambit and the stone-cold acceptance by Murdoch of Wolff's terms. As a result, we get the fascinating spectacle of Wolff interviewing the four adult Murdoch children and having each of four use the sessions as a way to telegraph a message to their father. The author clearly revels in the role. Wolff writes with a clear zest for his subject and a love of good gossip and journalism. He takes the reader on a brilliant ride. Wolff also gives just and full credit right from the very start for the enormous contributions of his researcher, Leela de Kretser. Indeed, the first words from Wolff that one encounters open cracking the book are a page+ of prose on de Kretser's considerable role. Wolff generously and genuinely opines that "(t)his book rests as much on her shoulders as mine." Good show, Michael and Leela!

Wolff, in that snarky New York way, does a wonderful job of slicing and dicing the Murdochian world of News Corp., Rupert's confused family life, his outsider status and rapacious instincts, and his stalking the Wall Street Journal. His buccaneering negotiations for the Journal and the clueless disparate Bancroft family are center stage with fascinating detours on Murdoch's upbringing, his foray into the staid world of London journalism and then his invasion of America. Wolff's characterizations of the world of modern media are priceless; for example, Fox News that " very odd combination of mischief and sanctimony - the perfect tabloid formula." One might read this book as a long magazine piece but it misses its entertainment value and the strong undercurrent of accuracy and insight Wolff brings to his portrait of Murdoch and the iffiness of modern media and news.

"Pull up a comfortable chair, here; have a glass of this great wine I've discovered, and let me tell you all about Rupert Murdoch..." Those lines never appear in Michael Wolff's chatty and engaging biography of Rupert Murdoch, the decidedly un-engaging media titan who most of the world loves to hate. But they might as well, because Wolff takes just that kind of unstructured and original approach to his task, telling the tale of the transformation of Murdoch from Australian newspaper proprietor to (he argues) the world's first global media titan as if he were breathlessly recounting it to friends by the fire after a good dinner. Darting back and forth in time and location, Wolff goes in quest of what makes Murdoch tick, digging into everything from his relationship with his father (who helped expose the folly of the Gallipoli landings in 1915, which cost the lives of thousands of Australian WW1 troops -- a key element of the family myth) to his often-troubled ties to his children. Murdoch-haters will find lots of ammunition here, from his indifference to those rules of common courtesy that the rest of us feel we have to live by (Murdoch discards subordinates, alienates wives and children, plays power games at an advanced level with great aplomb, but almost unconsciously) to his political views (conservative/libertarian) and his refusal to step back and let the journalists run the newspapers he owns. After all, why should he? He owns the news... Wolff's narrative revolves around Murdoch's 2007 acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, a purchase that Murdoch had dreamed of for decades. Together with the author's unprecedented degree of access to Murdoch himself, his family members and closest aides, that structure takes what otherwise might have been a mundane biography of a 77-year-old empire-builder (a historical retrospective, in other words) and makes it more dynamic. This Murdoch, in Wolff's portrayal, may mumble in a thick Australian accent, wear a singlet under his shirt and die his hair orange in a futile bid to look younger beside his third wife, half his age -- but he's still able to pull off a $5 billion deal to acquire a paper that, famously, was thought to be un-acquirable at any price. There are surprising insights here -- at least to someone who doesn't scan Gawker and follow every twist and turn of the Murdoch empire. Roger Ailes at Fox may have portrayed presidential candidate and now president-elect Barack Obama as a domestic terrorist of some sort -- but meanwhile, Wendi Murdoch was having dinner with him; Wolff, asking Murdoch who he should vote for in the Democratic Party primary, is told Obama. The reason? "He'll sell more papers." (That, in a nutshell, is Murdoch as seen through Wolff's eyes -- what matters is what is good for the newspapers.) Meanwhile, Ailes, far from being the media baron's alter ego, is, as Wolff reports "Murdoch's monster -- but a very profitable one." Indeed, Fox News -- whose approach to newsgatheri