Rupert Murdoch: muck, brass and business savvy

This biography claims Murdoch is no pornographer, but Godfrey Hodgson knows the tycoon won’t stand for ‘upmarket shit’ either

FIRST POSTED DECEMBER 18, 2008

The first contact I had with Rupert Murdoch was in 1969. I was the editor of Insight, the Sunday Times investigative unit. We had just started looking into the suspicious circumstance that Robert Maxwell's company doubled its profits every year, except in the year when he went public, when they quadrupled. Friends in publishing told me that just wasn't possible.

The phone rang. It was Rupert. He had heard we were turning over Maxwell, he said. I muttered something po-faced about how we were naturally interested in such a high-profile entrepreneur. "The bastard," said Rupert, "couldn't lie straight in his bed."

That led to a brief collaboration. Murdoch sent me the pleadings in a lawsuit he had against Maxwell in Australia. A few weeks later, he asked me to lunch. He had just acquired the old Sun, then a broadsheet newspaper previously owned by the unions. No one knew what Rupert had in mind for it. We had a sandwich in his office which, naturally, had round the walls the sloping shelves tycoons install to inspect their own and their rivals' products.

“We’re not having up-market shit of that description in my newspaper”

If I were editing the Sun, Rupert asked me, was there anything in the Daily Mirror I would want to imitate. I muttered something about admiring Mirrorscope, a section in the paper that tried, I thought with some success, to treat serious and difficult subjects briefly and in a lively style.

"I'll tell you one thing," Rupert replied, in a perfectly civil but terminal tone, "we're not having up-market shit of that description in my paper."

So that was how, I tell my friends, I blew my chance to edit the Sun. Instead, I subsided into a life of apostolic poverty as a historian of the United States.

I have, however, always had a more mixed estimate of Rupert Murdoch than most journalists. When he was bracketed together with Robert Maxwell, as he so often was, I knew how ridiculous that was. I wrote the first expose of Maxwell, and I know better than anyone what a bully and a liar he was.

Murdoch (pictured with wife Wendi Deng) may be an obsessive newspaper man who was a fish out of water in Hollywood, but his real genius is as a dealmaker

Rupert Murdoch is not like that at all. His most ridiculous pretension, which is something between a neurosis and a business strategy, is to denounce as "the Establishment" anyone who stands in his way. He is a complex man, courteous yet vulgarian, a 21st-century operator with a 1950s value system, by turns crass and subtle, confident and insecure. No wonder so many books have been written about him.

The latest Murdoch biography, The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch (Bodley Head, £20), by the New York media columnist Michael Wolff, is a shoddy book. It is hardly edited at all: there are words missing. It is badly written. Long strings of paragraphs begin with conjunctions ('and', 'but').

The research is absurdly sloppy. Murdoch's father is said to have been the "the most powerful newspaper publisher in

About the author

Godfrey Hodgson worked as Washington correspondent for the Observer, Insight editor at the Sunday Times, foreign editor of the Independent and... MORE