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

Too much bio not enough tell-all. Michael Wolff promises to take you into the "Secret World of Rupert Murdoch" , a world that turns out to be far less interesting than you might expect given that Rupert is among the world's ten or so most influential people. Certainly Rupert is part of the problem - he doesn't say much, he works constantly and secretly running the world leaves little time for hobbies. However, most of the blame is Wolff's. Wolff perseverates over describing Murdoch often devoting pages to try to capture what Wolff sees as Murdoch's mysterious, mercurial and counter-intuitive nature. The run-on paragraphs eventually take on comically awestruck tone such that they sound like the Chuck Norris jokes you see on t-shirts ("evolution is wrong, there is just a list of animals Chuck Norris allows to exist" or "Chuck Norris counted to infinity…twice" or like the introductory lines used whenever "The Stig" appears on BBC's "Top Gear" ("some say that while he is not from Japan, his image does appear on their banknotes"). At one point Wolff's attempts to describe Murdoch and his relation to others devolves into: "…he is who he is and they are who they are and he lives in his world and they live in their world and his world does not necessarily interact with their world…"The fetishized Murdoch is painted as a "Zelig" figure, a blurry, shadowy, cipher in the picture at every historical moment since the sixties but the central player in none. The few conclusions Wolff draws he eventually contradicts: Murdoch is cheap and then we hear about his 158 foot yacht, Murdoch is uncool and then we hear about the celebrities he hangs out with, Murdoch hates elitist trapping and then buys the "Wall Street Journal".

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.