Fantastic Rupert Murdoch article

From The Atlantic - focusing on Murdoch's acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, but also some cheap shots (especially about Murdoch's Australian-ness), genuine insights and reasonably good anecdotes.

Some selected quotes:

With his thin hair dyed rusty brown and brushed straight back off the wide dome of his forehead, and modish wire-framed glasses over small, heavy-lidded eyes, his face was all too familiar, its deeply creased cheeks sagging in a fine cascade of syncline folds to the crisp knot of his blue silk tie.

We’ve come here to expand, he said. He has announced his intention for the remade Journal not just to supplant The New York Times as the nation’s preeminent daily newspaper but to become the first truly global daily. This would be music to the ears of any newsroom, so hope mingled with the professional dread in Murdoch’s audience that afternoon. He may be awful, but he is rich and awful, smart and awful, powerful and awful, and while he may well be crazy to still believe in the future of print, he is determined and crazy. Murdoch might be the last person The Journal would have chosen as its savior, but newspapers may well be down to last hopes.

Rupert Murdoch is, by most accounts, a delightful man. Born to wealth that he has manifestly multiplied, he is a man who lives a globe-trotting lifestyle, a man who need never carry his own bags or stand in line at a security checkpoint at an airport, a man who moves through a string of fabulous residences; it would be easy to assume that he is a coddled, petulant creature of privilege. Yet Murdoch often flies commercial, carries his own bags, prefers a regular hotel room to a suite, uses taxis, and shops everywhere for bargains.

He is a bare-knuckled, union-crushing capitalist who has had more success than anyone wooing the ruling Communists in China. He is a Thatcherite conservative whose New York tabloid has endorsed Barack Obama. He is a 77-year-old who lives the life of a young man, with a Chinese-born wife (his third) who is almost four decades his junior and two small daughters to complement his four middle-aged children. He is a global-media baron, a titan in his field, whose empire now includes 20th Century Fox, Fox TV, Fox News, Fox Business Network, HarperCollins, The Times and Sunday Times of London, The Sun, the New York Post, The Weekly Standard, Dow Jones, BSkyB television, National Geographic Channel, MySpace, etc., etc. But Murdoch still sees himself as a stubborn outsider, a freethinking cultural marauder come to rattle the halls of power—a kind of Aussie Bart Simpson writ large. And nothing gets his juices flowing faster than a chance to disturb any establishment, be it Britain’s labor unions (he broke their stranglehold on London newspapers), the BBC (which he has successfully challenged with BSkyB), the dominant American TV networks (which he has taken on with his Fox channels), or CNN (which his Fox News Channel surpassed as the leading all-news cable channel, after CNN’s Ted Turner famously promised to squish Murdoch “like a bug”).

Murdoch is given credit for great business acumen, but he is less a pioneer and visionary than a wealthy and aggressive collector. He has vast resources and is constantly adding and subtracting companies to and from his empire. He identifies potential markets, and then, like a rich art buyer writing big checks for the work of artists who have already achieved critical recognition, he buys into companies that have demonstrated promise in reaching those markets. He doesn’t have a record of consistent success; some of his biggest newspapers lose money, including the New York Post and The Times of London. What he has are the resources to absorb failure.

at a time when every big newspaper is tinkering with futuristic business models, Murdoch is doing so with both feet planted firmly in the past. His strategy for success in 2008 is to behave as though the year is 1908. So while his competitors retrench, Murdoch is going to war—by challenging The New York Times, in particular, to an old-fashioned newspaper battle. Except this time the stakes aren’t nickels in Times Square, but dominance in America, and the world.

It’s a war he could well lose. For print journalists, the good news about Murdoch is that he believes the old Gutenberg technology still has legs, and that he is willing to back that belief with capital. But any 21st-century newspaper war is going to be fought in large part on the Web, and when it comes to new media, Murdoch’s record is mixed at best. From the 1990s on, he has repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to establish a foothold on the Internet. There was Delphi, an early player in the online industry, which he abandoned a few years after purchasing it. There was PointCast, a venture featuring something called “push” technology that Murdoch flirted with before it sank as quickly as it surfaced. Today he has staked his claim with MySpace, and he is actively seeking to broaden that beachhead by shopping around for a proven performer he can buy. He has flirted both with keeping The Journal’s content behind a firewall (where it remains at the moment) and with offering it for free, which indicates that he hasn’t cracked the central problem of Internet publication: How do you make it pay?

It’s also a war he could abandon if it doesn’t seem to be going his way. As his Internet ventures suggest, Murdoch has a history of moving aggressively into new territory, only to retreat just as quickly. He has built his media empire not only by identifying proven properties and investing in them, but also by ruthlessly discarding those that fail to measure up to his expectations. He can be a fickle patron, because his enthusiasm for a project is grounded not in a deeply held belief or commitment, but in the bottom line. And some speculate that he may ultimately value Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal less for their own sakes than for what their brand names bring to his other properties, particularly his just-launched Fox Business Network, although Dow Jones has a contract with CNBC that will not expire until 2012.

Even literary ambition began to creep into the pages of the great newspapers. At the best ones, when the material justified it, reporters were encouraged to write creatively and at length. A certain kind of reporter—and I was one—competed against others not so much for scoops, but for recognition, prizes, and tenured positions at papers where the rarefied work of “serious” journalism was underwritten. Mine was The Philadelphia Inquirer, where my byline read not “staff reporter” or “staff correspondent” but “staff writer,” and which we writers called, in its heyday, “the greatest care-and-feeding system for journalism ever invented.”

while the Web is rapidly destroying the business model that sustained all of the above, it has yet to develop institutions capable of replacing print newspapers as vehicles for great in-depth journalism, or conscious of themselves as upholding a public trust. Instead, the Web gives voice to opinionated, unedited millions. In the digital world, ignorance and crudity share the platform with rigor and taste; the independent journalist shares the platform with spinmeisters and con artists. Cable television and satellite radio have taken broadcast journalism in the same direction, crowding out the once-dominant networks, which strove for the ideal of objectivity, with new channels that all but advertise their politics. When all news is spun, we live in a world of propaganda.

The worst part of this is, the public doesn’t seem to care.

and he doesn’t buy the ideal of objectivity. He sees it as pretense—or hypocrisy—because he perceives a distinct liberal skew to the established journalistic powers. In Murdoch’s view, the public is best served not by objectivity, which he regards as impossible, but by “balance.”

He rejects the idea that the media should be dominated by a few respected, independent voices; he embraces instead a din of competing voices and interests. He is a Jeffersonian, a believer in a lively free market of ideas (except, of course, where it doesn’t suit his interests—notably in China, where he’s willing to make nice with the oppressive regime), and he scoffs at those who see danger in his acquisitiveness, at those who worry about the ever-widening reach of his media empire.

What is the Murdochian point of view? It is not so easy to predict. His interests are dizzyingly diverse and famously open to change. He is a social liberal and a strong advocate of unfettered international trade. Other than that, he tends to be conservative, but he is also influenced by personalities, and has reportedly cozied up to the Clintons and warmed to Barack Obama. His various newspapers have staked a variety of public positions that are at least occasionally at odds with Murdoch’s own—TheTimes of London, for instance, has been consistently critical of the repressive Communist regime in China, despite its owner’s blatant and well-documented kowtowing.

Murdoch is a panderer. Like most businessmen, he wants to figure out what his customers want and then deliver it. The salvation of The Wall Street Journal may well be that its highly educated readership wants precisely what the paper has been offering for more than a half century. But at the very least, it’s clear that Murdoch intends to give that tradition a good working over.

Beating other papers at their own game is exactly what the new ownership seems to prize. In a conference call to the paper’s Washington bureau in April, Thomson pointed enthusiastically to a page-one political story by the reporter Monica Langley. Headlined “He’s Back,” the article detailed the increasing influence of Bill Clinton on the presidential campaign of his wife, Hillary. The new publisher-editor described it as “perfect in every way.” But Thomson’s Washington-bureau audience was merely whelmed. True, the Langley piece was timely, it came on the heels of a resurgence in Hillary’s campaign, and what it lacked in access it made up for in provocative analysis. In other words, it was the kind of story The New York Times would have loved to have. But the old Journal would not have cared, or at least not that much.

It does, however, reflect classic Murdochian principles, and Murdoch does seem to have a sense for what sells. He apparently intends to expand the Journal staff to add meat to that broadened coverage, which would mean more stories like those found everywhere else. But even if aping the competition increased the newspaper’s readership—and it is hard to see how it would—it would also destroy what made TheJournal great. In addition to stressing more breaking, general-news stories, Thomson has made clear that he intends to “clarify reporting lines,” which is taken to mean that he plans to thin the ranks of the mid-level editors who were the newspaper’s line of defense against sloppiness and error. It is worth noting that the number of corrections in the first quarter of this year, under Murdoch’s reign, has risen by more than 25 percent compared with the first quarter of 2007, an increase that the company says reflects an increase in the number of stories the new Journal is running.

“People are running around frightened and confused,” said one longtime Journal reporter. “The push is toward news, news, news. It feels like Murdoch wants to make us more like every other newspaper in the country.”