Imagining a world without Rupert Murdoch Tuesday, 26 July 2011 01:24

Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson is rumored to have once said of his boss: “Rupert is not going to die.”

That proclamation of immortality, allegedly uttered to an obit writer trying to get ahead of events, preceded the phone-hacking scandal now dogging Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. A July 4 story in the Guardian reignited this five-year-old controversy by revealing that News Corp.’s Sunday tabloid, the News of the World, in 2002 hacked into the voicemail of missing 13-year-old Milly Dowler. The paper’s “voicemail interceptions” — News Corp.’s preferred euphemism — gave Dowler’s family false hope that she was alive. She was later found murdered.

Several weeks of nonstop headlines led to a dramatic appearance in Parliament on Tuesday by Murdoch and his son James, a high-ranking company executive. No one would have mistaken Rupert Murdoch’s performance for the work of an eternal being. He projected an aloofness that flirted with ignorance and denial, depending on the question. He perked up a bit after he was attacked by a shaving-cream-pie-wielding wacko.

Though it’s not wise to bet against Murdoch, his stubborn loyalty to his British newspaper lieutenants has invited questions about his fitness to run a company with $32bn in annual revenue. A Bloomberg report indicated that company directors were considering stripping him of his post as chief executive while keeping him on as chairman. Any title shuffling, any dilution of Murdoch’s control, would yield a less aggressive and probably less profitable News Corp. Such an outcome would be hard for the mogul to stomach, given that he once told a biographer that he would retire “when I’m 133 or something.”

That moment could come four or five decades sooner for the 80-year-old. If it does, here’s what a world without Rupert Murdoch would be filled with:

Lonely editors: Federal regulations forced Murdoch to sell the New York Post in the late 1980s, though he eventually repurchased it. In the interim, he lamented: “I feel depressed. This will be the first time I’ve lived in a city with no newspaper going on around me.” Tales of Murdoch’s newsroom micromanagement have followed him throughout his nearly 60-year career as a media entrepreneur, even as he has acquired broadcasting and entertainment companies. New York Post editors know firsthand his quest for brevity and snappy headlines. And in his recent parliamentary testimony, Murdoch spoke of his steady interaction with the leadership of the Wall Street Journal. That could be an understatement. As a Journal editor told The New Yorker of the contact between Murdoch and Thomson: “They probably talk five times a day. You’re kicked out of his office when Rupert calls.”

Softer elbows: Murdoch doesn’t enjoy sharing. Whenever he’s been forced to co-govern a media property, he has done everything possible to shove his partner out of the picture. That’s what happened in 1969, after Murdoch prevailed in a takeover bid for News of the World. The deal stipulated that longtime owner Sir William Carr stay on board as chairman. He did, until Murdoch booted him out months later. Similar scenarios played out as Murdoch rounded up New York media properties in the late 1970s.

Integrity: The hacking has stirred debate over Murdochian journalistic standards. Did the mogul’s newspapers in Britain set tawdry tabloid standards or merely conform to them? Answer: Murdoch savors muck. In his 2008 biography, Michael Wolff recounts finding the 77-year-old chairman working the phone in pursuit of a story. Though impressed with his reportorial techniques, Wolff concludes that “he was trying to smear somebody.” At a recent dinner party, Murdoch had “heard that a senior Hillary Rodham Clinton operative was a partner in an online porn company. He didn’t like the operative, and he didn’t like — no matter how much he had tried — Hillary.” The story didn’t pan out, though Wolff claims that it “became a staple in Murdoch’s repertoire of whispers and confidences and speculations.”

A break from tired classic-movie references: With each new Murdoch crisis comes a new round of features on the mogul. That means yet more Citizen Kane references. The cliches need retirement more than Murdoch does.

More time with Roger Ailes, Howie. Long and “Avatar”Almost 30 years ago, Murdoch told Fortune magazine: “I don’t know any better than anyone else where the electronic age is taking us, or how it will affect a large newspaper company. But I do know that . . . you will have to be a major player in the production of entertainment programming.”

That’s why Murdoch is Murdoch. He owns more than 150 newspapers but gets rich off of his film and TV properties. No matter what happens to him, he has shown that there will always be a market in the United States for tendentious, right-leaning cable talk shows; state-of-the-art coverage of football; and genre-crushing, big-budget movies. As Murdoch himself wrote, “I wonder if there is anyone left on this planet who has yet to see Avatar.”

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