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

Author:Michael Wolff [Wolff, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Social Science, General, Business & Economics, Language Arts & Disciplines, Australia, Business, Corporate & Business History, Journalism, Mass media, Biography & Autobiography, Media Studies, Biography, Publishing
ISBN: 9780385526128
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2008-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

NINE Who’s the Boss?

A key reason the Wall Street Journal has achieved such lofty standing is that it has not really had any active input, much less interference, from its proprietors for seventy-five years. Independence, along with a good budget, tends to make for quality journalism. The reason Murdoch’s papers don’t get awards or respect (at least from journalists who don’t work for him) is that he’s as involved a proprietor as any.

The hatred of Murdoch by the great population of journalists who don’t work for him is stoked by many things, but underlying all these things—and forming the real, gut-level antipathy for him in the newsroom at the Wall Street Journal, a sense of the end of the world—is the structural difference that he actually runs his newsrooms. If you work for Rupert, you do his bidding. You submit to Rupert. He gets his newspapers wherever he is in the world, gets out his red pen—just like his father before him—and puts a cross through stories that shouldn’t have run, circles a photo and draws an arrow to show where it should have been placed, notes a headline that should have been two lines rather than one, and so on.

He denies that he interferes—sort of (he doesn’t actually want people to think he’s not involved). The people around him, his executives and his editors, defending their own bona fides, deny this categorically. This—such denials about interference—is the artifice that Murdoch and his people believe everybody is practicing. They actually don’t accept that a hands-off structure truly exists anywhere. And if it does exist, then something has gone radically amiss—and you’ve a fool for an owner.

From his view—and understand that, except for his brief internship with Beaverbrook, he has only ever worked for himself; he has no idea, really, how other journalistic organizations function—it would be absurd and irresponsible for him not to run his papers.

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