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

by Michael Wolff

From the author of Fire and Fury, this irresistible account offers an exclusive glimpse into a man who wields extraordinary power and influence in the media on a worldwide scale—and whose family is being groomed to carry his legacy into the future. If Rupert Murdoch isn’t making headlines, he’s busy buying the media outlets that generate them. His News Corp. holdings—from the New York Post, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal, to name just a few—are vast, and his power is unrivaled. So what makes a man like this tick? Michael Wolff gives us the definitive answer in The Man Who Owns the News. With unprecedented access to Rupert Murdoch himself, and his associates and family, Wolff chronicles the astonishing growth of Murdoch's $70 billion media kingdom. In intimate detail, he probes the Murdoch family dynasty, from the battles that have threatened to destroy it to the reconciliations that seem to only make it stronger. Drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews, he offers accounts of the Dow Jones takeover as well as plays for Yahoo! and Newsday as they’ve never been revealed before.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Politics, Business, History, Journalism, Science

464 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Michael Wolff is an American author, essayist, and journalist, and a regular columnist and contributor to USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, and the UK edition of GQ. He has received two National Magazine Awards, a Mirror Award, and has authored seven books, including Burn Rate (1998) about his own dot-com company, and The Man Who Owns the News (2008), a biography of Rupert Murdoch. He co-founded the news aggregation website Newser and is a former editor of Adweek.

In January 2018, Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published, containing unflattering descriptions of behavior by U.S. President Donald Trump, chaotic interactions among the White House senior staff, and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I listened to the audiobook of The Man Who Owns the News, I couldn't help but daydream of what an author like Robert Caro would have done with the story of Rupert Murdoch -- a ruthless, power-obsessed, utterly untrustworthy man who has elements of both Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson about him. Caro is great at humanising his subjects even as he exposes their darker impulses and actions.

Michael Wolff, on the other hand, does a decent enough job of humanising Murdoch, at times portraying him as a somewhat sad old man plagued by nagging insecurities and a pathological need to assert his own virility, but his exploration of Murdoch's more egregious faults seldom rises above the level of gossip. And this is a man who has done so much to push political discourse and news media into the realm of derangement. A man who casts loved ones aside as if it were nothing. Have at him, Michael!

The book isn't exactly bad but it doesn't have any teeth and is hampered further by a needless non-linear structure. Some of its conclusions, meanwhile, have aged like milk. Wolff's suggestion that Murdoch's third wife was turning him into something resembling a late-life liberal (simply by schmoozing with other rich celebrities) stands out as particularly ridiculous given recent events. Ultimately, The Man Who Owns the News gives a terrible man the kid glove treatment.

[Bruno Bouchet · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to rate this book because it's a compelling read yet the writing style is utterly infuriating. The book follows Murdoch's purchase of the Wall Street Journal and uses that as a structure to dip into the past to important moments in his life. The trouble is the author writes in the present tense, even in the past and then refers to things that will happen in the future tense but which are still in the past within the book's narrative, it gets torturous. And then every now and again, he slips into the past tense anyway but for no reason I can discern.

HAVING SAID THAT - this is remarkable biography that creates a picture of a fascinating man. Equally fascinating is the story behind it. Murdoch gave full permission told all family and colleagues to co-operate fully with the writer and then when the first draft came it, he read it and refused to have anything more to do with it. The result is an unauthorised biography which has all the access to sources of an authorised one, making it uniquely authoritative. Why did he consent in the first place? Was it all a ploy for more publicity? I don't think this book will change anyone's mind as to whether Murdoch is the devil or not, but most readers will come away with a sneaking and grudging affection for the old bastard.

Murdoch himself comes across as a bully, petulant, brilliant, ruthless, bitter and childlike - and yet likeable. He's a towering figure who cannot be explained. His business decisions which have earned billions taken on a whim. To some he has destroyed journalism but the one thing he clearly loves more than anything (and possibly anyone) is newspapers.
The story of the purchase of the WSJ is remarkable, not just in Murdoch's determination against virtually all business logic to own it but for the portrait of the previous owners, the Bancroft family, a classic third plus generation of trust fund babies who have little to do with the paper.
It is all ripe for film - even a stage musical.
A fascinating read that surmounts it's tortured use of tenses.

[thewestchestarian · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Aurélien Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shrew and model businessman for some, amoral and vulgar technocrat for others, Rupert Murdoch is not the kind of person to leave indifferent! Michael Wolff, author specialist of mass media and himself a journalist, delivers here a direct, blunt, portray of the man, not sparring his words even if, at times, clearly transpires some sort of admiration and respect.

Written at the time when Murdoch was buying the 'Wall Street Journal' (an epic transaction!) he delves as much into his professional as his personal journey, both inextricably linked, to show not only how ambitious, aggressive, cynical, opportunistic such successful man is, but, also, how massive will be his impact. Like it or not, Rupert Murdoch indeed radically transformed journalism. One of the first to understand, as early as in the 1970s, that the medias were about to become global, he started then to build a mediatic empire stretching from his native Australia to the United States and Great Britain. Not limiting himself to that, he also changed how content itself is delivered, mixing news and entertainment in a confused blend. Tabloid culture? Well, that's him.

Efficiency, speed, and constant buzz news rightly going straight to the emotions for some, idiotic vulgarity which turned out to be a disease having contaminated what journalism should entail in the first place for others (think about from the topless girls in 'The Sun' to celebrity gossips sold as if they were newsworthy...) his 'philosophy -'sell to the consumer what the consumer wants'- is controversial enough as it is, yet there is more worrying. The man also carries in his trail a series of scandals which are quite chilling if you care for civil liberties. If you ever though that the transformation of the 'Times', or, the scam that were the supposed 'diaries' of Hitler to be polemical, then brace yourself for more -his approach will contaminate even the political arena. The Gough Whitlam Affair in Australia, how Fox News reported on the war in Irak, his close relationship with Tony Blair... Here was a man with power and influence, and not shy to use it for interested gains.

This is undeniably a long book to go through, not in terms of length per se but because it can be very boring at times (Wolff doesn't spare us his detailed transactions, nor the biographies of those businessmen who will cross his path!). Nevertheless, this is an invaluable outlook upon one of the most important media baron of our era. Like him or despise him, there is no denying indeed that journalism never was the same once Rupert Murdoch started to dig his claws into it. We might live in an era of frenetic buzz, when mass medias became as reliable as some are shamelessly biased, but, beyond the gossipy and vulgarity also lurks chilling questions when it comes to the safety of democracy.

[Richard MacManus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book and it was certainly the best bio I've read of Rupert Murdoch (there aren't too many of them and the last one I tried was a hatchet job based around some weird political conspiracy theory, which I abandoned less than halfway through). So comparatively speaking, this bio was well researched and relatively objective.

The author, Michael Wolff, nevertheless couldn't help inserting any number of his own literary theories and spins on Murdoch's story - which were in some places cutting analysis, other places seemed like guesswork, and still other places were literary pretension. However, there were enough interesting facts and analysis overall to make it on the whole a valid approach.

Murdoch's bio wasn't told chronologically, and we kept being returned to the book's central plotline - Murdoch's ultimately successful bid to buy Wall St Journal from the Bancroft family. While that plotline was undoubtedly fascinating and central to figuring out Murdoch - basically he's an old school but morally ambivalent journalist who wanted to buy WSJ precisely because the journalistic ivy league (represented by WSJ and NYT) hates him - in the end the story became tiresome and mired in the kind of back and forth minutiae that the Bancrofts themselves probably engaged in when deciding whether to sell to Murdoch. It was a real struggle for me to finish the book, because frankly I found myself not particularly caring about the inside deal-making details relating to WSJ.

Overall, Murdoch is indeed a fascinating character, and as the book concluded it is very rare to find such a large company so dominated by the will and obsessions of one person. I've always seen Murdoch as a journalist at heart, because he knows a good story and knows what it takes to get it. He's a dangerous businessman too of course, and tabloid journalism has often been the way his companies operate. I'm not suggesting it's necessarily good journalism, but it's certainly been effective for him and the way he operates has influenced the media landscape a lot. I don't fashion myself after Murdoch much, but I do admire his single-minded determination and willingness to do things the establishment won't.

[Alex Gruenenfelder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since I started with Michael Wolff's much later follow-up, "The Fall," I felt like I was reading in reverse when I approached this biography of Rupert Murdoch. Not nearly as fast-paced or compelling as its successor, which had inspired me to start watching and then fall in love with the show "Succession," this book is still a deep dive into a family that has more power than many of us even begin to realize. It can be a bit slow, but it's a good price of reading material for those interested in billionaires and media consolidation.

Written by a gossipy author, this book covers a billionaire who loves gossip and built his empire on it. As such, it will be liked by those who find political and business gossip to be interesting subject matter. Rupert Murdoch built his own establishment to oppose the preexisting one that he so loathed, and in the process changed the United States and our entire world. Give this book a read for a dive into that News Corp history.

[Andy · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the topic of Murdoch interested me, this book is disorganized and poorly written & edited... just like... oh a Murdoch Tabloid story; which may indeed be the author's point.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book read like one Bond villain describing the machinations of another Bond villain with relish and glee.

I read the first and last of Michael Wolff’s Trump books coming away unimpressed. Wolff gets the hot gossip, such as it is, by being an unrepentant jock sniffer but that’s all these books are: gossip.

I never thought I’d read him again but as I’ve cast around for books on Rupert Murdoch in light of my love of the tv show Succession, this one kept coming up again and again. I finally grabbed it from the library, assuming that it would be the quick, breezy read that the Trump books were breezy reads.

I was wrong. In ways both good and not good.

Wolff writes admirably, if somewhat critically of Murdoch but he needs access so this is mostly a favorable portrait. Centering around Murdoch’s purchase of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, the book goes deep into the life circumstances that make Murdoch Murdoch without revealing a lot of the man who keeps himself intentionally mysterious. We learn that he loves newspapers, carries grudges, has no shame, and doesn’t always make genius moves. But the ones he does make are indeed genius.

Wolff uses the sale as the spine to build the story, which he mostly does by offloading behind-the-scenes accounts of meetings, take overs, intrigues, etc. This weakens the book, making it less than the sum of its parts. Wolff is proud of the access he gets, swinging it around like a sword. But it doesn’t allow for much of a peak into Rupert Murdoch or his secret world. Instead, it just reveals the negotiations of old white (mostly) men who keep the world in their collective thrall.

Still, it’s an interesting look at the man who has helped to ruin the world through conservative propaganda packaged as working class male narrative.

[Amy C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rupert Murdoch, a man of stolid temperament, robust resolve, and paucity of sentiment, stirs the fears of his contenders in the media world, as Wolff harshly discloses in this business thriller with candid volubility.
As someone with little understanding of the corporate world, this book was an eye-opener, briskly revealing both the eccentricities and ennui of Murdoch's unabashedly hectic life. The contention surrounding Murdoch's succession options (who will ultimately inherit his companies' deeds?) and the media mogul's perceived diffidence (is he speaking frankly, or is his deception beyond the naked eye?) serve to enshroud the prosperous magnate's life in perennial enigma.
Michael Wolff, whose writing I first haphazardly came across when "Fire and Fury" made headlines, never fails to deliver a mordantly sardonic account of the business world as not typically perceived by the average global citizen.

[James Aura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nicely written but did not contain a lot of information I hadn't encountered already.

[Tanish · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too irratic, too verbose

[Thomas Chaney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enthralling biography of one of the most enigmatic and powerful media moguls in recent memory. Excellently paced and intriguing throughout, I could not put this book down!

[Zach · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book has some interesting insight into Murdoch, it especially paints an interesting perspective of Murdoch as at his heart a newspaperman. From this perspective, the book does present an intersting description of the transition of the newspaper from a highly local entity with reporters largely from the working class who were in an almost white collar position (many did not have college degrees in the early years) to the post-Watergate world where journalism becomes a "respected" field full of college educated, upper class and the transition to a national media. (ie the description of the NY Times no longer being a NYC paper but a national paper that is 2nd read by many after their local paper). The book also helps one understand the development/appeal of tabloid journalism and its impact on the development of Fox News.

However, as a book that conveys so much about the newspaper business and Murdoch's impact, it is very disappointing that the book does not provide more analysis of the current state of the newspaper business.


Unfortunately the book has a couple drawbacks:

--the author appears to be attempting to write two books at once, once about Murdoch the other about the Bancroft family and the sale of Dow Jones. The portions about the Bancrofts come across as two dimensional, the author does not allow himself enough space to get into the details of an event that could be a completely separate book.

--There is not enough detail about Murdoch's life. Many biographies convey much about an individual's peronsality through ancedotes and events from their past, here the author conveys some of this, but there is so much time taken up with the description of the Dow Jones sale, that often the author makes broad blanket characterizations about Murdoch and those around him and we are just left to take the author at his word, there is no story or background given to support many statements.

--The timeline of the book is often chopping and somewhat disorietning as the author keeps going back and forth between the Dow Jones sale and Murdoch's own life.

[Caitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really much new here, despite the author interviewing Murdoch a number of times. The stuff about his family and third marriage has all been rehashed to death here in Australia, but may be newer to overseas audiences?
The style kind of grated on me - this kind of gee whiz, forced flippant tone as if that's the only way to keep the reader interested in a business story. It was hard to tell what was comming from Murdoch and what Wolff was just kind of speculating on out of thin air.
I did like his notion of Fox News as the tabloid of the US.

But this book seemed pretty fluffy with not much to it. Maybe because I work at News Corp, can't say I really found his picture of the company true (although I am WAY down on the totem pole) although it's possible I'm one of those 'third rate' people he says hte company is full of.

Anyway, I would recommend Neil Chenowith's Virtual Murdoch instead - that gets more into the crazy business side of things. This just seems like a lot of Wolff's own opinion -and he's much more interested in personal life/goss than the media empire, which i personally find more interesting. Quick read though.

[Bookmarks Magazine · Rating 3 out of 5]

By no means has Michael Wolff given the world the definitive biography of Rupert Murdoch. Several critics, especially those in the United Kingdom, felt that he had not even written a factually adequate one, leaving out major episodes and making several major errors. Others wrote that Wolff has written an interesting book but that it never truly penetrates the "secret world" of its subtitle. But like the tabloid newspapers upon which Murdoch built his empire, The Man Who Owns the News offers so many titillating details that reviewers found it difficult to put down. Add in the fact that its foundation was an encounter between two of the most enigmatic and controversial characters in today's media elite, and it may not even matter what's true and what's not.

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Cathy Allington · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to give this no stars. I had to give it one as a minimum. How on earth this was accepted for publication is beyond my comprehension.
The book has no seeming order. it starts on the Dow Jones buyout but jumps between Rupert's early life and his early career in no order and with no correlation with its chapter headings.
The author peppers the book with his own opinions. Seriously, if I wanted to read about what Michael Wolff thought about the media world, I would have bought a book named "What Michael Wolff thinks of the media world". Regardless of what anyone may think of Rupert Murdoch, he has carved his own place in the world and accords more respect than a former Vanity Fair writer.
The writing style is abysmal. Sentences regularly have 70 words or more, with disparate thoughts separated by commas, colons, semi colons and even question marks. All in the one sentence.
A thoroughly annoying, irritating and badly written egocentric epistle

[Chris O'Brien · Rating 2 out of 5]

While there were moments that I found this book entertaining, I don't mind saying that Michael Wolff's writing in general drives me crazy. Though he insists he interviewed boatloads of people, including Murdoch many many times, much of the book comes down to Wolff simply imaging what may or may not have been going through people's minds. He lays out possible scenarios, then suggests others, but offers no firm thoughts on why people actually did what they did. It seemed much of this could have been written from simply reading clips and thinking outloud.

Also, the man never met a comma he didn't like. It made me long for a simple, declarative sentence. Rather than overstuffed lines with infinite asides, long lists of synonyms and metaphors, that simple were redundant. My first move as editor would be to whack this book in half.

[Kathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fascinating book about the man who owns most of the news media, News Corp., including Wall Street Journal, MySpace, Fox News and more. The author had unprecedented access to Rupert Murdoch and his mother and family. It attempts to make him a vulnerable character, a man who attempts to appease his father and loves newspapers to the extent of jeopardizing his family relationships. Married three times, he is an overbearing father who pushes his children to work in his business only. Parts of this book are interesting, including some parts about his takeover of Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal and the personal information about his three marriages, but mostly this book by Michael Wolff is difficult to read, rambling, and hard to follow.

[The American Conservative]

'The hard writerly chore of trying to imagine a soul where none may exist has pluses and minuses. On the plus side, Wolff is a shrewd and dazzling writer who has engaged in media ownership himself. He projects his own ego and values on to his inarticulate hero, and his book contains many excellent insights into how business works, how newspapers work, and how the New York elite works.'

Read the full review, "Murdoch Exposed," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...

[Lori Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A should-read biograpy on leadership for knowledge workers, managers, directors, C-levels, and entrepreneurs.

[Maha · Rating 1 out of 5]

Never hated a book so quickly as this one... frankly, the only reason I decided to carry on reading it till the very end with the afterword and all was to come rate it as a one.

My problem with the book started with the author's tone (quite condescending) and with so much disdain (that at points he clearly says that he has so much disdain for the person he sat with for more than 50 hours to write their biography!).

On page 7,
A few weeks into the writing of this book, when news of Murdoch’s willingness to sit for a series of interviews with me has spread ~ suggesting that I might have sold my soul or that I was in danger of losing it ~ I ran into Jonathan Alter, Newsweek’s lead writer and a figure of doubtless journalistic rectitude, in a television studio in Manhattan.
“I hope you're going to use your access to Murdoch,” he said without preamble, “to really screw him.”
“So that’s how we do this job,” I said ~ mordantly, I hoped.
Alter was not to be dissuaded. “You’ve got to ask yourself, is it good for the country or bad for the country? And Murdoch is bad for the country.”

But isn't this act of betrayal you selling your soul anyway? If you don't like the guy so much, why interview him? Why not just write an opinion piece and not a "pretend" biography.

At the very beginning, I expressed my hatred for the book to a co-worker who said, "I've heard of Murdoch, but I've never heard of Micheal, what's his name?"

This book was my sleep aid, especially in the middle, I was struggling to read or keep track of what's going on. The only time my interests were aroused (and felt maybe a 2 would be a better rating for the book) was when the author talked about Rupert's wife Wendi!

Here's the thing, I neither know the man nor his biographer... so as someone who started reading about someone they knew absolutely nothing about, this book was the biggest pain in the ass ever! Perhaps, if the reader hates Murdoch, then I can see them enjoying this book! All it does is reduce his business sense to pure luck. Really, a man who build all of this, doesn't know what he's doing? It's hard to believe that! Maybe, he doesn't have a high IQ, maybe he has a high EQ (this goes against what the author was selling, he sold the image of an old mumbling dude who doesn't finish his sentences and suffers from both low IQ and EQ!) Yes, every now and then, he sprinkled a good comment here and there... but they were so far apart and connected by pure disdain for what the man has achieved. [Which is surprising, cause I only saw a single video of Wolff a day after finishing the book, and the guy had many fillers in his interview, "uh", "umm", etc.]

Towards the end of the book, I got the sense that part of his disdain was that Rupert was a Republican and a conservative... the author seems to like liberals more! Again, as someone who truly doesn't care about the politics of all of this, I just wanted a decent biography of one of the most powerful men in the world!

(Perhaps I would change my mind one day if I found out that Wolff's work is as noble as he claims, but till then, this book truly bored me to death!)

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m going to get to my random thoughts on Michael Wolff’s magazine article book The Man Who Owns the News, about Rupert Murdoch’s bid to buy the Wall Street Journal and the family machinations that were going on at the time. But first, a story:

As you might know, Wendi Deng and Rupert Murdoch married in 1999. She is 40 years younger than he is and they met soon after she earned her MBA from Yale and started working for the Murdoch-owned Star TV in Hong Kong.

Well, Wendi was a Yale MBA classmate of my friend, Dave’s, now-wife Shelly. Dave rented a room in my house in 1996 and we threw a New Year’s party. Shelly was back in Los Angeles on winter break and brought her classmate, Wendi Deng, to our party.

During the party, I thought Wendi was flirting with me. I said something to Dave and Shelly along the lines of, “I think she wants to fool around with me.” They both assured me that I was mistaken, that I was neither old enough or wealthy enough for her (which, seeing the direction her life took, turned out ultimately to be true).

A couple of days after the party, Shelly was over visiting Dave and we ran into each other. Shelly said to me, “Joe, it turns out you were right, Wendi did want to hook up with you on New Year’s Eve.”

And that is how close I came to sleeping with the woman who would become Rupert Murdoch’s third wife.

Provenance: Discovered going through my father-in-law’s books after he passed away.

Expectations: I thought this would be an interesting view of Murdoch’s personal and business life through 2009, when the book was written. I was wrong.

The Story: There are two stories being told here. The first is Murdoch’s bid to buy the Wall Street Journal in 2006-07. This is the magazine article that Wolff should have written.

What Wolff does, however, is also tell the story of Murdoch’s history and how he came to be at this juncture of buying the Journal. He goes into how Murdoch came to be in the newspaper publishing business, his drive to buy company after company, and also how this drive got him into severe financial trouble.

There is also the story of Murdoch’s family history. His marriage to Wendy and the birth of their two children, which really pissed off his four adult children, gets a decent sized portrayal. There is also a lot of ink given to Murdoch’s dynastic ambitions, and how each of his adult children were treated as they competed to take the reins of News Corp one day.

What it's really about: So, what is this really about? That’s a good question, and one I’m not sure I can adequately answer. Another good question is why is this so boring? I have better answers for that down below.
I think at the end of day this book is about what drives a man whose huge appetite for risk, ownership, and credibility to reach the heights Murdoch did. Wolff also tries to humanize Murdoch, talking about his faults and foibles and how these not only didn’t impede his success, but in some ways facilitated them. It’s a unique, if boring, portrait of a medial mogul.

Of Note: Murdoch is seen by those who work for him as almost omniscient, some sort of business wizard. Everything revolves around him in his companies, and those that don’t tow the line are few and far between (Roger Ailes, during the unnecessary tangents into Fox News, is one of those that does not cow-tow to Murdoch).

The stories here almost seem quaint. Written in 2009, we did not yet know how much damage to American discourse and politics Murdoch-owned media would play. Between the New York Post and Fox News, Murdoch is pretty damn responsible for the rise of disinformation and right-wing platforms. But this story is written as if Murdoch’s conservatism does not play much of role in reporting and programming when it very much does.

The story is disjointed, and can be hard to follow. Each chapter starts with a short telling of the Wall Street Journal deal to that point, then shifts back in time to Murdoch’s history.

We get a lot of background about bit players in the story, which was unnecessary and contributed to my feeling that Wolff was padding the story to get a book out of it.

Picking Nits: While Wolff tries to be objective, I felt like it was performative rather than sincere. Murdoch has faults, some more important than others, and Wolff definitely points these out. But then he goes on to almost excuse them or, worse, portray them as some sort of innate skill that Murdoch has for business.

The book was poorly edited, with several spelling and grammatical errors. I don’t fault Wolff for that, but it did distract.

My biggest nit is that while Wolff tried to get a book out of magazine article by adding more context and history to Murdoch’s story, he doesn’t really do a great job of it.

Recommendation: I go back and forth on how to rate this book. I didn’t love it, but maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought. It probably won’t stay with me, not like my near-miss on New Year’s Eve 1996 has.

[Grindy Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pay no attention to the ridiculously low rating (3.16 as of the date of this review). This is a clever telling of Rupert Murdoch's media career told against the backdrop of his takeover of Dow Jones in 2007. Part David Halberstam, part Michael Lewis, it squarely places the Murdochs where they belong - love them or hate them - as one of America's great media families, with the Sulzbergers, Chandlers, and Grahams. Required reading for anyone who wants to know what makes modern media tick, even ten years after its publication.

[Elisabeth Ahlefeldt-Laurvig · Rating 2 out of 5]

A biography of a dealmaker. What makes that man tick? According to the book: money.

But what about influence - here is a biography of the owner of News Corp and yet there is almost nothing about his influence on his news organization? An organization that includes Fox News one of the most spectacular players in Trump's precidency. Granted this book is written before then, but what about politics before then?

I really think this book leaves too much out to be able to understand the inside world of Rupert Murdock.

[Ugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

The style can be annoying - gossipy, subject-hopping, incessantly parenthesised - and some of the detail of the deal to buy the Wall Street Journal that the book is loosely organised around becomes tedious, but the subject is mostly pretty fascinating and the access is unparalleled. Plus as an added bonus for today's readers, you get to look for parallels in the Succession TV series. I'm going to have to read the follow-up that tipped me off to this book's existence, once the price comes down a little.

[Samuel Lipscomb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book. The writing style is really engaging, even if a little bit confusing at times. Wolff does a good job of painting a picture, which not many books like this do. I left it realizing that Murdoch is a much different character than what I thought. Still very controversial and responsible for a lot of unsavory stuff, but in a different way than I had thought. Very interesting. Though I will say, the book was published in 2008 so it leaves out newer Obama/Trump/Biden elements that would be interesting to hear about.

[Mohamed Atef · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rich inside look over the journey of Rupert Murdoch from different aspects and views. The biggest lesson I learnt from that bio is that you can’t win all your battles, even Murdoch had lost to some during his reign over the media industry. After what I knew about Murdoch’s personal life and the hectic days they went through I still have one question Wolff didn’t answer yet...Does it really worth it?

[Gerard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meandering, pretentious and gossipy

I got the book for the gossip and there was plenty of that in it. But over all the book was a struggle to get through, using the Dow Jones takeover has through line while he told the Murdoch history didn't really work because the deal just wasn't that interesting. And dear god I think I've never used the kindle dictionary feature so much before.

[M Pereira · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was slightly informative from the perspective of an Australian media empire and how the Murdoch family were perceived in their native Australia. But I didn't think it went into as much detail about the scandals and specific brand of journalism that Murdoch promoted in TV and Broadcast as I would have liked. All the same it was sort of informative but very much like window dressing to what is a much more substantial subject matter.

[Philip Cowan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh dear. Double-edged sword choosing an audio abridgement of this book. On the plus side, it was all over sooner but on the negative, do you really want a dull book read by its dull author in a monotone?

Nothing of any interest is revealed in this plodding, self-satisfied, so-called expose of Rupert Murdoch.

One you can skip.