The Man Who Owns the News by Michael Wolff Read Free Book Online Page A

of the family. Shortly after the article appears, Cox is forced out at Dow Jones. Both Cox and Goth will move overseas. While other younger Bancrofts—those in their thirties and forties—are also full of questions about their odd inheritance and enforced stewardship, they are all rich enough and passive enough not to want to deal with the cold shoulder that would greet them if they voiced too many complaints within the family. What’s more, in 2000, with the bull market surging and technology advertising at its peak, Dow Jones will reach $75 a share—its pinnacle.
    And yet 1997 leaves the family and its trustees jittery—the Bancroft trustees, at the family’s ancestral (well, since 1940s) trusts and estates firm of Hemenway and Barnes, in Boston, now ask for and get a position on the board alongside the three seats reserved for the three branches of the Bancroft family. Since the trustees control the trusts that control the company, “ask” can well be read as “demand.” There is a regular effort now to deal with the obvious fact that Dow Jones isn’t the best investment in the world. On the advice of its trustees and advisors, the family sells down as many shares as it can while still keeping control.
    But in the fashion of a family that dislikes overt conflict, nothing happens. And nothing changes either. Except that everybody gets older, including Kann, including the Bancroft cousins, including Murdoch—moving everything toward…something. Nothing—even nothing itself—goes on forever. A lack of movement is itself odd and disturbing, and if you are finely attuned to these sorts of things—stasis where there should be progress—it suggests its own sort of opportunity.
    Which falls to the person who plays the longest game.

 
    TWO Around the Corner
     
    LATE 2004
     
    There are two events at the end of 2004 that might have raised questions about Rupert Murdoch among his closest advisors—if doubting him or having any skepticism at all about him was an option, which it was not.
    This is not just because he surrounds himself with particularly compliant lieutenants—or, as they tend to call one another, henchmen. But because the men (all men) who surround him—and many have been with him for decades—have come to believe that he has special powers, that he can “see around corners.” They not only believe this but need to believe this. Where, in other companies, other executives wait for the top executive to falter, count on it even, here any sign of faltering or error is adjusted or rationalized or made part of the plan by the people around him. They believe in him—if not as an omnipotent person, then as the closest version of one they ever expect to come upon. His near omnipotence is their meal ticket; his near omnipotence is their brand. What is News Corp. but a company built around the instincts, impulses, and gambles of its leader?
    Both of the troubling events that occur at the end of this year involve Murdoch’s family, which is the central governing principle of News Corp. Fostering the well-being, power, and present and future opportunities of the Murdoch family, in its multiple iterations, is, after only Rupert’s interests (which he judges—for the most part anyway—as part and parcel of his family’s interests), the reason for the company’s existence. Inside News Corp., you treat the Murdochs like they are the royal family—or the way the British royal family was regarded before Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids came along and destroyed their mystique.
    Murdoch sees himself, and hence everybody at News Corp. sees him, as first and foremost a good family man—even if he has three of them.
    There is the early, left-behind family: former wife Patricia Booker, whom he continued to support through her many travails after their divorce until her death in 1998, and their daughter, Prudence, born in 1958, who moved in with her father when she was nine. Then there’s the dominant middle