Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch » (Bargain)

Michael Wolff, a columnist for Vanity Fair and two-time National Magazine Award winner, is one of the nation’s most influential writers about media, culture, and politics. He is a commentator for CNBC and a found of Newser (www.newser.com), the news aggregator. In 2003, he achieved international recognition for his dispatches from the Persian Gulf as the Iraq War began. His work, which has been widely anthologized, has appeared in numerous publications in The United States, including New York magazine, where he was a columnist, and the Guardian and Spectator in The United Kingdom. He is the author of four other books, including Autumn of the Moguls and Burn Rate. He lives in New York City.

If Rupert Murdoch isn't making headlines, he's buying the media outlets that generate the headlines–from the Fox network and Fox News, to MySpace, to the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal–and that influence every aspect of American politics and culture. He may be the most powerful man of the age–and, many, would argue, the most frightening.

In nine months of interviews, Michael Wolff has had more access to Murdoch and his associates and family than any journalist has ever been granted. This is the story of Murdoch as Machiavellian titan, as overbearing (but doting) father, as love-struck husband (of a woman forty years his junior), and as the most cynical and brilliant newsman who has ever lived.

Written in the incisive and compelling style that has made Wolff's Vanity Fair column such as must-read–and with a new foreword and afterword detailing the reaction Murdoch had to the book as well as his tumultuous relationship with and abhorrence of the Internet and its effects on his newspapers industry–The Man Who Owns the News reveals a host of new details about Murdoch's business, his family, his hopes for the future, and other media companies he yet wants to own.

The Man Who Owns the News is an epic for our time.

Acknowledgments vii

Foreword to the Paperback Edition xv

Prologue: His Message 1

Chapter 1 The Butterfly Effect 15

Chapter 2 Around the Corner 31

Chapter 3 The Throwback 53

Chapter 4 Opposing Families 83

Chapter 5 The Outsider 115

Chapter 6 His Art 141

Chapter 7 The Eighties–Business Guys 161

Chapter 8 It's a Tabloid World 197

Chapter 9 Who's the Boss? 225

Chapter 10 Rupertism 255

Chapter 11 The Nineties–The Amazing Mr. 287

Chapter 12 Rupert in Love 317

Chapter 13 The Ecology 339

Chapter 14 Dynasty 351

Chapter 15 Putting the Deal to Bed 377

Epilogue: The Proprietor 389

Afterword to the Paperback Edition 405

Endnotes 414

Bibliography 440

Index 445