A year or so ago, at a dinner of media executives and a few journalists, one of the guests told this joke:
"Rupert Murdoch, asleep in the middle of the night, is awakened by a flash of light. He sits up, rubs his eyes and sees Satan standing at the foot of his bed.
" 'What are you doing here?' the mogul demands.
" 'I have come to offer you any deal you can imagine,' the devil responds.
" 'What do you want in return?' says Murdoch, clearly intrigued.
" 'You can have any deal in the world you can imagine,' replies Satan, 'and, in return, all I ask is your immortal soul.'
" 'Any deal?' asks a skeptical Murdoch.
" 'Any deal,' purrs the devil, 'but in return, I take your soul.'
" 'Hmmm,' muses Murdoch, 'what's the catch?' "
If you spent any time around Hollywood a few years ago, you might have heard the same story told about Michael Ovitz, then head of CAA. With or without satanic assistance, the super-agent's dreams of world domination ultimately came to naught, but as Michael Wolff's often fascinating, sometimes frustrating new biography, "The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch," shows, the 77-year-old head of News Corp. still is at the top of his game.
Wolff, who is a bit of an Internet entrepreneur himself, writes about media and culture for Vanity Fair, and one of his book's strengths is his decision to structure it like an extended magazine article. He uses Murdoch's purchase of Dow Jones and its corporate crown jewel, the Wall Street Journal, in 2007 to provide a genuinely gripping narrative spine to his account. Along the way, he weaves in the story of Murdoch's rather eventful life. Much will be familiar to people who have casually followed the dreadful mogul's career or who read British journalist William Shawcross' sympathetic biography back in the early 1990s. There's the usual stuff about the Australian-born Murdoch's being shipped off to a posh boarding school, where he was rejected as a coarse outsider; about his undergraduate education at Oxford, where he was rejected as a coarse outsider; about his initial foray onto Fleet Street, where he was rejected as a coarse, self-seeking outsider; and into the American market, where he was . . . well, you get the picture.
