Free The Man Who Owns the News by Michael Wolff

management by upheaval, or management by distraction, or management by force of will—he makes his enthusiasms everybody’s enthusiasms. He changes the game so much that it stays his.
    Now he’s entertaining a new game changer, something that could help him take back the story.
    It would help him deal with Malone—force him to solve that problem that he allowed to be created. It would help him deal with Chernin—while he had to give in to Chernin over his contract demands to get the top spot if Murdoch “departed,” he’d better be damned sure Chernin doesn’t wind up strong enough, nor his children weak enough, for Chernin to renew the contract on the same terms. And it would help him solve the family problem—which is, in his mind, about legacy. So he’ll do what he’s always been doing: creating a legacy. He’ll just create a bigger one—which is, in fact, just what he’s always been doing.
    In the spring of 2005 Murdoch has lunch with Bruce Wasserstein, one of the most famous dealmakers of the 1980s, who more recently took over the investment bank Lazard. Wasserstein, fishing for business, mentions Dow Jones. It’s impossible, but on the other hand, the business is in decline, while the Bancroft family’s needs are ever-increasing…might be something there…Everybody knows Murdoch has a thing for Dow Jones, so if you want Murdoch’s business, it’s the obvious thing to offer him. And if you know anything at all about doing business with Murdoch, you know you have to gossip about something, have to hold out the possibility of unsettled relationships, of changing alliances, of exploiting other people’s weakness, of far-flung, unthought-of opportunity. No matter that you might be exaggerating or even making the whole thing up.
    Then Vernon Jordan, the Clinton confidant and corporate-board gadfly, who’d been forced by age limits to retire from the Dow Jones board, presses him: “Put the money on the table and the family will take it. They’re just a bunch of coupon cutters.”
    Then there’s James Lee Jr., vice chairman at JPMorgan Chase, almost comic in his enthusiasms and salesmanship, who’s been obsessive about repeatedly urging Murdoch to look at Dow Jones. He knows Murdoch has a nagging interest in the company, and he knows Dow Jones has problems—and Lee has nothing to lose by conflating those two facts.
    In May, Norm Pearlstine and John Huey, both former WSJ editors and now the two top editors at Time, Inc., call on Murdoch to get his support for Time’s fight with the Justice Department in the Valerie Plame case over a journalist’s right to keep sources confidential. They too know about Murdoch’s longtime interest in Dow Jones and about offering Murdoch gossip to curry his favor, and during their conversation—which Murdoch will later claim not to remember—they point out that the Bancroft trustee at the Boston law firm Hemenway and Barnes, Roy Hammer, has once again repeated, in a current Fortune article, that Dow Jones is not for sale—at least not, Hammer quips to Fortune, for less than $60 a share.
    Pearlstine, who has mentioned this as well to the Washington Post Company’s CEO, Donald Graham, who dismissed the figure out of hand, will recall later, “Rupert’s eyes sort of lit up, and he said, ‘Huh, $60 a share.’ He started trying to figure out how to get there almost as we were sitting there. Whereas Don Graham is a prudent man who would say that was an absurd price for Dow Jones, Rupert was trying to figure out how he could do it.”
    The Wall Street Journal, along with the New York Times, the big-three networks, and CNN, are the things he could never buy—establishment things, elite things. Indeed, at one time or another he has tried to buy every national news company in the country—and been rebuffed. (Hence, he started his own network and his own twenty-four-hour cable news channel.) So whenever the subject comes up of actually owning what he is not supposed to