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

ever own…
    When Peter Chernin first gets wind in the spring of 2005 that Dow Jones is once again an idea in Murdoch’s head, his reaction—beyond that Dow Jones is not available, not a chance—is Why in hell? What possible advantage would Dow Jones offer News Corp.? As Chernin sees it, everything from a corporate point of view that might be accomplished with the acquisition of Dow Jones has already been accomplished, in spades, ages ago.
    This has been the premise of News Corp., which has become the premise of all other big media companies: By acquiring a famous media brand, you take over its cachet and standing—as well as its cash flow. The New York Post, New York magazine, the Village Voice, the Times of London, Harper and Row, TV Guide, Twentieth Century Fox—these are the brands that put Murdoch on the map.
    Except now the Murdoch brand is bigger than all of them. Bigger, certainly, than Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. And certainly News Corp. would get no advantage from Dow Jones’ pitiful cash flow.
    From any prudent, standardized business-practices view—and the media business, once a business of audacious and often ridiculous moves, is becoming nothing if not standardized—trying to take over Dow Jones is illogical.
    Not to mention the potential PR disaster. In the standardized playbook of modern corporations, the idea is to avoid controversy. Truly, there might not be any greater desire at the highest reaches of corporate life than to avoid bad press. Bad press kills. It hammers your share price, it rattles your board, it undermines you with your friends and family, it discourages your customers, it challenges your vanity, and eventually it gets you fired. For any executive, how the media might respond is a major strategic calculation. Beyond containable levels, if the press is going to be bad, you just don’t do it.
    Chernin has enough trouble dealing with Fox News. The last thing he needs is endless stories—and this is how it would play—of tawdry, dubious Fox News taking over the respected and unimpeachable Wall Street Journal.
    Even more to the point, for Chernin the Wall Street Journal, however iconic, is the newspaper business—that dying animal. (Murdoch not only mocks Chernin for not reading newspapers, but points out that Chernin can’t get his college-age children to read a paper: “They won’t even read one. They refuse. He keeps sending out subscriptions for the New York Times to college and they won’t even open them.”) The company’s newspapers in London and Australia, once great cash contributors to the company, are now, like newspapers everywhere, fading enterprises. They aren’t the company’s future. They aren’t anybody’s future. They’re just Murdoch family lore.
    Anyway, Murdoch is always buying Mars—at least until some other more distracting planet comes along, and then he’ll be buying that. It is Chernin’s job to help dissuade, distract, and keep the focus on the real business at hand, which is entertainment, not news. And while he knows that Murdoch has told his people to start a book on Dow Jones, collecting all the public data about the company’s performance, Chernin isn’t worried. Murdoch has been ordering up that book for the past twelve years. They call it the Olympic book because it gets forgotten about and then dusted off every few years. Dow Jones—Chernin knows, everybody knows—is not for sale, and, famously, does not want to be sold. Not now. Not ever.
    It’s true enough: Nobody has any reason to believe that the Bancroft family, or the people who shield the Bancrofts from people such as Murdoch, would react any differently than they have in the past. No means, as it has always meant, no.
    Still, it’s just a phone call. In fact, when Murdoch hears that Michael Elefante, a younger lawyer at Hemenway and Barnes, is replacing Roy Hammer, who ran the trusts for more than thirty years and is due to retire—and who has snubbed Murdoch