Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Media Wizard, by Neil Chenoweth. Crown. 352 pages. $27.50.
As a driver of globalism, no force is more powerful than the media. They respect no borders, bringing Mickey Mouse to France, capitalism to China and CNN to the hideouts of punk dictators. Their multinational conglomerations wheel and deal over technological advantage, market share and even swaths of sky.
By Neil Chenoweth's reckoning, the revolution that has been reshaping the media's power before our eyes is just over a quarter-century old. Chenoweth, author of Rupert Murdoch, puts its beginning point at Sept. 20, 1975. That was the night Muhammad Ali stopped Joe Frazier in the so-called Thrilla in Manilla.
Gerald Levin, who ran a small pay-television outfit called Home Box Office for Time Inc., rented satellite time to show the Thrilla in Manila to customers in three states. This was the first connection of a live event, a satellite, a cable channel and a mass audience. It pointed the way to the world we now perceive each night through the boxes in our living rooms.
The currency of this new world is currency. To be a player at the top level of the global media game requires billions of dollars. Rupert Murdoch is one of the few people who had the stakes, the stomach, the ambition and the morals to join the game.
Murdoch, a native Australian, inherited his father's newspaper in Adelaide in the 1950s. Like the press barons of earlier generations, he turned a sleepy enterprise into an aggressive one and soon began prowling for larger challenges. He bought and shook up newspapers in Sydney, London and New York.
His competitive urges kept pace with a rapidly changing media world. He bought and combined book publishers, forming HarperCollins. He acquired 20th Century Fox and Fox TV. He launched satellite television in Britain. He even made inroads into China.
A stated goal of Chenoweth's new biography of Murdoch is to follow the money, charting the deals that have shaped and reshaped Murdoch's empire. Chenoweth's main focus is the last 20 years, including the time in the early 1990s when Murdoch overextended himself and his conglomerate nearly went kaput.
This approach has promise, but Chenoweth's book is a mess. His portraits of the people around Murdoch, and even Murdoch himself, are superficial. His information about Murdoch's business transactions tends to come from published sources.
These weaknesses might be excusable if Chenoweth brought a story-teller's art to his tale. But following Chenoweth's narrative of Murdoch's life and finances is like riding with a beginning driver who hasn't gotten the hang of stick shift. The stops and starts are so frequent and jarring that the reader loses any sense of direction.
In just a two-page stretch, Chenoweth mentions events that occur in 13 different years spanning 1944 and 1985, though not in chronological order. The death of Murdoch's father was a significant event in his life but not significant enough that it should happen twice, as it does in Chenoweth's book. Murdoch is a fascinating character and a big-time intercontinental power, and he's still going strong at 71. The business, political and personal exploits that have defined his life deserve far more discerning and illuminating treatment than this book provides.
Mike Pride is the editor of the Concord Monitor, New Hampshire's capital newspaper, where he has worked since 1978. A former Nieman fellow at Harvard University, he has earned the National Press Foundation's editor of the year award. With Mark Travis, he is the co-author of My Brave Boys: To War with Colonel Cross and the Fighting Fifth.