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http://nymag.com/news/media/64305/The Raging Septuagenarian
Taking on the Times, Google, and, in a sense, his own children, Rupert Murdoch is not going gently into the night.
By Gabriel Sherman
Published Feb 28, 2010
.... ...a battle that had been raging around Murdoch for years. Is Fox News a disreputable cash cow, its reported $700 million in profit something to be tolerated with a held nose? Or is it central to the News Corp. mission? And questions like these lead directly to others: Who is Rupert Murdoch, really? And what does he want now?
As always, these questions do not lend themselves to simple answers. The News Corp. patriarch turns 79 years old on March 11. The younger generation—Prudence, 51; Elisabeth, 41; Lachlan, 38; James, 37—is no longer that young. Three of its members are accomplished businesspeople in their own right. And they, along with senior News Corp. executives, have been working toward the day when Rupert is no longer making the decisions. They are trying to shape and define his legacy, sometimes editing out parts, like Roger Ailes and Fox News, that offend their sensibilities, while trying to position the company for a future that looks very different from the present. But the problem with these efforts is that Rupert Murdoch is not going anywhere. If anything, he’s been more active than ever, raging at his adversaries with the vigor of a man half his age. Over the last several months, he’s been waging a very public war with Google, trying to bend the freewheeling web according to his own rules. He successfully fought Time Warner to get the cable giant to cough up millions to broadcast his Fox affiliates. And he’s rebuilding The Wall Street Journal with an eye on destroying the New York Times, one of the most ancient of his enemies. ....
Murdoch, who depends on Ailes’s profits to fund his unprofitable hobbies (the New York Post, for instance, which has failed to take down the Daily News and is said to lose as much as $70 million a year), didn’t want Ailes to do anything rash, like quit. His feelings about Ailes were complicated, but he needs him. (Just as he needs his children, but gets furious at their efforts to usurp control.) And so inside News Corp., Murdoch worked to quell the little family rebellion. On Monday, while Ailes was having lunch with News Corp. chief operating officer Chase Carey in the third-floor executive dining room, Murdoch made an impromptu visit. Both James and Elisabeth sent Ailes e-mails explaining that Freud’s views weren’t their own. Everyone had fallen into line. Rupert Murdoch was still in charge. ....
Why the Freud quote wasn't the first time he had choked on his morning Times.How he and Thomson view journalists..... Thomson’s views of journalists are closely aligned with those of his boss: He thinks most of them are liberals overly concerned with writing stories that will impress other liberal journalists and win prizes in journalism competitions. ....
“‘You’re a bunch of lazy, self-important, past-their-prime journalists.’ ” Why the Times is religion for a particular brand of reader and advertiser. “Digital is out of his comfort zone.”Why the failure of News Corp.’s Internet businesses tainted James's reputation..... Roger Ailes is another complication for James. In Europe, where James spends much of his time, Ailes and Fox News are mocked and loathed as the worst form of American jingoism. James is concerned about climate change, and his wife, Kathryn, a former model and marketing executive, works for the Clinton Foundation. Politically, James is not liberal—he’s a committed free-market thinker—but Fox’s brand of politics is a problem that, in his view, needs to be managed. ....
Why Michael Wolff's book The Man Who Owns the News infuriated many..... Dame Elisabeth explained she doesn’t really have much more to say about succession; it’s a topic that doesn’t come up. “I don’t discuss it with him. I’m sure he’ll never retire,” she tells me. “I don’t intend to retire either, and I’m 101.” ....
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