Now His Board Is Rupert Murdoch's Real Threat

Rupert Murdoch always believed that the internet and its free model was the threat to his enduring dynastic ambition. In the event it was his operatives in the UK. They handed the sword to his enemies. Still, for nearly a generation he ran what amounted to a parallel monarchy more powerful in its way than the real one, the constitutional version headquartered in Buckingham Palace. His monarchy was better resourced, had an actual empire at its disposal. It had also most of the feudal trappings that the real one had been forced to dispense with; vassals, liege lords, courtiers, court favourites and a signal ability to distribute patronage and cause it to be bestowed. Neither was his variety, as was the true constitutional monarchy, constrained to just encouraging, advising, and warning. His monarchy was far from virtual. It could do pretty much as it liked, it seems now.

In Rupert Murdoch’s ambition to hand over his corporate creation to his children lay the strength of his ambition and also its weakness. It was the wellspring of the personal mystique and aura that for so long outshone that of all others and conferred upon him something that had long fled the portfolio of all other hereditary monarchies outside the Middle East: the power to induce fear.

The weakness always lay in the intense focus of this objective of handing over the gigantic media and entertainment empire to his descendants. It blinded him to anything, especially advice, that ran contrary to this magnificent obsession.

This ambition was supercharged in its focus on the three of his children from his second marriage, the middle layer comprising Lachlan, Elisabeth, and James. As in any hereditary monarchy the Murdoch one was characterized by a shifting jostling for succession as each of these three vied for the approval of their father, as Rupert had once sought the approval of his father, the founding father, Sir Keith Murdoch.

With their clenched fist faces and visible and frequent exhibitions of power and wealth, conscious and unconscious, they brimmed with entitlement. They were not in the hearts and minds business. Like their father, they shared the view that the quickest pathway to whatever they wanted was the shortest one.

Any of Rupert’s monarchical style entourage of grand visiers and lords chamberlain understood that any unfavourable critique of the divine right of this trio would lead to them being cast aside, as so many were.

Dangerously, the family all had one thing in common in that they shared the same identical delusion. It was the notion that decade after decade they could keep dishing it out with impunity. To be fair, they were always equal opportunity about their victims which could be members of the real monarchy, rock monarchy, peerage, or just the latest reality show hero.

They sincerely believed themselves to be invulnerable. Bulletproof in their parlance. Even if there was trouble, anywhere in the far flung empire, the mere promised arrival of the patriarch on the scene would solve it, or did until just so recently

Rupert Murdoch’s first colonization was New Zealand, something that is now largely forgotten.

It was here that his political sleight of hand was first made evident when in spite of the New Zealand government’s legislated opposition to foreign media ownership in the mid 1960s he nonetheless persuaded them that he was the man to take over The Dominion, the Wellington morning newspaper that in time grew to a group that commanded half the nation’s newspaper readership.

It was a few years after this first foreign coup that I met him. The Dominion was then a farmer’s paper and I was stationed in one of its provincial offices. His reputation of course preceded him. This was not the group of genial squatters who had just sold him the paper, we were told. This was a tough-minded practitioner of results management, and everyone, advertising, distribution, editorial, had better stand by to give a good account of themselves. We were lined up rather like the servants awaiting arrival of the new master in a television costume drama series about the aristocracy.

In the event, Murdoch breezed in, and after a few pleasantries, breezed out again.

This I came to realize later was part of his reverse-effect leadership approach. By deliberately playing down his impact on those working for him, or depending on him, he actually boosted it.

It is not generally known that Murdoch has been involved in huge plays in other industries other than the media and entertainment sphere, such as in agribusiness and transport.

Years later I was to witness this same effect when it was his role to influence a New Zealand board in the matter of their acquiring the assets of the old Australian Ansett airline business in which he had played a pivotal part.

Under-selling himself and his role, the New Zealand acquirers composed of a box-tick board of worthies were more malleable in his hand than any putty.

He has honed over the years also a weird ability to sum up certain human characteristics especially those associated with vanity. He knows for example that in his presence there is always so often a reluctance for anyone to ask questions of any true value for fear of appearing ignorant, or small minded. He grew up in the Australian syndrome of the Big Man and he has always had an unerring sense of those who want to be classified as such.

His insight into the frailty of others extends to his foot soldiers, his journalists. He understands the problems that practitioners have with numbers and simple arithmetic especially of the kind needed to evaluate balance sheets and any other mercantilist data. It is an occupational shortcoming that for example renders them unable to flesh out from any presentation of assets the countervailing liabilities.

This also means that the vocation finds it hard to identify, for example, funds moving between different tax jurisdictions.

Though he revels in journalism especially in its tabloid format, it is in so many ways that as a bush accountant that lies his true point of difference. His backbone ratio management technique flourishes side-by-side with wheezes in the valuation of things that are often hard to value, such as newspaper titles for example.

Even his disasters over the years have conversely often been viewed as part of his wider triumphs in terms of an all - encompassing genius to see around corners. Setbacks have included his running out of cash 20 years ago and more recently vast losses in the social networking internet sphere.

He finds it hard to relax alongside people he does not know well and again has turned the handicap into a strength without even trying. Those in his orbit believe it is they that are at fault. He does not have to be engaging. Others seed and burnish elements of his myth to the effect in the early days for example that he did not like people who wore suede shoes or who were overweight. He has made a small cult out of the conundrum as to whether or not he drinks alcohol. The notion of him as an ascetic has gained strength over the years as his once rather pudgy and indulged visage has transformed into one of singular gauntness, now crumpled with age. Were someone to be caught in a one-on-one with him, in a taxi for example, the desired conversation it was suggested should centre on topics as diets and religion.

Of all these guises the most effective has always been the most ironic. This is his larrikin pose. This has always been reinforced by his anti “elitist” stance, a code for his wish to be viewed as anti establishment.

In fact, he is the scion of the Melbourne social establishment, the most impenetrable in the English-speaking world, not excluding the United States.

All this hydra headed role playing and play acting has been glued together by the impression that he is at one and the same time anywhere and everywhere. Until just recently his anticipated appearance at the scene of any of his operations anywhere in the world has been in itself sufficient to solve whatever was going wrong

In spite of Australia being sometimes considered the world headquarters of the cult of exaggerated masculinity, it cannot be said that Rupert Murdoch beneath all the propaganda is especially macho, or that even outside his mercantilist career, he even pretends to be. Hard driving female journalists, as we have so recently seen, enjoy the same approval or otherwise as the male version. It was the women in his life who moved him toward Catholicism, the only occasion in which he deliberately slipped out from under the shadow of his father, newspaper proprietor Sir Keith Murdoch, an adherent of the Scots low church.

In Australasia the term “family man” is one of particular admiration and respect blended with affection. Rupert Murdoch in a sense is the ultimate family man. He has had three of them, from three wives. It was his determination to take the family business into the third Murdoch generation that indirectly detonated the current imbroglio.

He was heedless, as were the three of the children scheduled to take News Corporation forward, to the accelerating opposition to this dynastic transfer both within News Corporation and outside it. This is curious because Rupert Murdoch in his anti-elitism mode knows that in the English-speaking world, and in his native Australia especially that there is much resentment toward those with inbuilt advantage, especially if it flaunted.

An example just prior to the present maelstrom was the acquisition by the family firm, as they see it, of the daughter Elisabeth’s UK-based film company. It was enough for the family that it was the family. Thus they ignored the shareholder rumbling dissatisfaction about what by any definition was an arbitrary internal related party acquisition.

None of them learned from the true Royal Family, the one they were so happy to target, of the exceptional skill involved in handling large-scale entitlement and so the inevitable, somewhere in the family, adventures and misadventures.

And yet….and yet when the dust settles the family citadel will be seen to be still standing. In the Westminster sphere, anyway. The old meddler knows that the hacking flap and its aftermath has much in common with events after one of those periodic financial busts. There is a slew of commissions of inquiry, much breast-beating, and after a while normal service resumes when memories dim about the cause of the all the commissions and inquiries.. Above all, boredom sets in, Murdoch knows.

There will be a few more bodies thrown off the back of the Murdoch sledge. Things will settle down.

His worry is his own board, now severely rattled that the can of worms will cross the Atlantic and contaminate the company's real seat of global power in the United States. The board knows it must handle its founder with extreme care lest they too as individuals or as one corporate body find themselves tossed to the wolves. They must introduce carefully to their master of mischief the notion of a regency minus the entire Murdoch clan until such time as the US operations have been quarantined from the UK virus.

Unbelievably ambitious and determined to get their hands on what they see as their patrimony, the three children involved are unlikely to sideline themselves running hospital ships or community business advisory services, for example.

The main board's strategy of persuading the Murdoch siblings to recuse themselves from their role as divine right inheritors, even for a while, will be the next intriguing phase of the family saga

ENDS

© Scoop Media