Read Online Murdoch's World by David Folkenflik - Free Book Online Page B

after the conniving antihero of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair .) A relationship ensued and Rupert and Wendi were married just weeks after his divorce from his second wife, Anna Torv Murdoch, was finalized.The divorce settlement was reported to have cost $1.7 billion, butin reality she settled for a nine-figure payout, valued between $100 million and $200 million, to lock in the fortunes of the adult children. (She had raised Murdoch’s daughter Prudence, by his first wife, since the girl was nine.)
    As Wolff tells the story, Murdoch wanted the timing of his involvement with Deng out of the book, but it stayed in. The Man Who Owns the News received scant coverage in any News Corp properties. And Wolff also criticized Allan by name on cable television for the racially charged cartoon. Soon an article appeared onthe gossip website CityFile, and then another surfaced on the better-known Gawker, alleging that Wolff was having an affair witha younger colleague—a woman just a year older than his daughter. The Post pounced, citing, of course, the reporting of others. Over the course of the month,the Post published seven pieces invoking the affair and publishinganother cartoon by Delonas, unfairly depicting the couple, in the words of Wolff’sgirlfriend Victoria Floethe, as “a thirteen-year-old girl in bed with an eighty-year-old.” By the end of the coverage, Wolff had moved out of the apartment he shared with his wife and the tabloid was running pieces about a legal fight the soon-to-be divorced couple were having with Wolff’s mother-in-law.
    Wolff still had the tapes of his conversations with Murdoch. According to Wolff, he called Ginsberg and reminded him of the interest websites expressed in putting the chairman’s unguarded musings online. Murdoch typically spoke indistinctly, making reproduction of the tapes of less than clear value. But the Post ’s articles stopped cold at the end of the month.

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    FAIR AND BALANCED

    TABLOID BLOOD WOULD CIRCULATE THROUGH the arteries of what would become a new American television network, breaking the monopoly of the big three. In 1985 RupertMurdoch acquired six television stations in the nation’s largest ten markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Washington, DC, from John Kluge’s Metromedia conglomerate. The deal, constructed before Murdoch had acquired 20th Century Fox, put the creation of a fourth network within reach. When Murdochbought out Marvin Davis’s stake in both Fox studios and the stations that year, the Australian newspaper king was suddenly America’s newest multimedia mogul—with major holdings in print, movies, and television.
    At its debut in 1986, the Fox network broadcast but a night or two a week. Even when Fox became full-fledged, it provided just two hours of nightly prime-time programming. It offered magazine shows inspired more by the New York Post and daytime television than nightly news programs. In fact, Fox had built no indigenous news division to cover the news.
    A Current Affair was a syndicated scandal and entertainment TV show that originated in 1986 from News Corp’s flagship local TV station WNYW Channel 5 in New York City. One of its stars wasSteve Dunleavy. He wore a trench coat, chain-smoked like Bogart, and cut a memorable figure with a jutting chin and unavoidable pompadour. And he chased just about anything with two X chromosomes. The oft-recycled claim was that he had been in coital vigor with a Scandinavian heiress late one snowy night outside a bar when a city snowplow ran over—and broke—his foot. Dunleavy was said to be so soused that he continued his aerobic affections unabated.
    The tabloid columnist Pete Hamill joked,“I hope it wasn’t his writing foot.”
    Dunleavy shone as a reporter for Murdoch’s tabloid Mirror in Sydney before breaking stories for the National Star . He headed to greater glories on the Post . During the