Brady On Media 'Red Rupert,' The Pragmatist James Brady 05.18.06, 6:00 AM ET
NEW YORK - Rupert Murdoch arrived in America in 1974 to buy newspapers in San Antonio and to create a national tabloid, and has been here ever since, an increasingly influential political force and media baron (TV, movies, the Internet, etc). Yet to some people, he remains an enigma.
"What's in a Murdoch-Clinton Alliance?" asked a somewhat disingenuous headline in The New York Times of May 11.
The story, strangely situated in the Metro section but datelined Washington, and written by Anne E. Kornblut, explored recent kissy-face time between those apparently sworn political enemies Murdoch and Hillary Clinton, as the most unlikely couple since Mary Matalin and James Carville found romance.
Murdoch would be hosting a fund-raiser for Senator Clinton this summer. Hillary was being polite: "I am very grateful that he thinks I'm doing a good job." One liberal blogger screeched, "The brazenness of this move is almost too much to stomach." Well, maybe, but was it all that much of a surprise?
Perhaps the most astute line in the Kornblut piece took note of Murdoch's "tendency to prize political power over ideology," a polite and elaborate way of saying he isn't quite the raving rightwing ideologue he sometimes appears, nor has he overnight converted to flaming pinko. But he's really a guy who just loves to win.
I went to work for Rupert in the summer of '74 as editor of his new supermarket tabloid National Star, and stayed with him in various jobs for the next nine years. In those days, he was still an Aussie and clearly a power back home, a press lord who cheerfully enjoyed the sport.
Once I asked about how close an Australian newspaper proprietor could get to the prime minister, did they talk frequently, or maintain a stiff and proper distance. "He comes to dinner at the house," Rupert said off-handedly. Although we think of him as a conservative, back then, if memory serves, Murdoch backed a conservative one term and a liberal the next. Depending on the candidate, and conditions, Rupert took turns.
Long before that, while his father Sir Keith, a correspondent who broke the story of murderously incompetent English leadership at Gallipoli, ran the family papers in Adelaide, the son was an Oxford undergraduate known as "Red Rupert."
I was never able to predict his political choices. In 1977, when I edited New York magazine, which Rupert owned along with the New York Post and the Village Voice, he hosted a series of editorial board meetings with the half-dozen mayoral candidates. I suspected Rupert wouldn't be backing Bella Abzug. But his eventual choice of Ed Koch astonished me. Koch, of course, won.
Some time after I'd left his organization, I wrote a column about Rupert's love of winning. As a tennis player, he beat people with whom he had no business being on the same court. "He hates to lose," said Aussie George Viles, known around the office as "Old Blue Rinse." Rupert was also a fan of thoroughbred racing, and according to Viles, in a big race Murdoch might have a bet placed on every horse in the field. "It doesn't matter to Rupert about the money so long as he has the winner. He hates to lose."
Rupert chided me for naiveté, and for the column. "You've been listening to Viles too long," he scoffed. But Old Blue Rinse might have had something there.
Which is what I suspect Rupert sees in Hillary. He is a good handicapper and he smells a winner. Just why people at the Times hadn't long ago figured this out, I can't say. Any assiduous reader of the New York Post over the last year or so could read into the paper's stories about Hillary Clinton--their placement, their number, their tone--a political sea change, a shift in coverage. Earlier on, Hillary had been the newspaper's "Dragon Lady," their pet peeve, their la belle dame sans merci. Then the paper began ripping her then Senate opponent, Republican Jeanine Pirro, and puffing Hills.
Now Red Rupert and Hillary are taking tea and crumpets.
Surely long before Ms. Kornblut wrote her column, top editors of the Times should have drawn conclusions. I am hardly the most astute poll watcher in town. But I sensed something had happened, that Murdoch had made a decision. And that for all his strong backing of Bush through two elections, he knew a loser when he saw one.
And that, once again, he wanted to be on the winning side. So he started wooing Hillary. Now if Roger Ailes' Fox News starts cuddling up, I'll be sure of it.