All Rupert Wants to Do is Play Gossip Columnist
Rupert Murdoch might be a billionaire and the majordomo of one of the largest media conglomerates on the planet, but at the end of the day, all he really wants to do is trade gossip. Or so says Michael Wolff, who will be publishing a book on the Aussie mogul next year and has a piece on Murdoch is the October issue of Vanity Fair. Calling him "among the biggest gossips in New York," Wolff describes a day when he turned up at News Corp. HQ with his assistant, whom Rupert completely ignored because, Wolff says, he was dismayed to see she was pregnant:
We found the 77-year-old News Corp. chairman and C.E.O. hunched over the phone reporting out a story. He'd been out the night before and gotten a tip. Now he was trying to nail it down. His side of the conversation was straight reporter stuff: Who could he call? How could he get in touch? Will they confirm? Barked, impatient, just the facts. Here was the old man, in white shirt, singlet visible underneath, doing one of the same basic jobs he'd been doing since he was 22, having inherited the Adelaide News in Australia from his father. And he was good at it. He was parsing each answer. Re-asking the question. Clarifying every point. His notepad going. He knew the trade. Of how many media-company C.E.O.'s could that be said? This wasn't a destroyer of journalism—this was a practitioner.
Also of note: Wolff takes full credit for starting the rumor that Michael Bloomberg was thinking about buying the New York Times, a tidbit he says started when he mentioned the rumor to Murdoch.
