James Murdoch likes to take refuge in the word “process.” Sometimes in his increasingly beleaguered public appearances he says it with a short “O,” sometimes with a long one: his dry, slightly rootless transatlantic accent jumps around. But he always says the word slowly and reverently, carefully dividing the two syllables as his slender hands make neat, symmetrical gestures. “Process” suggests systems at work; activities that cannot be stopped; things being under control.
Until this tumultuous month, his continuing rise, like that of his family’s media conglomerate News Corporation, seemed intimidatingly inevitable. Only 38, James Murdoch had for half a decade been regarded as the likely successor to his 80-year-old father Rupert as head of News Corp, having overtaken his siblings Elisabeth Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch. Since 2007, James has been in charge of the company’s European and Asian operations, from brash Indian satellite television to ancient British newspapers. Since 2003, he has also been chief executive and now chairman of its main moneyspinner BSkyB. And in March, News Corp announced a further promotion: a “newly created role” for him, with additional international responsibilities, at company headquarters in New York.
His restlessness and blunt ambition seemed perfectly suited to the task. Last month, he told a media conference in Cannes that for News Corp, “The real issue [is that] we aren’t big enough,” compared with “monolithic brands like Google, Apple.” Over the next five to 10 years, he went on, News Corp intended to function “at a much bigger scale.”
Photo: Bloomberg
“James is like his father, News Corp people believe,” wrote Rupert Murdoch’s biographer Michael Wolff in 2008. “He’s aggressive, implacable, focused, remote, fit, precise. His father is obviously proud, even perhaps slightly afraid of him.”
Perhaps not any more. Already, this month’s historic retreats and defeats and general, jaw-dropping disarray suffered by Rupert Murdoch’s 58-year-old empire have claimed many casualties, from the entire staff of the News of the Worl to the legal manager of Murdoch’s London newspapers, Tom Crone, and News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, to the reputation of News Corp on both sides of the Atlantic.
As I write, James still has his job. Last Wednesday, the Financial Times still described him as his father’s “presumed successor.” But he is highly vulnerable: as overseer of his family’s British newspapers since 2007, he has been intimately involved in News Corp’s disastrous response to the phone-hacking revelations. “The company paid out-of-court settlements approved by me,” he admitted in a statement last week. “I now know that I did not have a complete picture when I did so. This was wrong and is a matter of serious regret.” On Wednesday, after being issued a highly public summons, he agreed to appear with Brooks and his father before the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee on Tuesday next week.
“This must seem like an extraordinary nightmare for him,” says Claire Enders of the respected media watchers Enders Analysis. “James Murdoch became chairman of News International in 2007, after the alleged [phone-hacking] offences took place. But people will say: ‘James should have been more decisive. James should have asked himself more questions.’”
Nor has his touch improved as the scandal has gone on. “The whole thing has been an absolute crisis management disaster,” says the former Labor spin doctor Alastair Campbell. Max Clifford, an old hand at averting PR catastrophes, reflected an increasingly common view when he told the Guardian: “I get the feeling James Murdoch is out of his depth.”
Two weeks ago, James gave an extended, damage-limitation interview to ITV. It lacked a certain composure: one of his shirt collars poked out untidily over his suit lapel, his tie knot was messy (he usually wears open-necked shirts for business), and he shifted from foot to foot when his answers were forced to touch on the most sensitive areas. With his lean frame and cropped hair, his round, almost rimless glasses and bureaucratic answers — “these are very serious matters that we take very very seriously ... there are real human beings involved” — he looked like a young US Marine officer trying to explain why a military operation had gone awfully wrong.
Enders says: “James Murdoch is a man of great ability, but he has a tendency to impetuous decision making, like his father. [James] closing the News of the World was an impetuous act, and it has done absolutely nothing [to halt the crisis]. And over the years James Murdoch has done himself no favors in his dealings with people — media regulators, politicians.” He has failed to anticipate, says a well-connected City figure who knows him well, that there are fraught moments in any business career when, “you may need people on your side. Right now the Murdochs look pretty friendless.”
In British media circles, James Murdoch’s abrasiveness is legendary. A former senior colleague at BSkyB says: “He can be likable, approachable, keen to learn, but you had to be careful on occasion. When he has made up his mind, you might be able to push back against him once, but to do it twice could be career-limiting.” Wolff writes: “James’ certainty has become part of a signature aggressiveness that he seems to think mimics, or extends from, that of his father.” He tells Wolff, “A little menace isn’t a bad thing”; in recent years, he has publicly attacked, among other perceived foes of News Corp, the BBC, the British Library, the UK media regulator Ofcom and the London-based Independent.
The bad side of James is that he picks too many fights needlessly,” says an old friend. “He’s become a little bit more, ‘The world’s against us [Murdochs],’ and the people around him have played to that side of him. But he’s this funny conundrum. He can also be very courteous and considerate. He’s got a good sense of humor. He’s an enthusiast. I can’t remember a time when I’ve felt: ‘Gosh, James looks a little tired.’”
Enders agrees that he “can be charming.” But it is a less streetwise, less instinctive sort of charm than that exercised by his father, until very recently, over British politicians. James is a less self-made, more technocratic kind of Murdoch. “He doesn’t read the newspapers,” says Enders. “He’s not a [media] content man. He’s interested in technology.” Campbell says, “He strikes me as very clever, but in that gilded way.”
James was born in London in 1972, the fourth of six children. His mother was the second of Rupert’s three wives, Anna. Rupert was in his early, most frantically expansive phase as an international media proprietor — he had recently bought the News of the World and the Sun — and until university James and the family lived a nomadic existence driven by newspapers. James quickly discovered they did not fascinate him: as a 15-year-old intern at the Sydney Daily Mirror, he fell asleep at a press conference, and was delightedly photographed by the (non-Murdoch) Sydney Morning Herald. Around the same time, he and Lachlan had sub-editing shifts arranged for them at the Times in London. “I don’t think they did many,” remembers a section editor at the time. “They looked completely lost and not very interested.”
At Harvard, James did visual environment studies. He drew a cartoon strip called Albrecht the Hun for the university’s satirical magazine, about a Germanic anti-hero who prefers reading to plundering. He dropped out of Harvard a year before the end of his degree. Soon afterwards, in 1995, he moved deeper into the world of alternative culture that the Murdoch empire, in those days, usually scorned or ignored, by helping found Rawkus Records, a tiny New York hip-hop label. The Rawkus aesthetic was cultish and sometimes cerebral, just right for clever, self-conscious young men like James Murdoch; in 1996 a reporter from the New Yorker found him at the studiously unkempt Rawkus offices, “dressed in a moth-eaten sweater and thrift-shop corduroys.” But there were hints of the media executive he would become. “We’re doing things that no other company would let us do,” James told the reporter. “We make mistakes, but at the same time it’s great.” About his father, he said: “I’ve been asking him for advice since I was a kid.”
Later that year, News Corp bought Rawkus and James left to work for the conglomerate’s music and internet division. It was the middle of the first dot-com bubble, a potentially perilous time for a green, self-confident young media executive with a lot of money behind him, and in 1997 he persuaded News Corp to offer US$450 million for a hot but technically and financially stretched software company called PointCast. Fortunately for him, the deal stalled and was not concluded: “We wouldn’t let our offer sit out there indefinitely,’’ Murdoch told the Businessweek Web site. “They [Pointcast] did have an opportunity ... and they didn’t take it.’’ Two years later, the now troubled PointCast was bought by another company for only US$7 million.
In 2000, James was sent away by his father to Hong Kong, to run News Corp’s then-struggling Asian broadcast network Star TV. He was still only 27. Following his father’s then-reliable formula of unsubtle politicking — James accused the Western media of unjustly maligning the Chinese government — and far-sighted purchases — he acquired the Indian rights to Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, which became one of the country’s most popular programs ever — he made Star a success.
His growing confidence could startle. In 2002, Campbell records in his diaries, Rupert Murdoch, James and Lachlan came to dinner at Downing Street. The conversation turned to the Middle East: “[Rupert] Murdoch said he didn’t see what the Palestinians’ problem was and James said it was that they were kicked out of their fucking homes and had nowhere to fucking live. Murdoch ... finally said to James that he didn’t think he should talk like that in the prime minister’s house ... TB [former prime minister Tony Blair] said afterwards he was quite impressed with the way Murdoch let his sons do so much of the talking.”
The following year, James was appointed chief executive of BSkyB and in 2004, against the advice of senior colleagues, he announced that BSkyB would put subscriber growth before short-term profit. The company’s shares fell by a fifth in a single day. “He was very calm,” says one of his close advisors at the time. “He didn’t panic in any way.” Over the next three years, his strategy turned out to be correct. “At BSkyB he proved an exceptional company architect,” says Enders. With his feel for technology and popular culture James was well suited to the fast-changing world of modern television.
But then in 2007 he was given responsibility for his family’s British newspapers, with all their charged political symbolism and old, carelessly buried secrets. “At Sky he had changed the culture, but his biggest mistake now was not to change the culture of News International, and instead to be slightly absorbed into it,” says someone who knows him well. “He should have turned the place inside-out, and then he’d be something of a hero.”
James is interested in big-picture politics — environmentalism, protecting civil liberties, shrinking the state — but the smaller canvas of British political life absorbs him less. Strikingly, in his ITV interview last week, he referred to “Prime Minister Questions” rather than “Prime Minister’s Questions,” as if he had never played very close attention to the central event of the parliamentary week. Although he is a British as well as American citizen, “He is not too bothered by sentimental ideas about the importance of Britain, and British journalism and British heritage,” says a former advisor.
In 2009, when the Guardian began exposing the News of the World’s phone-hacking, the former advisor suggests James’ “initial response would have been: ‘It’s just the liberal Guardian stirring it up, egged on by the BBC.’” Enders says this is an age-old Murdoch impulse: “Any criticism is seen as an attack, not as something evidence-based or something to learn from. It’s all very emotional.” But, she goes on, “I’ve heard from a large number of people that because of his temper, people would not willingly approach him with something that might be bad news.”
James has a certain machismo. He has “not let up on” Lachlan “since childhood,” writes Wolff, while all James’ siblings view him as “having particular Martian qualities ... [he is] remote, harsh, intense, judgmental.” He famously works standing up in his office, gets in at dawn, smokes and drinks whisky, and knows karate. Some of this is deceptive: one reason he starts work early is so he can see his wife and two young children in the evenings. He lives in the relatively discreet millionaires’ enclave of Kensington in west London — not flashy Belgravia or Mayfair — and values his privacy. At the ongoing revelations that his newspapers have been so brutal with the privacy of others, a friend insists: “He’ll be horrified.”
What will happen to him now? Allies of the Murdochs — there are still a few in London, mostly keeping their heads down — say that the current frenzy will eventually abate. The parliamentary recess is imminent, and the start of the soccer season is not far off, when even many Murdoch-haters annually rediscover their appetite for his products. Non-Murdoch papers may be found guilty of terrible excesses too. Phone-hacking fatigue will set in. Britons have plenty of other things to worry about. As for the News Corp succession, as one media analyst puts it, “There is no plan B” currently to James taking over from his father.
But even if he does, his inheritance will not be the one anticipated until barely a fortnight ago. In Britain and the US, and probably other countries, politicians and the police and shareholders are likely to treat News Corp in a starkly different way from now on. “The company will be under enormous pressure for a very long time,” says Enders. Many think it will never recover. James’ role as News Corp head could be not to secure world domination but to manage decline.
Or he could face worse. Last Friday, the former Labor home secretary Alan Johnson suggested that James Murdoch could be prosecuted, and ultimately go to jail, under the 2000 Regulation of Investigative Powers Act, which states that company directors face “criminal liability” if found guilty of “consent,” “connivance” or even “neglect” when their business is involved in the unlawful interception of communications.
Before the latest round of News Corp calamities, I asked a longstanding friend of James how he judged his prospects. “It doesn’t look good,” he said. And then there was a long silence.
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