The Banality Of Power

By John Elson

TITLE: MURDOCH

AUTHOR: WILLIAM SHAWCROSS

PUBLISHER: SIMON & SCHUSTER; 492

PAGES; $27.50

THE BOTTOM LINE: In this slick but surface biography, a powerful media tycoon is just a man who can't say no to more.

HE HAS BEEN SLURRED AS "THE Dirty Digger" -- an invidious reference to his origins Down Under -- and reviled as a living replica of Citizen Kane. He has been caricatured (on this magazine's cover) as a King Kongish monster standing atop Manhattan's World Trade Center. Across the globe, an angry legion of ex- employees recalls him as a greedy exploiter who breaks contracts without blinking and treats hirelings like wads of Kleenex.

Hate him or love him (and some do, since the man has real charm), there is no escaping Rupert Murdoch these days in popular entertainment and journalism. At 61, the chairman of News Corp., who is now a naturalized American, stands out as one of the world's pre-eminent media barons. Through a bewildering mesh of subsidiaries, he controls an $8.5 billion communications empire that includes newspapers and magazines in Britain, the U.S. and Australia, the Fox . TV network and movie studio, plus a powerful satellite that beams video programming throughout the British Isles. Like Johnny Rocco, the mobster boss in Key Largo, Murdoch is insatiably ambitious for more -- more publications, more programming, more power. Where it all will end, to cite a famous parody, knows God.

Two themes stand out in this lumpy but fast-reading unauthorized biography, which gets the record straight yet seems to miss the inner man. (Shawcross, a British writer perhaps best known for his savaging of Henry Kissinger's Cambodia policy in Sideshow, managed to interview his subject. Murdoch read the manuscript but refused to comment on it.) One is that Murdoch is a daring but occasionally imprudent gambler, usually with other people's money. In 1990 News faced a liquidity crisis caused by the recession, a huge drop in advertising revenues, and Murdoch's reliance on short-term loans at a time when interest rates were rising rapidly. Suddenly $7.6 billion in debt, owed to 146 different institutions, had to be rolled over. An obscure Citibank vice president, Ann Lane, put together a rescue plan code-named Dolphin, and with Murdoch's help wheedled all the lenders into buying it. Thanks largely to Lane, Murdoch was spared the humiliating option of going belly-up into bankruptcy and losing control of his empire.

The second Rupert byte, if Shawcross can be believed, is that this restless entrepreneur, who controls so much of what the world reads and watches, seems to be utterly banal of mind. Apart from the family he dotes on, Murdoch apparently has no interests other than minding his properties and seeking new ones.

Murdoch sees himself as a radical provocateur. Yet the onetime student who kept a statue of Lenin in his Oxford digs is now a confirmed Thatcherite. "He deals in simplicities, and simplicities can be dangerous," Shawcross writes piously, referring to Murdoch's unshakable faith in the blessings of an international free market and the imposition of American values and products on the rest of the world.

Murdoch's awesome influence poses a theoretical dilemma. Which might be worse: that the tastes of so many are being catered to by a cynical larrikin whose primary goal is making money? Or that those reading and watching millions would be molded by a zealous ideological propagandist, committed to a false cause? Put this way, the best to be said about Rupert Murdoch is that he is the lesser of evils.