Murdoch, Ink.

With a redesigned Wall Street Journal, mogul Rupert Murdoch is launching an old-fashioned newspaper war against The New York Times. Not since William Randolph Hearst took on Joseph Pulitzer have we seen such a fight.

Johnnie L. Roberts
NEWSWEEK
Updated:Apr 19, 2008

Two of the publishing world's most influential editors approached the tower at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan with apprehension. Headquarters of News Corp., the limestone-clad tower houses the company's pugnacious New York Post and Fox News Channel, favorites of the boss, Rupert Murdoch. When he's not hopscotching the seven continents, Murdoch rules his empire from his eighth-floor office here, which is decorated with a backlit, floor-to-ceiling map of the world—the better to pinpoint his hundreds of media properties, from Los Angeles-based Fox Broadcasting and the Silicon Valley headquarters of MySpace to the United Kingdom's BSkyB satellite-TV company. The dining suite where Murdoch hosts his guests has three separate rooms, each themed to one of the media Murdoch controls: newspapers, movies and television. The place whispers discretion, so the powerful who call on Murdoch needn't fret about surfacing the next day in the tittle-tattle of the New York Post's Page Six. Given the nature of their visit, discretion was important to the guests on a late spring day three years ago, the then Time Inc. Editor in Chief Norman Pearlstine and his deputy John Huey. The two men had come seeking support from the one media mogul whom other moguls most fear and respect.

Pearlstine and Huey were facing a potential public-relations nightmare. For months, they'd been trying to untangle Time magazine from "Plamegate," the scandal involving press leaks from the Bush West Wing that had compromised the identity of an undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame. Cornered by a special prosecutor who was probing the mess, the magazine editors were still pressing for legal relief, but also realized that their only other recourse might be to cross that most sacrosanct journalistic line: revealing their reporter's confidential source—who in this case happened to be Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. So they called on Murdoch to seek support for their legal position, recalls Pearlstine. Huey says they were also looking for a promise of a restrained response from Murdoch's minions if it were necessary to out the confidential source. They didn't want to land on the New York Post's front page with their heads superimposed on rats, for instance (such is the power of the Post over Manhattan's media elite). "Done," Murdoch said quickly, to the surprise of the editors.

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