Author: Murdoch 'absolutely despises' the 'bullying' Bill O'Reilly Muriel Kane

Published: Friday November 28, 2008





Print This Email This A new book about media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns Fox News, is to be released next week. Its most sensational revelations involve what the author describes as Murdoch's loathing for leading Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly.



Politico received a pre-publication copy of Michael Wolff's The Man Who Owns the News and reported on Friday that Murdoch is not only embarrassed at times by his ownership of Fox News, but that he "absolutely despises" O'Reilly, who is that network's top-rated personality.



"The embarrassment can no longer be missed," Wolff writes of Murdoch. "He barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill OReilly. And while it is not that he would give Fox up -- because the money is the money; success trumps all -- in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets."



Wolff adds that Fox CEO Roger Ailes shares Murdoch's opinion. "It is not just Murdoch (and everybody else at News Corp.s highest levels) who absolutely despises Bill OReilly, the bullying, mean-spirited, and hugely successful evening commentator, but Roger Ailes himself who loathes him. Success, however, has cemented everyone to each other."



According to Wolff, Murdoch's desire not to be defined solely by his ownership of Fox underlay his purchase last year of the Wall Street Journal, which "was in no small way about wanting to trade the illiberal -- the belligerent, the vulgar, the loud, the menacing the unsubtle -- for the better-heeled, the more magnanimous, the further nuanced."



The 77 year old Murdoch, who is generally viewed as conservative but not ideological, has made a few surprising moves recently, including a highly visible truce last summer with the Obama campaign.



But when Wolff went so far as to suggest -- in an article published in October's Vanity Fair -- that "Rupert Murdoch is becoming a liberal -- sort of," Murdoch grumpily denied any such thing.



Wolff comments, "He wasnt a liberal! Who said that? He was, stubbornly, what he wanted to be, what he decided he would be."



