Author's Note: This is the first part of a Virtual Murdoch series.

I'm with the invaders, no use trying to hide that. And at the same, I disagree with some of the things they are doing.
~~ William S. Burroughs, "Quick Fix"

Introduction: Don't Hate The Media, Become The Media

What Murdoch offers - what Murdoch is offering here to you now - is a piece of the future. The man before you has this uncanny ability to make the future happen, in a way that almost no one in the world can. It is a future of ideas and visions that makes Mursoch almost irresistable to anyone with a spark of imagination. It is this quality that gives Murdoch such a devastating effect on politicians, particularly on those to the middle and left of centre, whose rhetoric depends on imagination. Murdoch's natural home is deep on the right, and Democrats and Labour politicians understand this in their heads. And often it makes no difference. Murdoch in your face at Force Ten still takes your breath away with his tantalising, attainable view of a possible future. This is Murdoch in full seductive mode.
~~ Neil Chenoweth [1]

The minidisc had been recording for only a few minutes when I grasped that Neil Chenoweth, an Australian Financial Review investigative journalist, had stumbled onto something big.

We were holed up in Chenoweth's hotel room on 9 July 2001, discussing his just released book Virtual Murdoch: Reality Wars on the Information Highway (London: Secker & Warburg; Sydney: Random House Australia, 2001), a biography that explained how Rupert Murdoch achieved pre-eminence in the global media elite. What Michael Lewis had promised with The New New Thing (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1999), Chenoweth has actually delivered on. This was no saccharine CEO self-hagiography, but rather a New Economy of labyrinth corporate ownerships, offshore tax havens, a phalanx of lawyers and MBAs, tense annual shareholder meetings, and M&A meltdowns. Virtual Murdoch had only been on the streets for a day, and Chenoweth was already in trouble.

The problem with one-newspaper cities, Ben Badikian once observed, was that they were reliant on local advertising and faced censorship by their owners. Brisbane has the Murdoch-owned City News. When a News Ltd executive discovered that Chenoweth was the keynote at a Park Royal Hotel book launch organized by Better Bookshops Brisbane, a quick call to the hotel's general manager ended the "anti-newspaper" gig. "It wasn't a huge gig with only 22 people booked in," noted Crikey's Stephen Mayne (with Chenoweth it would have been 23 Skidoo), but that wasn't the point: this was yet another case of corporate self-interest overwhelming a purportedly free press. It may have only been a book tour, but given the details that Chenoweth has unearthed, may be a sign of things to come.

The anonymous News Ltd. staffer who "killed" the speaking engagement highlighted a supreme irony: these PR flak techniques worked when information flows were subject to "top-down" centralized control by an oligopoly. In an Indymedia age of "bottom-up" forums, however, these techniques boomerang back on their practitioners (if they haven't already "escaped" to edit media critique sites like Jim Romenesko's Media News or Brill's Content.

Just as scary was the fact that Chenoweth had predicted media deals that fell within days of our scheduled interview: Comcast Corporation announced a surprise M&A bid for AT&T. And that was before I heard the news of a GM and News Corp deal. Chenoweth had written about the early negotiations in his book's introduction, and he suggested that it would be as important as the AOL/Time-Warner merger.

Having reinvented himself yet again, the changeling Rupert Murdoch would become the global media's single most powerful mogul. The deal would achieve nothing less than the redefinition of the 21st century media landscape itself.

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