KEY POINTS:
The collapse of what seemed to be the rock-like pillars of the modern economic world are being reported with almost gleeful relish, so much so that some commentators suggest the media's morbid obsession with bad news is contributing to the paralysing lack of confidence in global financial institutions.
It is, perhaps, not surprising that the whiff of schadenfreude is so strong. The media was one of the early sectors to find that the rivers of cash which had once seemed inexhaustible were drying up. Now the message seems to be "join the club" as other industries find themselves flailing around in a bleak new world.
Compared with the American auto industry, for example, the sums involved in the suffering media business seem modest. But there's no escaping the pain.
Sumner Redstone is battling to keep a grip on his MTV to CBS empire with an army of bankers, once so generous, seeking to call in the US$1.6 billion ($2.7 billion) debts his family have accumulated. He has sold his stake in Midway Games and may sell his National Amusements cinema chain. The core empire which includes Paramount Studios is not yet on the block but that may just be a matter of time.
Three of America's greatest newspapers, the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun, have folded into the cover of Chapter 11 bankruptcy with the parent Tribune Company being an estimated US$13 billion in debt. Trinity Mirror, Britain's biggest newspaper chain, has fallen out of the FTSE top 250 companies because the collapse of its share price has been so severe.
In Ireland, Sir Anthony O Reilly's Independent News and Media group has been trying to offload some of its interests in the face of 1.4 billion ($3.4 billion) in debts, and across the Tasman, David Kirk fell victim to collapsing share prices at Fairfax and mounting losses in the online operations of the Australian Financial Review.
And then there's the man some describe as the most powerful single figure in the Western media - Rupert Murdoch. The market is moving so quickly that any figures are likely to be out of date before they are published, but some estimates put Murdoch and his family's losses at US$4.8 billion as the share price of News Corporation crumbles in the face of declining advertising revenues.
Against this backdrop of tottering empires, the title of Michael Wolff's new biography of Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, may be less accurate than it once was or, at least, the value of that putative ownership may be questionable. Not that Murdoch himself at 77 seems subject to much gloom. In a notably upbeat Boyer lecture he delivered last month Murdoch said newspapers would always be around in one form or another.
The business wasn't about "printing on dead trees" but "our real business is giving our readers great journalism and great judgment". He pointed to the Times in London and the Wall Street Journal as how newspaper brands can hold large online readerships.
Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? He owns them both and his pursuit of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal provides the backbone of Wolff's book, the latest in the tonnage of dead trees devoted to books about Murdoch.
Wolff leaves no doubt about Murdoch's obsession with newspapers and his skill in the business of journalism. Although his empire's film and television interest have made him the pioneer of multimedia ownership, it is newspapers that Murdoch is closest to and which he most understands.
In the newsroom he is spectacularly hands-on. There is no shortage of evidence that Wolff has it right when he says, "A News Corp editorship under Murdoch is a position in which your authority, your professional grade is always temporary. You hold it only so long as he is not in the room (or the country). As soon as he arrives, you surrender it."
Most critics say that under Murdoch the Wall Street Journal is now a livelier and better newspaper than it once was.
But Murdoch is more than a working journalist. He is a dealmaker of killing skill. The financial difficulties which the business is now enduring are not new to Murdoch.
He has been close to disaster before and has always escaped, buying businesses when he hadn't got the money to do so, making the right move at the right time as if by magic and sailing on undeterred by his mistakes, of which there have been many.
As Wolff says, Murdoch is not interested in the past.
"He is - and this is a fundamental entrepreneurial talent - a master illusionist. It's the essential entrepreneurial skill to convince people you are what you have yet to become."
Reading about his negotiations with the Dow Jones family owners is like watching the All Blacks take on a pub team, except that All Blacks would probably show compassion.
Murdoch is, in this and other accounts, driven by a malice and dislike for rivals that is near pathological.
Wolff is fascinated by Murdoch and was given such access that the book almost qualifies as an authorised biography. It doesn't share the uncritical approach of most such works, however, and there are plenty of examples of Murdoch acting about as rationally as Caligula. But what Wolff fails to deliver, and it is probably not capable of being delivered, is exactly what Murdoch is after.
For many, Murdoch is the Dark King. In his recent hatchet job on the failures of the mainstream media, British journalist Nick Davies paints a picture of a man bent on political influence. But it is hard to pin down exactly how that works. Murdoch's mad dog television channel Fox News mounted an unrelenting attack on the Democrats in the American presidential campaign but he is quoted as wanting Obama to win because he would sell more newspapers.
In Britain, Tony Blair's PR hardman Alastair Campbell has given a picture of a relationship between the Prime Minister and the media magnate that could hardly be described as healthy for democracy. But this reflects as much on Blair as on Murdoch. According to Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain, Murdoch complained about the time he wasted drinking tea with Blair and coffee with Blair's successor, Gordon Brown.
Although Wolff points out Murdoch is, at heart, deeply conservative, he also has an abiding loathing for the establishment, particularly the intellectual elite. "He ain't conventionally smart. His war against intellectuals is, in part, to level the playing field, because he lacks their advantages. He doesn't have the the kind of mental patience to work through the analysis. His is a short attention span ... It's a minute by minute mind. Animalistic. Eat what you kill."
Yet in recent years under the influence of his third wife Wendi Deng, 38 years his junior, to whom Wolff devotes a lot of understandable attention, he has flirted with the American liberal establishment. So if he is not driven by politics, perhaps it's only business goals he pursues.
In Ken Auletta's book Back Story, Dan Rather of CBS, who is not a disinterested observer, is quoted as saying: "Mr Murdoch has a business, a huge worldwide conglomerate business. He finds it to his benefit to have media outlets, press outlets that service his business interests."
But many of Murdoch's deals make no conventional business sense and would never have been pursued by those practising orthodox financial principles. He has bought newspapers because they were there, not because he was going to make money.
His pursuit of "respectable" titles like the Times and now the Wall Street Journal have cost him untold millions. He has little interest in the things money can buy, at least until Wendi came along.
He undoubtedly loves the news game. But it's the news according to Murdoch and his whims and mischief making.
It's not clear that the concept of freedom of opinion has any meaning for Murdoch as was demonstrated so clearly by his shameful trimming - although Murdoch is a stranger to shame - when his ultimately ill-fated Chinese operations were threatened.
How important all this is for democracy is debatable. Fox did not get the election result it wanted. There's not much evidence that Murdoch's outlets have ever swayed a British election.
Murdoch may have been right in his November speech that newspapers, however delivered, are trusted by readers, but with an ever greater amount of information flying around it is questionable how influential the mass media is in creating opinion.
In any event, it may now be that the financial implosion in media will end the days of the press baron as represented by Murdoch and his megalomaniac predecessors like the Harmsworths, Beaverbrook, Hearst and the unspeakable Joseph Pulitzer, now the badge of journalistic propriety.
Whether we will then be served any better by news delivered according to the precepts of MBA management is another question.
The Man Who Owns the News by Michael Wolff.
Published by Knopf - $55
MURDOCH AT A GLANCE
* Age 77. Dyes his hair and is somewhat deaf.
* Chairman and CEO, News Corporation.
* Net worth US$8.3 billion, according to Forbes.
* Spouses:
- Patricia Booker (1956-1967)
- Anna Torv (1967-1999)
- Wendi Deng (1999-)
* Children:
- Prudence Murdoch (b. 1958)
- Elisabeth Murdoch (b. 1968)
- Lachlan Murdoch (b. 1971)
- James Murdoch (b. 1972)
- Grace Murdoch (b. 2001)
- Chloe Murdoch (b. 2003)
