Quick Take
- Narration: Don Leslie delivers Wolff’s sprawling, anecdote-dense prose with steady professionalism; he handles the gossipy digressions as well as the structural analysis without flattening either
- Themes: Media consolidation and power, dynasty versus merit, the paradox of the press baron who controls journalism
- Mood: Engrossing but uneven; chatty dinner-party energy with flashes of genuine insight
- Verdict: The most complete portrait of Murdoch’s empire assembled to that point, and still relevant to anyone trying to understand how media power concentrates and operates.
I came to this audiobook already skeptical. I had read Wolff before and found his style either irresistible or infuriating depending on the subject, and Rupert Murdoch seemed like precisely the kind of subject that would tip the scales toward self-indulgence. A man who has spent decades making himself the central actor in every story his outlets tell seemed like dangerous raw material for a writer who has his own tendencies in that direction. I started it on a weekday morning commute and found myself still listening at my desk, headphones in, pretending to file emails, well into the afternoon.
The Man Who Owns the News was published in 2008, giving it the particular temporal quality of a photograph taken just before something changes: the Dow Jones acquisition has just happened, the smartphone era has barely begun, and the digital disruption that will eventually reorganize everything Murdoch built is visible on the horizon but not yet rearranging the furniture. That historical positioning gives the audiobook an accidental documentary quality that it did not have when new.
Access, and What Wolff Did With It
The central premise of the book is that Wolff had unprecedented access to Murdoch himself, and this raises the access journalism problem immediately: how do you write critically about a subject who let you in? Wolff navigates this imperfectly but more honestly than most. He includes moments that are unflattering to Murdoch, particularly around family dynamics and the Dow Jones acquisition, and he does not pretend that his subject was cooperative in order to be well-portrayed. The picture that emerges is of a man who agreed to the access partly out of vanity and partly out of a calculation that Wolff could be managed, and who was then surprised when that calculation proved only partially correct.
One reviewer who described the book as the best available account of Murdoch compared it favorably to Shawcross’s earlier biography, noting that Wolff’s style, while chatty, creates an intimacy with the subject that more academic approaches cannot. That comparison holds. The book reads as journalism rather than scholarship, and the Vanity Fair columnist’s voice is present throughout in ways that some listeners will find engaging and others will find intrusive.
The Dow Jones Throughline and Where It Strains
Wolff uses the acquisition of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal as the structural throughline, returning to the negotiations while weaving in the broader history of News Corp’s growth from Australian regional newspaper to global media empire. This is an ambitious editorial choice and it works better in some chapters than others. A reviewer correctly noted that the deal itself is not inherently thrilling as a dramatic engine, and there are stretches where the financial maneuvering description goes flat. The family dynamics chapters, by contrast, are where the book earns its fifteen hours most convincingly.
The Murdoch children, their positioning for succession, and the particular dysfunction of a family empire in which the patriarch refuses to name a successor represent the book’s most genuinely revelatory material. The portrait of Rupert Murdoch as simultaneously building a dynasty and remaining unable to fully trust any of its potential inheritors is the kind of psychological observation that could only emerge from extended access. Whether that observation is accurate is impossible to verify from outside, but it rings true in the way that good reporting on powerful people tends to ring true.
Don Leslie’s Navigation of Wolff’s Prose
The audiobook’s narrator Don Leslie has a natural broadcast quality that suits the material’s journalistic DNA. He does not editorialize, which is the correct instinct given how editorially colored Wolff’s own prose already is. Fifteen hours and forty minutes is a long listen for any narrator, and Leslie’s consistency is genuinely impressive. The occasional dry observation that Wolff drops into otherwise expository paragraphs lands cleanly in the audio format because Leslie gives those moments a slight pause without making them a performance.
The one legitimate complaint about the narration echoes the complaint about the book itself: the gossipy passages and the analytical passages exist in the same tonal register, which means listeners have to do some work to separate observation from assertion. This is not Leslie’s failure but Wolff’s, and it is present in the written version as well. The audio format makes it slightly more acute.
Who Should Listen, and Who Should Skip
This audiobook is well-suited for listeners with an existing interest in media history, press freedom, or the specific mechanics of how large media companies are managed and mismanaged. It is also valuable for anyone trying to understand the ideological architecture of outlets like Fox News and the New York Post as products of specific choices rather than inevitable market outcomes. Listeners who want narrative biography without the gossipy journalism-about-journalism quality that Wolff brings to everything should manage expectations. And given the 2008 publication date, a few hours with some supplementary reading about what happened to News Corp in the years since will make the audiobook considerably richer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Man Who Owns the News still relevant given it was published in 2008?
Yes, with appropriate framing. The book covers the structural logic of Murdoch’s empire and his methods of acquisition and operation, which have not fundamentally changed. The specific deals have moved on, but the portrait of how Murdoch thinks about media power remains analytically useful. Treat it as a foundational document rather than a current account.
How critical is Wolff of Murdoch, given the access arrangement?
More critical than you might expect from an authorized-access biography, but not unflinchingly so. Wolff includes genuinely unflattering material about family dynamics and acquisition methods, but his style tends toward the ironic observation rather than the prosecutorial. Listeners hoping for a systematic critique of Fox News’s political impact will find gestures in that direction rather than sustained analysis.
Does the audiobook cover the phone-hacking scandal at News of the World?
No. The book was published in 2008, and the hacking scandal became public in 2011. The audiobook therefore captures News Corp at a moment just before one of its most damaging episodes. This is worth knowing before you start, as listeners expecting coverage of that episode will not find it here.
Is Don Leslie’s narration engaging enough to sustain fifteen-plus hours?
Leslie is a steady and professional narrator whose broadcast quality suits the material. The audiobook’s pacing challenges are more a function of the book’s structure than of the narration, and listeners who find Wolff’s discursive style engaging in print will find it equally so here. Those who want the book to stay on point may find the fifteen hours stretch.
