'Rupert Murdoch Is Becoming a Liberal'

Rupert Murdoch isn't what you've been told, Michael Wolff writes in Vanity Fair. He's not a destroyer of journalism—he is perhaps the last great lover of newspapers. And he’s actually turning liberal. Yes, he’s still a free-marketeer, but Murdoch has been seduced by his second wife’s liberal social circle, and "the angry outsider, the anti-elitist" is becoming one of them. Which explains why he overpaid for the Wall Street Journal and fantasizes obsessively about buying the New York Times.

Murdoch hosted a secret meeting with Barack Obama this summer, including a face-to-face with Fox chief Roger Ailes, which started acrimoniously but ended in a “tentative truce," writes Wolff.  After spending 9 months interviewing the mogul for an upcoming book, Wolff finds him the opposite of the corporate man—"maybe the last troublemaker in the holier-than-thou, ethically straitjacketed news business." But he thinks Murdoch is actually becoming embarrassed by Fox, his former alter ego. (More Rupert Murdoch stories.)