‘He changed my life for the better as he changed the world’

Rupert Murdoch is the most interesting person I’ve known by a country mile, writes his longtime editor Piers Akerman.

Rupert Murdoch is the most interesting person I’ve known by a country mile.

To admit this on ABC television invites derision, as I found when I nominated him on the Insiders program as the individual I’d most like to have dinner with.

I was jeered at by the other panellists and host Barry Cassidy.

The ABC, like the embittered former prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd, is eerily, hatefully obsessed with Murdoch but, having worked with and for him for over half a century, their fanatical preoccupation would indicate only that they don’t know him.

I don’t pretend to be an intimate of the man known as KRM to senior editors and managers, or just Rupert to many across the global organisation he built, but I have spent quite a bit of time with Murdoch and he remains as fascinating as he was when we first met in Sydney after I joined The Daily Mirror in 1969.

Rupert Murdoch and Piers Ackerman in Sydney in 2011.

What his detractors don’t know, or choose not to, is that Keith Rupert Murdoch has an intellectual dynamism that places him in a global realm well beyond their petty prejudices and he’s given thousands great opportunities here and abroad.

Joining News was like stepping on a magic carpet and over the years that decision has taken me from Australia to the United States and the United Kingdom.

Despite offers to join an international TV network, to run a national news network for an Asian government, and from a rival Australian publisher, I’ve stayed because Rupert is the most stimulating and challenging, as well as engaging, person I know and he’s a superb journalist as well as being an extraordinary businessman.

When we met, Rupert was married to his second wife, Anna, who had been a reporter on his other great love, the national newspaper The Australian.

He had just ventured into the British market with his purchases of the News of the World and The Sun and the young couple were spending most of their time in London.

In early 1970, Muriel McKay, wife of Alick McKay, Rupert’s deputy, was kidnapped and murdered after being mistaken for Anna by two West Indians, who were caught and convicted — though Mrs McKay’s body was never found.

The incident shocked the Murdochs and they relocated to New York where I was then working.

One weekend when I was with Anna and Rupert at their country home in upstate New York, his first biographer called to ask about writing a book and typically, Rupert invited him over for a game of tennis.

The writer proved as accurate with his serves as he was with the later work, a pastiche of crudely written gossip. Rupert was later to remark on the number of people who had made money writing about him.

Sydney Rupert Murdoch and Piers Ackerman and Rupert Murdoch in Sydney at the News Awards in 2008.

As executives know and as he promised in his exit note, his focus remains on the company he founded; Anna’s was on the children they had together, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James; and Prudence, Rupert’s daughter by his first marriage.

I was on The Australian in the early ’80s, then transferred to The Times in London as the Wapping dispute wound down, a victory for Rupert over corrupt print unions.

When I was editing The Advertiser in Adelaide in the late ’80s, Rupert told me of his unsuccessful attempts as a young man to wrest that newspaper from its Establishment ownership, even bringing a gladstone bag of cash to show chairman Sir Lloyd Dumas he could raise the capital but to no avail.

At the Herald & Weekly Times in Melbourne in 1990, we merged The Sun-Pictorial and The Herald, even as The Mirror and The Telegraph were merging in Sydney.

I occupied Rupert’s father’s old office and he told me how he used to wait in the outer office for Sir Keith Murdoch, hoping for a lift home.

He said he was so small then his feet dangled in the air as he sat in a straight-backed chair while Sir Keith’s secretary helped him with his homework.

The smell of printers’ ink in the old building brought back childhood memories.

Rupert’s skill in editing, headline writing and layouts, is enviable. He even scribbled a rather cheeky poster when we heard that Kerry Packer had fallen off his polo pony.

That poster was hastily scrunched up and thrown away when his sister Janet Calvert-Jones called with an update on Kerry’s health and Rupert asked her to make sure flowers were sent to Kerry’s wife, Ros.

I was never given any instruction on the editorial position the papers should take. Not there, not ever.

After the Victorian people elected a reforming government under Liberal Jeff Kennett, I left for Los Angeles and then Washington to join the forerunner to the highly successful Fox News.

It was during a dinner with Rupert and Anna at their home in Bel Air after Elisabeth had become engaged to Elkin Pianim in early 1993 that I saw clearly their divergent hopes.

Whilst Anna spoke of her desire to become a grandmother and expressed the hope Rupert would slow down, I could see him slowly rolling his eyes to say: ‘As if’.

He is a creator, and now he has passed on his creation to his eldest son but, as editors everywhere know, he will be watching.