¡Mi regalo de Reyes!

Michael Wolff está cobrándose su biografía de Rupert Murdoch bastante bien y bastante por adelantado. Cashing In On Rupert, titularía yo el reportaje sobre la habilidad de Wolff para reciclar el libro. Ya me estoy esperando una pieza en El País Semanal o en El Mundo Magazine para antes de Navidad.

Al grano: hoy The Guardian publica extracto editado de la dichosa biografía. El adelanto confirma lo que sabíamos: Wolff escribe muy bien. Es un delicioso repaso de cada uno de los hijos Murdoch –de los mayores de edad–, con los que se entrevistó. Lo más jugoso saldrá en el libro, pero no se pierdan de ningún modo el tramo dedicado a James (¡hilarante!) ni estas perlas:

::LACHLAN. "Family businesses are great businesses," Lachlan says, "but they're, they're also fraught with difficulties, so, um, so the, uh... I think because you go back to that fundamental character trait that has served Dad so well, which is forward thinking and always driving forward, I think he, um, misunderstood - doesn't understand or appreciate sometimes, or he does, but doesn't think about how complicated they are, um - I'm not really answering the question, but, uh, don't you know my dad's never going to die?"

::ELISABETH. "He [Dad] still falls into stupid old habits. I mean, he's impossible to figure. He's weirdly awkward about things, but his heart is in the right place. He's very old-fashioned. He finds it hard to talk about emotions, hard to say... If somebody doesn't know it... He'll say sorry if you call him on it, but he walks straight into it."

::JAMES. […] he discusses the advantages of his father's menacing reputation with a pleased glint in his eye. "A little menace isn't a bad thing." But his father's menace -cowboy-or outlaw-style- has mutated in James into a sort of programmatic, techno-manager, automaton-like cultishness. And from his mouth comes paragraph after paragraph of super-abstracted business-speak.

The Man Who Owns The News, de Michael Wolff, sale la semana que viene en el Reino Unido editado por The Bodley Head, a £20.

En la foto, de d a i: James Murdoch y su esposa Kathryn Hufschmid, Matthew Freud, marido de Elisabeth Murdoch, Wendi Deng, mujer de Rupert Murdoch, Sarah O'Hara, mujer de Lachlan Murdoch. La foto es de Tom Stoddart/Getty.

Murdoch en PaperPapers: aquí