Word: shawcross
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AUTHOR: WILLIAM SHAWCROSS...
...themes stand out in this lumpy but fast-reading unauthorized biography, which gets the record straight yet seems to miss the inner man. (Shawcross, a British writer perhaps best known for his savaging of Henry Kissinger's Cambodia policy in Sideshow, managed to interview his subject. Murdoch read the manuscript but refused to comment on it.) One is that Murdoch is a daring but occasionally imprudent gambler, usually with other people's money. In 1990 News faced a liquidity crisis caused by the recession, a huge drop in advertising revenues, and Murdoch's reliance on short-term loans...
...second Rupert byte, if Shawcross can be believed, is that this restless entrepreneur, who controls so much of what the world reads and watches, seems to be utterly banal of mind. Apart from the family he dotes on, Murdoch apparently has no interests other than minding his properties and seeking new ones...
Murdoch sees himself as a radical provocateur. Yet the onetime student who kept a statue of Lenin in his Oxford digs is now a confirmed Thatcherite. "He deals in simplicities, and simplicities can be dangerous," Shawcross writes piously, referring to Murdoch's unshakable faith in the blessings of an international free market and the imposition of American values and products on the rest of the world...
...expensive to waste on reasoned debate over the economy and the homeless. The bipartisan conclusion: keep it short -- and mean. Dan Quayle has appointed himself the "pit bull" of Bush's campaign. G.O.P. insiders boast that if Mario Cuomo runs, they've already located his Willie Horton: Arthur Shawcross, an upstate New York child killer who went on to murder 10 women after he was paroled...