Murdoch.

• Author: Ledbetter, James

There is emerging a General Formula by which the quality of a media book may be calculated before reading it: the greater the pre-publication pseudo-controversy the book generates, the worse the book actually is --but never for the reasons that made the book "hot." Richard Clurman's book about Time Inc., To the End of Time, sucked for reasons entirely separate from the Liz Smith-inspired theory that Robert Sam Anson plagiarized the manuscript in Esquire. Eric Alterman's assault on the punditocracy, Sound and Fury, suffered not, as prominent reviewers hulled, from one-sided political bias, but from an acute allergy to any kind of media theory.

Consider, then, William Shawcross's Murdoch, already the subject of scorn in Tina Brown's Vanity Fair Weekly, once known as The New Yorker. In a short salvo months before the book's American debut, a writer called Shawcross a Murdoch "hagiographer" and said that the Aussie baron "has found his Boswell." Shawcross's defenders--notably John Le Carre--counter-claimed that Brown was merely avenging the book's less-than-flattering treatment of her husband, onetime Murdoch editor Harry Evans, an assumption the couple denounced, in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, as "sexist."

Given such highly visible invective, the General Formula predicts that Murdoch is an unreadable disaster--which it is. But certainly not because of excessive to a dying toward Murdoch, or because of its discussion of Evans, a bit player who comes off as a grousing idealist. No, the problem is that somehow the writer who made his reputation by trashing Henry Kissinger has turned as juicy and froth-inducing a subject as Rupert Murdoch into an arid literary equivalent of kitty litter.

Murdoch is drearily written, clumsily organized, and--like too many Simon & Schuster volumes--badly in need of genuine editing. The first chapter--the first!--ends with this cliffhanging description of Murdoch's father Keith: "He was also a generous and discerning patron of the arts." Such resume-dumping typifies Shawcross's "prose" style, as well as his ham-listed sense of structure. Admittedly, it's difficult to capture Murdoch's simultaneous global deals in a straightforward narrative; Shawcross tries by breaking down his chronology into subheadings: "New York," "Hollywood," "London," etc. But the effect, paradoxically, is that each section ends up being both insufficient and redundant. Like too many contemporary chroniclers...