MURDOCH'S GAME.

Like the legendary press barons to whom he is often compared--Hearst, Pulitzer, Northcliffe, Beaverbrook--Rupert Murdoch has relished playing kingmaker. In the fall of 1977, when he was forty-six and had recently arrived in New York from Australia, by way of Fleet Street, he decided, as the new owner of the Post and New York, to endorse a candidate for the mayoralty. The city was in crisis: the treasury was empty; the serial killer Son of Sam had been terrorizing the five boroughs; the labor unions were threatening to strike; and seven Democratic candidates, including Mario Cuomo, Herman Badillo, and Ed Koch, were vying to succeed the hapless Abe Beame.

Murdoch invited them to his office. "Mario Cuomo was Governor Carey's candidate," Koch recalled recently. "And Rupert's preferred candidate, too, initially. Rupert asked each of us what we would do to take on the labor unions. Mario said, 'Trust me.' I said, 'I'll take a strike and I'll break it. If they go on strike, it will be illegal, and I'll defeat them.' "

Koch, then a liberal congressman from Greenwich Village, lacked both Cuomo's eloquence and Badillo's popularity in the outer boroughs. According to one poll, only four per cent of voters even knew who he was. "Rupert was impressed by what I said," Koch said. "But he wanted to endorse Mario nevertheless. So he gave him a chance to come back and see him again later in the week. Again, he asked him the same question. And Mario said the same thing: 'Trust me.'

"A day or two later, I was sitting at home. My campaign truck had broken down, so I couldn't go out campaigning. The phone rang and a voice said, 'Is Congressman Koch at home?' I didn't recognize the voice, so I said, 'Who's calling?' The person said, 'It's Rupert.' I said to myself, 'Rupert . . . Rupert . . . That's not a Jewish name. Who could this be?' Then I recognized the Australian accent. I said, 'Oh yes, that Rupert.'

"He said, 'Congressman, we will be endorsing you in the mayoral race. It will be on the front page of the Post tomorrow.' I said, 'Rupert, you just elected me.' And he had. The Post's endorsement transformed my campaign. I wouldn't have won without it."

Almost thirty years later, Murdoch is arguably the world's most powerful media executive. His company, News Corporation, owns the Fox Broadcasting network, the Twentieth Century Fox film studio, the book publisher HarperCollins, the Post, The Weekly Standard, MySpace, and part of DirecTV, the biggest satellite-television provider in the country. News Corp. also owns five British newspapers and more than a hundred and ten Australian newspapers, and controls satellite-television providers in Britain, Italy, and Asia.

The success of Fox News Channel, which Murdoch launched in 1996, has secured his reputation as a strident conservative, so it came as a shock to both his right-wing allies and his liberal enemies when, in July, he hosted a fund-raising breakfast for Hillary Rodham Clinton. During the Clinton Administration, both the Post and Fox News pilloried the First Couple with a relish bordering on cruelty. (Page Six, the Post's famous gossip column, referred to the President as the "horndog-in-chief," and Sean Delonas, its editorial cartoonist, routinely depicted him in his underpants.) Since September 11th, Murdoch's media outlets have sometimes seemed like propaganda arms of the Bush Administration, skewering anybody who dares to question the President's war on terror. (Last year, Bill O'Reilly, one of Fox's most popular anchors, suggested that the American Civil Liberties Union and the "judges who side with them" are "terror allies." When the Abu Ghraib prison story broke, the Post didn't even put it on the front page.)