Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- At the end of “The Man Who Owns the News,” Michael Wolff gets a glimpse of Rupert Murdoch the reporter.

Arriving for an interview one morning, Wolff finds Murdoch hunched over a phone in a white shirt, singlet showing. The billionaire News Corp. chairman is chasing a tip, barking questions, seeking confirmation, scribbling notes.

“This wasn’t a destroyer of journalism, this was a practitioner,” Wolff writes. “On the other hand, he was trying to smear somebody.”

The flip-flop from admiration to anxiety epitomizes the tension coursing through this labored, often maddening portrait of the 77-year-old mogul whom so many journalists love to hate.

Wolff writes a column for Vanity Fair. Drawing on what his publisher calls unprecedented access to Murdoch (more than 50 hours of interviews) and his closest associates and family members, Wolff sets out here to tell two stories.

One is a behind-the-scenes reconstruction of Murdoch’s $5.2 billion acquisition of Dow Jones & Co., the owner of the Wall Street Journal and -- full disclosure -- my previous employer. Murdoch bought the Journal, Wolff says, in order to destroy the New York Times in what would be “a true, and perhaps final, newspaper war.”

The other, told as flashbacks, is the story of Murdoch’s life from his birth as the son of an Australian newspaper publisher to his third marriage with Wendi Deng, 38 years his junior, and the jockeying for power and affection among his heirs.

Dynastic Ambitions

Murdoch has deep dynastic ambitions yet is unwilling to give up “an iota of real control,” says Wolff, who interviewed all of Murdoch’s grown children and even his 99-year-old mother, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, who gave the author a tour of the estate garden in her golf cart.

Why would Murdoch grant so much access? Wolff says he assumes his book is part of Murdoch’s “branding and legacy strategy.” The brand surely needs a makeover that goes beyond Murdoch’s effort to look younger by dying his hair a color Wolff calls “obviously and vainly orange -- or, occasionally, aubergine.”

Murdoch is usually thought of as the raucous outsider who challenged staid media insiders, be in London or New York. He’s the proprietor of tabloids such as the Sun -- that London purveyor of Page 3 girls and sledgehammer headlines like “GOTCHA” -- and their TV equivalent, Fox News.

Chasing Obama

Murdoch’s “most significant brand association” is with Fox News, the channel that treated Barack Obama so roughly that Murdoch had to beg for a meeting, which finally occurred “knee to knee” at the Waldorf-Astoria, Wolff says.

So far, so good. Yet this book suffers from two flaws.

The first is that it’s not so much a biography as an oil portrait, with fat gobs of adjectives and adverbs dripping down the canvas. More Oskar Kokoschka than David McCullough, Wolff seeks to capture the essence of the man and sometimes succeeds.

Murdoch is “shadowy and scowling,” he says. He’s “just a man with a phone. He seems abstract, disembodied, puzzling.”

Unfortunately, Wolff overplays his hand, burying the reader in avalanches of conjecture about Murdoch’s motivations.

“Why should Rupert Murdoch be so difficult?” he asks. “So stubbornly the ‘other’?”

Answer: It could be this, it could be that, or, or, or. And so it goes, page after page -- whole paragraphs of nuance and opinion supported by too few facts. Wolff is grappling with psychological demons, making the book captivating and irritating by turns.

‘Epic, Transformative’

The second flaw is deeper yet perhaps unavoidable: Wolff has fallen under his subject’s spell, whether describing Murdoch’s mien -- “perfectly presentable, perfectly well-bred, exceedingly mannerly” -- or his habit of “upending” his company every decade or so, a tactic that Wolff describes in heroic terms.

“This is often how he deals with his own troubles -- he changes the game,” Wolff writes. “He does something so epic and transformative that everybody else is stuck following his lead.”

Wolff isn’t blind to Murdoch’s dark side -- how he surrounds himself with loyal lieutenants and hounds those who stand in his way. Yet time and again, Murdoch comes across here as superhuman.

Access is always a mixed blessing for a journalist. If you get too little, your reporting will be thin and colorless. If you get too much, you may be seduced.

Wolff got too much.

“The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch” is from Broadway Books (446 pages, $27.95).

(James Pressley writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: James Pressley in Brussels at jpressley@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 30, 2008 19:00 EST