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Rieder: Rupert Murdoch's remarkable comeback

Rem Rieder
USA TODAY
Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch waves to photographers as he is driven away from News UK headquarters in London June 26.

When President Obama wanders away from his handlers unscripted to meet with the people, he is fond of saying that "the bear is loose."

Well Rupert Murdoch, the bear in the media world, is way loose.

His audacious bid to have his 21st Century Fox company swallow up Time Warner is a vivid sign that the 83-year-old mogul has plenty of game left. And make no mistake: Time Warner's rejection of his opening salvo is merely the beginning of the pursuit, not the end.

It's also evidence of a stunning turnaround in Murdoch's fortunes since the summer of 2011, when a phone-hacking scandal involving one of his British newspapers threatened to topple the powerful media giant. And it's a reflection of the indomitable will that has characterized his remarkable career.

The news that the News of the World had hacked the cellphone of a missing teenager reawakened the long-dormant scandal with a vengeance. Public revulsion triggered a chain of events that seemed to leave Murdoch reeling.

His top lieutenant and close confidant Rebekah Brooks was forced to leave the company and was hit with criminal charges (she was recently acquitted); he was forced to close the 2.7 million-circulation News of the World; his bid to take total control of British Sky Broadcasting, a lucrative satellite broadcaster, collapsed.

Rebekah Brooks, former News International chief executive, talks to members of the media in central London,  June 26.

Things got so bad that a United States senator called for an investigation of Murdoch's U.S. media holdings, which include Fox News Channel, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. He endured humiliating questioning from the House of Commons. The following year, a Parliamentary committee concluded that Murdoch was "not a fit person" to run a major international company.

The flurry of punishing blows might have done in a lesser force, But Murdoch absorbed them and moved on. Now he's back in overdrive, as my colleague and Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff forecast in a prescient column earlier this week.

It's always hard to hold Murdoch back, and even the costly hacking furor — it cost him hundreds of millions of pounds — didn't stop him for long, Just a couple months after that "not a fit person" verdict, Murdoch was on Twitter picking fights with Scientology and the Mitt Romney campaign.

Tenacity and drive have characterized Murdoch's career since he took over his father's Australian newspapers at age 22. A huge newspaper guy to this day, Murdoch snapped up many of them over the years, then in 1985, branched out into the entertainment business by acquiring the then-20th Century Fox. He has had his missteps along the way — he bought largely forgotten MySpace for $580 million and sold it for $35 million six years later — but he has had far more hits than misses as he became a towering media force.

His British tabloids have been characterized by sleazy reporting, and Fox News is hardly a paragon of journalism excellence. But in the latter case, Murdoch certainly was astute in seeing and going after an unserved audience and creating the dominant cable news channel.

And while media critics (I among them) warned it was the end of Western civilization when he acquired Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal in 2007, the paper remains strong.

As for Time Warner, the mating dance has just begun. Deals such as this often take a while to congeal. Murdoch is no stranger to patiently playing the long game, as his relentless pursuit of Dow Jones shows.

And as content distributors are merging (see Comcast/Time Warner Cable, etc.), it's no surprise that content makers want to, as well. A much larger entertainment colossus would give 21st Century Fox considerable leverage indeed.

History shows that, quite frequently, what Rupert wants, Rupert gets. You could lose a lot of money betting against him.

Love him or hate him — and many people do the latter — you've got to give this to Murdoch: He plays big, very, very big.

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