RUPERT MURDOCH: THE MAN WHO WOULD OWN THE WORLD; LAUDED OR LOATHED, MEDIA GOLIATH'S FOCUS REMAINS ON DOMINANCE.

Byline: Dennis Love Daily News Staff Writer

It's Rupert Murdoch's world. We just live in it.

At 66, Murdoch - who has been depicted by some as a visionary media pioneer, by others as the megalomaniacal mayor of the global village - is the undisputed mogul among moguls.

Other media power brokers may carry higher profiles and other media empires may make more money (for now), but the expansionist Murdoch has done more to change the face of news, entertainment and sports in the last decade than anyone.

And now, Murdoch has designs on making his distinctive imprint upon his adopted hometown, Los Angeles.

Although he has been a presence in L.A. for some time - the Australian native maintains his primary residence in Beverly Hills as he closely manages his News Corp.'s global, newspaper, movie, TV, cable and satellite empire - his move to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers clearly will place him at the forefront of the city's psyche.

Murdoch's bid for the Dodgers largely has been seen as a stroke of genius, which could serve as a cornerstone for a Los Angeles-based sports conglomerate with teams as fodder for Murdoch's programming-hungry media outlets like the Fox TV network and Fox Sports West.

Such a move would make Murdoch not only a titan in yet another arena but also perhaps L.A.'s pre-eminent ``player'' - if he hasn't been accorded that status already.

``It's not that he wants to take over the world. But he does see the entire pie as it relates to what he does at News Corp.,'' says a Fox television executive, who - like almost everyone interviewed for this story - asked not be named. ``He has a gift for absorbing the nuances of how a shop operates and then translating it into the big picture.''

Yet the prospect of Murdoch as top Dodger worries traditionalists who argue that he has taken prized institutions such as the Sunday Times of London and debased them - even while usually making them immensely profitable.

Not to worry, says Fox Sports Vice President Vince Wladika, Murdoch's chief spokesman on the impending purchase: ``If the sale goes through, and if we decide to do anything, I guess the best way to term it is they would be PBS-type changes, with extreme tastefulness in mind.''

That doesn't do much to placate Murdoch's army of critics, some of whom see him as the fire-breathing personification of corporate evil.

A Cal State Northridge electrical engineering major recently launched a Web site devoted to Murdoch - of whom the student is no fan.

``I see him as being most responsible for degrading journalism and treating the news as entertainment,'' Keith Beckstead said. ``He represents more and more concentration of power. The question is, is he willing to abuse that? I think he has demonstrated that he is.''

Not everyone shares Beckstead's harsh view, of course. Even among media critics, who long have been among his most animated detractors, Murdoch is depicted more and more as an inevitable antichrist, as opposed to one who once upon a time might have been stopped.

After all, it has been repeatedly pointed out that Murdoch's British tabloid the Sun has the largest daily circulation of any English-language newspaper in the world. Success can be quite persuasive.

``British and American journalism used to be competitive, sensational, overtly political and populist,'' essayist David Plotz wrote recently. ``Murdoch believes that the snobs have crippled the profession with respectability, making journalism irrelevant to the masses. . . . Murdoch is, in some sense, the best democrat of all: He prints newspapers people want to read and produces TV shows that people want to watch.''

Differing views

He is a man of contradictions.

A political conservative who is said to be quite strait-laced in his personal life, Murdoch nonetheless is an unparalleled wheeler-dealer who has introduced a pronounced sensational streak into the mass media via his tabloids and his TV programming.

``He contains within his character both an extraordinary gambling instinct and a certain dour Puritanism,'' wrote William Shawcross in his 1993 biography, ``Murdoch.''

Murdoch has stopped at nothing to assemble the pieces of his synergistic News Corp. Certainly, staggering price tags for various properties have failed to blunt his acquisitive nature.

For example, the $1.58 billion Fox paid for TV rights to four years of National Football League games was $100 million per year more than the next-highest bid by CBS; mortified Wall Street analysts called it a ruinous overexpenditure, especially considering Murdoch's very close call with financial disaster in 1990 after a similar spending spree.

Now, however, News Corp. is very profitable and has made even more deals to position itself in the U.S. news, sports, satellite TV and children's programming market. In fact, the company is expected to announce as early as today a joint venture with Liberty Media Corp. to buy 40 percent of Cablevision System Corp.'s sports-programming services.

The deal, for reportedly about $850 million, includes Madison Square Garden and the two teams that play there, the New York Knicks basketball team and New York Rangers hockey team. Analysts say Murdoch is paying too much for the Cablevision properties, but he's heard that before.

The NFL deal - like many of Murdoch's eye-popping undertakings - looks like a bargain in retrospect. The contract itself was a money-loser, but it gave Fox instant credibility and a platform from which to promote its other programming.

`Mad genius'

``He's kind of like a mad genius,'' Murdoch archrival Ted Turner told the National Press Club a few years ago. ``There's a thin line between madness and brilliance. The most dangerous kind of competitor is one who is a little mad. . . . God knows where he'll strike next.''

Murdoch himself has never provided much insight into his thinking. He rarely sits for interviews and hits the social circuit even less frequently. But he did tell GQ magazine last year, ``Just to buy something because it looks like a nice asset is a great mistake - unless you've got so much money that you can do it for a hobby, or unless you can see that you can do something better with it.''

Murdoch's personal worth has been estimated at between $3.2 billion and $3.3 billion, making him the wealthiest person in Los Angeles. One would presume he has ``hobby'' money. But Murdoch clearly has a worldview for his News Corp., even if he has been known to scratch out the components of a megadeal on the back of an envelope.

By most accounts, Murdoch's omniscience grows out of a fierce micromanagement style that has him perusing weekly ``flash reports'' from his various enterprises. Murdoch managers have said repeatedly that their boss is a perpetual threat to personally ring their phones at any time, and he has been known to throw himself intensely into one arena or another for a week at a time, make a glut of decisions large and small, and then move on.

``His impact is in bursts. He would be very hands-on for a while, directing everyone but the janitor, and then you wouldn't see him for months,'' said one Los Angeles public relations executive who asked not to be identified (``You never know when he might acquire your company'') and who worked at the New York Post when Murdoch took it over in the 1970s.

``It drove the editors nuts. But I think that approach gave them a good idea of what (Murdoch) wanted on a given day, and it allowed him to develop a feel for what the Post was like on a given day,'' the executive said.

Building an empire

Having constructed News Corp. into a planetary power from a single, small Australian newspaper he inherited from his father, newspaper executive Sir Keith Murdoch, Rupert Keith Murdoch clearly has plenty of confidence in his empire-building skills. His associates and rivals have often debated whether his ability to make huge decisions involving millions, if not billions, of dollars very quickly is due to nerve or impetuosity.

Murdoch has conceded that his snap, seemingly seat-of-the-pants decisions carry substantial risk.

``I like to be able to move fast,'' he has said. ``Sometimes it leads to making mistakes, but other times it leads to getting an opportunity before other people see it.

``You have other companies, sometimes with development offices with 45 or 50 MBAs in them. And you put a good idea to them and the chief executive says, `That was a good idea; let me pass it by my experts.' Two months later, 45 people have signed onto negative reports because they don't want to take the risk of putting out a positive report in case they get blamed for it. And then nothing happens.''

Murdoch has made enough happen to last 10 lifetimes, from Adelaide, Australia, where he began, to London to New York to Hollywood, and, seemingly, everywhere in between.

Beginning in the 1950s, he expanded his budding newspaper chain from Adelaide to Perth and then across to Sydney. In the mid-1960s, he launched the Australian, described as the ``first serious national paper on the continent,'' and managed to keep it afloat despite years of red ink. He acquired TV holdings in Australia and exported them to New Zealand and Hong Kong.

Then, at the end of the 1960s, Murdoch made his move, purchasing British newspapers News of the World and the Sun. They proved outstanding moneymakers and helped finance a long string of acquisitions and start-ups during the 1970s and early 1980s: papers in San Antonio, Texas, a new supermarket tabloid in the National Star, the New York Post, the Village Voice, New York magazine, more TV stations in Australia, half interest in an Australian airline and then Britain's most prestigious newspapers, the Times and the Sunday Times.

By the mid-1980s, Murdoch had taken control of the Boston Herald and the Chicago Sun-Times, and had acquired the Twentieth Century Fox film studio and Metromedia television stations.

He took the Metromedia stations and created the Fox TV network.

He purchased Hong Kong's primary newspaper, the South China Morning Post, and the Melbourne Herald. Murdoch then entered the publishing field: He bought one of America's most venerable publishing houses, Harper & Row, and British publisher William Collins and formed HarperCollins.

To cap off the '80s, Murdoch took a deep breath and anted up a mind-blowing $3 billion for Triangle Publications, the American magazine group that owned TV Guide. It was widely viewed as a massive overpayment, and, indeed, by the end of 1990 Murdoch and his bankers were embroiled in a desperate attempt to reschedule $7.6 billion of debt.

Murdoch prevailed and retained control of News Corp. He went on to steal away some of CBS' most important affiliates to increase the prominence of the Fox network, and in 1993 hammered out a $525 million agreement to purchase a 63 percent stake in Hong Kong-based satellite TV service STAR - the latter deal finalized while Murdoch was anchored off the coast of Corsica in his new yacht.

(To seal the deal, Murdoch dispatched his corporate jet to bring STAR's Chinese owner from London to the Mediterranean, where the media heavyweights shared a lunch prepared by Anna Murdoch, Murdoch's novelist wife.)

Fast pace

Murdoch shows no signs of slowing down. Just recently he finalized $2 billion-plus deals which align News Corp.'s U.S. satellite assets with Primestar. On the same day, it was announced that Murdoch had agreed to buy International Family Entertainment, owner of the Family Channel, which reaches 69 million cable housholds.

And, of prime interest to Angelenos, he continues his pursuit of the Dodgers - one of the most valuable and beloved franchises in sports. Some fans and critics have fretted that Murdoch may make sweeping changes; but others have reasoned that his potential ownership will simply bring the Dodgers up to speed in the mega-payroll era personified by the likes of the New York Yankees' George Steinbrenner and the Atlanta Braves' Ted Turner, the latter now in concert with Time Warner.

There is plenty of local enthusiasm for Murdoch, including some from Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who termed Murdoch ``a very loyal resident of Los Angeles . . . a very quality human being.''

An Australian-American at the helm of the Dodgers? It could happen. And even if it doesn't, Murdoch's next move will no doubt move and shake a town already rife with movers and shakers.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--color) no caption (Rupert Murdoch and his companies' logos)

Jon Gerung/Daily News

(2) News Corp. President Rupert Murdoch, center, attends an awards presentation in his honor with his daughters Elisabeth, from left, and Prudence; his wife, Anna; and his sons Lachlan and James.

Gregory Pace/SYGMA