In the first week of January 1997, owner Peter O'Malley had put the LA Dodgers up for sale. Murdoch, while in the midst of his many crises with Charlie Ergen, Congress, Pat Robertson and Michael Clinger, found the time to invite O'Malley to Misty Mountain, Murdoch's celebrated home in Los Angeles, and convinced him to sell the Dodgers to News Corp.

Murdoch's obsession with buying sports rights— from the 1992 deal to win coverage of British football's Premier League, a deal which overnight turned around the fortunes of his BSkyB satellite operation, to the NFL, etc., etc.— now totaled $5 billion. But sports are not just about strategy. They're an affair of the heart, as Super League, Murdoch's disastrous attempt in 1995 to buy the entire sport of rugby league football in Australia, showed. At the same time that Fox was working to convince the FCC of its openness and candor, News executives including Lachlan Murdoch were traveling across Australia under assumed names, holding secret meetings to sign up rugby league football players.

It was a debacle. Lachlan was at the first meeting, where the players didn't even sign the right piece of paper. When Murdoch's Australian rival, Kerry Packer, mounted a counter-attack, the affair ended up in court with a judge who would never be caught dead anywhere near a sports arena. He filed a damning judgment accusing News Corp.of corrupt practices. But the Appeal Court overturned the decision. Essentially it found that sports were no longer the romantic, traditional picture or shared enterprise that the judge had drawn. Modern sports were brutal. Broken promises were part of the business.

Chapter Fourteen: The Mouse Wars

At the start of 1997, Michael Eisner was in a bit of a slump. Wherever he looked—in movies, television production, animation and news, Murdoch seemed to have grabbed the ground Eisner was heading for. What really hurt was sports. Eisner had planned to launch a series of new ESPN channels to treble ESPN's value, but Murdoch's Fox Sports was already doing this— and it was using Disney's own teams to promote it.

A legal fight in California became a race to win Charles Dolan's SportsChannel (SportsChannel) and Madison Square Garden networks based in New York, owned by Cablevision. Murdoch and Malone had been trying to court Dolan for years to use his local sports networks to double the reach of Fox Sports. Eisner wanted SportsChannel as a base to expand ESPN into local sports coverage, and to fend off the Murdoch threat in sport.

Meanwhile Murdoch bought the Dodgers, and Eisner went on the offensive just as Murdoch was in the most delicate stage of a satellite deal with the cable operators at Primestar. His wedding anniversary had been a disaster, he had to take time out for the Humanitarian of the Year night; in between, he managed to do the Primestar deal, snatch Pat Robertson from Eisner's clutches, succeed in getting his programs carried on cable networks, and beat Eisner again, this time in an $850 million deal with Charles Dolan. Eisner had offered $100 million more than Murdoch, but Malone had done a side deal with Dolan that made Malone a major shareholder in Cablevision.

Murdoch had been completely defeated by the cable operators in his grand plans for an American satellite operation. They had forced him not only to give up his merger with Charlie Ergen at Echostar, but also to give the cable operators his satellite license and satellites in return for nonvoting shares in their satellite venture, Primestar, and to promise that he would not compete against them. But the conditions he had demanded in return for making peace had remade his empire, as the cable operators agreed to carry his programming. In addition, Murdoch's defeat focused Wall Street's attention on the cable companies, with the realization that Murdoch's satellites were no longer a threat. In fact Bill Gates had begun investing in cable companies, which showed where the future lay. Cable stocks soared. Later AT&T realized what cable offered, and spent $106 billion buying up cable companies. Everyone ended up hundreds of millions of dollars richer—even Murdoch. With the cable networks (on which the future of the Internet depended) now assured, in October 1998 Internet stocks took off, and the whole world changed.

The only loser was Michael Eisner, who after a year of losing to Murdoch, retained NFL broadcast rights for ABC and ESPN in January 1998 only after agreeing to double the price they had been paying. Until then, the combined cost of NFL cable rights and ABC's Monday Night Football had come to $492 million a season. Eisner agreed to pay $1.15 billion a season for the next eight years. He was paying an extra $658 million a season just to hold on to what he already had. It crippled Disney's cash flow, and helped trigger a long descent in its stock price. Winning against Murdoch could be even more painful than losing.

Chapter Fifteen: The Trouble with Tony

In March 1998, a year to the day after Murdoch had switched horses to back Tony Blair's Labour Party in Britain, Murdoch called in a favor. He asked Blair to talk to the Italian Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, about a deal he was involved in. Blair had been adopted by Murdoch's American advisor Irwin Stelzer, who described Blair as one of Thatcher's children. Murdoch's antics with Tony Blair and Newt Gingrich, while entertaining in themselves, are part of a wider battle of ideas about how to understand—and how to regulate—the information revolution.

Press reports that Blair had been lobbying Prodi on Murdoch's behalf caused a sensation in Britain, where Blair was already under fire over his relationship with Murdoch. For nearly two decades the Labour Party had demonized Murdoch, not done his dealmaking for him. The Prodi affair came just after the House of Lords had passed an amendment to outlaw predatory pricing, a move aimed at Murdoch's British newspapers, and after the furor over the decision by HarperCollins to dump the autobiography of Chris Patten, the last Governor of Hong Kong. Murdoch, who was involved in sensitive business negotiations with the Chinese government, had ordered HarperCollins executives to drop the book by Patten, which was scathing in its portrayal of the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong. HarperCollins executives told Patten's editor, Stuart Profitt, that the book was to be dropped on the grounds that it was too boring. When Profitt asked for written reasons for the decisions he was suspended. The affair erupted in a spectacular flurry of lawsuits in February 1998, and Murdoch and HarperCollins was forced to make a grovelling apology to Patten.

While in the US, Murdoch was merely one of the larger players, what emerged from this period was how much power he had everywhere else in the world. Outside America, it was arguable that News Corp.operated as an entity largely beyond the power of any one particular country to regulate.