As he drapes his long, lanky frame over the sleek milk-white couch in his glass office, he warns that he’s not much of a talker when the subject is himself. Doodling on a yellow legal pad, he speaks slowly, precisely as if every word is worthy of a 120-point New York Post all-caps bold headline. There are vast pauses – creative white spaces as seasoned newspapermen would say – between his sparse sentences.

Meet media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Head of the News Corp. empire whose operations span five continents and whose vast holdings include the FOX television network and Twentieth Century Fox Film, making it one of the largest diversified media companies in the world.

Murdoch, an Australian native and naturalized American citizen who was born with printer’s ink pumping through his veins, has written many a headline in his day.

He also has made more than his share of them. The self-described “lifetime journalist” says that he “never contemplated anything else” as a career. “It never occurred to me that there could be any life as interesting as this,” he says. “You’re in the center of events. You have a great responsibility yet a great opportunity to affect the political debate. You have the power, unquestionably, to change people’s opinions. You can draw attention to anything you see that’s wrong in society. You’re in the center of public discourse.”

And throughout his half-century career, Murdoch has boldly put himself in Israel’s corner, championing the state through the New York Post to such an extent that the paper is known around the globe as the nation’s best ally in the United States. “The New York Post has always been a friend of Israel, long before I ever bought into it,” he says. “I think that that’s the only part of the New York Post that I never changed.”

It is this advocacy, coupled with his continued support of Jewish charities, including the UJA, and the Jewish community, that has led the Simon Wiesenthal Center to honor him this year with its Humanitarian Award, its highest accolade. He joins a list of honorees that include Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Margaret Thatcher, Al Gore and King Hussein of Jordan.

“We are privileged to honor Rupert Murdoch,” says Rhonda Barad, eastern director of the center. “Not only is he a longtime supporter of both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Israel, his media holdings bring the global community together and allow the center to act immediately on events around the world, whether they be human-rights abuses in Darfur or anti-Semitic acts in France.”

The Wiesenthal award is among a handful from Jewish organizations that Murdoch has received through the years. In 1982, the American Jewish Congress named him Communications Man of the Year; in 1997, the UJA Federation honored him with its Humanitarian of the Year award; in 1999, he got the Wilstein Award for Achievement in Technology from the Jewish College of Technology; and in 2002, he was the honoree at the Jewish Community Relations Council’s 25th Anniversary Gala.

Although Murdoch is as aggressive in the media business as an ace reporter dogging a Deep Throat story, he is shy to a fault when it comes to discussing his accomplishments and rarely grants interviews. “In the three decades that I have known him, never once did he say, ‘Go get me a story about myself,’ says Howard J. Rubenstein, the public relations counsel for News Corp. and for the New York Post and sometime spokesman for Murdoch. “I’ve never once heard him boast about himself. Occasionally, he will boast about his children, but never about himself.”

Rubenstein, who calls Murdoch a “genius who is able to look into the future in terms of business,” says that Murdoch is “wonderful socially,” and regales him with verbal tours of the social and economic status of the countries where he has holdings. “The conversation never is about himself,” Rubenstein says. “It’s always about what issues you’re interested in. With me, he talks about the media business, and every time we talk, he’ll bring up politics. He’s a Republican and I’m a Democrat and we’ve never argued.”

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who declares himself “proud to call him a friend,” says that “Rupert Murdoch isn’t just a trailblazing entrepreneur; he is a real New Yorker and model corporate citizen, who has been an ally as we have reformed a school system which had failed generations of children. Furthermore, his steadfast support of Israel has always meant a great deal to me.”

Murdoch’s interest in the fate of Israel began long before he took over the Australian-based newspaper his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, owned. As a 16-year-old, Murdoch was mesmerized by the headlines in 1947 when the Exodus, a ship filled with 4,515 Jewish refugees sailing from France to Palestine, was boarded by British naval officers in an effort to halt the emigration. Two passengers and a crew member were killed and 30 people injured. Forced onto deportation ships, the remaining passengers refused to leave, and the resulting David and Goliath standoff played out in the international press. “I remember my father being very shocked by that,” he says. “And feeling that the British had made a terrible historic mistake. I’ve followed the saga of Israel ever since. We’ve always been on the side of Israel, through its wars and all the issues surrounding its survival.”

Murdoch’s support of Israel is much more than print-deep. He has visited the country, is a friend of Ariel Sharon’s and tells of the time in the 1980s when he and a select group of New York and London editors spent the weekend at Sharon’s ranch and got a tour of the country via helicopter.

He also has extended his empire to Israel, setting up a main work center in Jerusalem for NDS, a leading global supplier of digital pay-TV systems and software.

“The first issue for Israel is peace, of course,” Murdoch says. “It’s very good to see that huge progress has been made in that regard in the last year or two, and it justifies the policies of President Bush. But there’s quite a long ways to go yet. There are big elements of people like the Palestinians who do not like the idea of peace.”

He is certain that peace is “absolutely” achievable soon. “I think the war is correct, I think the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza is correct – painful but correct – but something that has to be faced,” he says. “The great thing about peace will be the development of the Palestinian state and the investment by the Palestinian people and by the West. You’ve got huge numbers of people who have been held back and who have been kept living in disgraceful conditions for the sake of making this confrontation continue. And now that we’ve broken this mold, at least at this stage, everybody’s very hopeful.”

Murdoch points out that he’s pro-Israel because he’s also pro-democracy. “And I’m more pro-Israel today as it becomes a more actively competitive, capitalist economy along the lines of this country,” he says. “There are a lot of economic reforms going in now or waiting to go in when peace is achieved.”

And if Murdoch doesn’t take credit for News Corp.’s role in making a difference, he does say that he is proud to be a friend of the Jewish state. He says it is important for everyone, including non-Jews like himself, to back Israel because “Israel needs all the friends it can get. There’s still latent anti-Semitism in some parts of the world, most particularly Western Europe and in Russia. I’m proud of what we’ve been able to do with our newspapers and to keep as many people as possible aware of the cause of Israel. I hope to continue it forever. I just hope that there won’t always be the same need for it.”

The 74-year-old Murdoch says that his sons, Lachlan, who runs the New York Post and the Fox Television Stations group, and James, who is the chief executive of the satellite broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting, are equally committed to the Israel cause.

But the word retirement isn’t even in his vocabulary, and he looks forward to each new challenge of disseminating information in the ever-evolving 21st century media world, where technology outpaces itself before the next edition of his daily newspapers is even put to bed. “Today, there is more growth of choice, more choice of ways of finding the news,” he says. “We used to provide it by starting new newspapers or saving failing ones or starting competitive news channels. Now, of course, with the explosion of the Internet, you don’t need more choice. It remains very difficult to start a newspaper or to start a news channel.”

Murdoch’s center-stage career has been filled with headline-grabbing business decisions that have changed the way daily news is communicated and disseminated.

It all began in 1952 when, at age 21, he was called back to Australia from his studies at Oxford after his father’s death. In 1954, he took control of his father’s News Limited, an Australian-based company whose only key asset was a majority interest in the No. 2 daily newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia.

From this loss-making newspaper, he built his global empire through bold moves that led news reports around the world:

He started the FOX network, pitting it against the Big Three, at a time when no new network had been established in the United States for four decades. And, he proudly points out, for the first time in its history, FOX  beat NBC, CBS and ABC in ratings for the entire 2004-05 season.

He wrestled the National Football League rights from CBS, which had had them for decades.

Against incredible odds and at enormous risk and expense, he started British Sky Broadcasting, the first successful pay-TV system in the United Kingdom. It is, he reminds, the leading digital TV service in the world and is a model for satellite TV systems globally.

And against the combined might of GE and Microsoft’s MSNBC and in direct competition with CNN’s two-decade monopoly, he established the Fox News Channel.

“I’ve been successful because I’m a bit of a gambler,” he says and chuckles. “I take chances, risks that others would not take. People thought I was crazy for starting a news channel.”

Asked to sum up his career in a New York Post front-page headline, he seems surprised, amused by the request. But he’s used to being put on the spot and thinking under deadline pressure. He doesn’t disappoint. Five seconds later, he has it: “RADICAL.” He laughs and turns this over in his mind. Or, he says, “AGENT OF CHANGE.”    

“I think I’ve caused, indeed, I have caused a much higher degree of competition in all areas of the media that we’ve touched,” he says. “And that in turn has caused change, brought more choice to people and has caused other people to change to be successful. It’s been change after change. From day one, I’ve been a catalyst for change. In Adelaide, I saved a dying newspaper, and I started the first national newspaper in Australia. In Britain, I made The Sun the most popular paper in the country.”

And the press went wild with stories about him, which is why there are so many articles on the Internet about him. The successes, he says, “made other people, people in the industry, paranoid about me because they thought I might change them or hurt them. Some articles about me are just critical, and some articles about me are just packed with inventions. When you have a lot of newspapers, and you make someone talented an editor and it doesn’t turn out well, you find the chemistry’s wrong or you made a mistake … most of them write a book about it with a lot of imaginary recollections. I don’t read books about myself.”

The future of the media industry, he says, lies with the Internet, and he is focusing his business strategy there at least for now. “From starting the first national newspaper in Australia to starting Fox News, now a great deal of our effort is to build a bigger presence on the Internet,” he says. “We like to do it, we want to do it, it’s a great challenge to communicate in a new medium, and it’s also necessary that we do it. As far as I can see today, the Internet will be a large part of our future.”

He marvels at the idea of so much information and misinformation at the fingertips of the public. His own name, for example, when Googled, brings up 615,000 hits, all displayed in a mere 9 seconds, quicker than you can even type his name. Some of the stuff is accurate; much of it isn’t. (For the record: He has no Jewish blood, even though there are articles on the Internet that claim his mother was Jewish and that he was raised as a pious Jew.)  “It’s an amazing technological feat, but it does mean that there’s really no knowledge that’s not available to every single living person in the world simultaneously and at no cost,” he says. “I think that’s one of the most revolutionary things that has happened and that has changed the world for the better.”

In these days when journalists are making as many headlines as the stories they cover – he mentions Jayson Blair, The New York Times reporter who got caught fabricating stories, and Woodward and Bernstein’s getting scooped on the unmasking of Watergate’s Deep Throat – Murdoch says that the public has a jaded view of the profession. “I think most journalists are very sincere and very hard working, almost unconsciously hypocritical, they claim complete objectivity when they have in fact agendas; their judgments are subjective.”

He says that journalists don’t need more schooling – Murdoch is not a proponent of journalism schools and has never so much as thought of taking a course in the subject – they need more on-the-job experience. “Journalists today, particularly in this country, need more training and more time in junior positions under great news editors. They tend to go to journalism schools, where they really learn very little journalism,” he says. “You can learn a lot more under an editor about getting your facts right and arranging stories in the right way and making them the most interesting.”

In terms of headlines, Murdoch says that getting the Simon Wiesenthal award is a stop-the-presses event that humbles him. “I feel very honored about it,” he says. “I can honestly say that I try to keep a low profile and restrain myself from accepting awards in most cases. I’m very pleased to make an exception because it is such a remarkable institute.”