The End of the News of the World.

And the day Rupert Murdoch asked me to tell Billy Graham that he was praying for him

By Dan Wooding
Founder of ASSIST Ministries

LAKE FOREST, CA (ANS) -- The phone rang in the Billy Graham media room just before the start of Mr. Graham's Greater Puerto Rico Global Mission, which originated March 16-18, 1995 in San Juan, and was beamed around the world by satellite.

Rupert Murdoch

I picked it up and at the other end of the line was a man with an Australian accent, who asked to speak to Billy Graham.

I asked, "Whose calling," and he replied, "Rupert Murdoch."

When I explained that Mr. Graham was not at this number I asked the media baron if I could convey a message to Billy and he replied, "Please tell him that I am praying for his crusade."

Shortly afterwards, the phone rang again and this time it was David Frost, who also asked me to convey a similar message. He was calling, he said, from a cruise ship in the Caribbean.

As I write this, the last edition of the News of the World has rolled off the presses with its front page declaring: "Thank you & goodbye."

Final front page of the News of the World

Editor Colin Myler, after leading staff from the building late on Saturday, said: "This is not where we want to be and not where we deserve to be."

Publisher News International axed the 168-year-old tabloid in the wake of phone-hacking allegations last week.

In a full-page inside editorial, the paper offered an apology. "Quite simply, we lost our way," it said.

Rupert Murdoch is due to arrive in the UK this weekend to take charge of handling the phone-hacking crisis.

During a short speech to more than 200 staff outside the paper's offices in Wapping, east London, Mr. Myler held up the 8,674th and final edition of the Sunday newspaper, saying: "As a final tribute to seven-and-a-half million readers, this is for you - and for the staff, thank you."

He added: "Now, in the best traditions of Fleet Street, we are going to the pub."

The News of the World (NoW) had doubled Sunday's print run to five million, with money from the sales being donated to four charities.

Dan Wooding on the phone in Puerto Rico where he had previously spoken with Rupert Murdoch

So what is the link between Rupert Murdoch and Billy Graham? Well, first of all, Murdoch's News Corp owned what I consider to be the worst paper in British history - and that is saying something - and Billy owned The Christian and Christianity Today for which I was Chief Reporter for one year, and it was also closed, this time in 1969. I have to say that Billy's paper had a much prouder history.

The closure of The Christian was greeted with a storm of criticism from both inside and outside the evangelical community.

The London Evening News headlined the story with "Billy Graham kills his British paper."

The article began, "The 110-year-old weekly The Christian and Christianity Today is about to be killed. The issue going to press tonight will be the last -- a piece of news which the editor, Dr. J.D. Douglas, learned after his staff were told only after last week's issue had been produced.

"The British Board of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association issued a statement in the last issue of the paper expressing 'reluctance and regret.'"

Staff at The Christian before it was closed

Letters poured into the office describing the closure as "murder," and "a disaster for evangelicalism in this country," and "the heritage of more than a century's Christian journalism has been killed at a stroke."

The news became a nightmare for me. I had been convinced that the Lord wanted me to be a journalist and now, about a year after fulfilling my dream, I was about to be put out on the streets with a wife, Norma, and two sons, Andrew and Peter, to support.

Fortunately, I was able to soon find a new job with a London weekly and later moved into the wicked tabloids of Great Britain and even worked a shift for the News of the World, something I am not too proud of.

So what this pair have in common that they killed off two different kinds of British papers, but there was no comparison in the content and, years later, Billy Graham expressed his regret to me about what had happened.

For so many people, media mogul Rupert Murdoch is an enigma. He owns a huge media empire especially in the United States. Murdoch's first permanent foray into TV was in the USA, where he created Fox Broadcasting Company in 1986. In the 2000s, he became a leading investor in satellite television, the film industry and the Internet, and purchased a leading American newspaper, The Wall Street Journal.

Rupert Murdoch was listed three times in the Time 100 as among the most influential people in the world. He is ranked 13th most powerful person in the world in the 2010 Forbes' The World's Most Powerful People list. Media reports say that with a net worth of US$6.3 billion, he is ranked as the 117th wealthiest person in the world.

In 1985 Murdoch became a United States citizen to satisfy legislation that only United States citizens could own American television stations. This also resulted in Murdoch losing his Australian citizenship.

In Great Britain, New Corp owns the London Times and Sunday Times, the Sun, and up until today, ran the News of the World. The latter two are nothing more than sex-ridden scandal sheets that to me are a blot on the United Kingdom.

Many, however, will be surprised to learn that his media empire also owns HarperCollins book publishing company that brings out Bibles and also Zondervan Christian book publishers According to Zondervan's website, the company was bought out by HarperCollins Publishing, a division of NewsCorp, in 1988 and has continued to be its parent company's Christian book-selling outlet. It published the first edition of the NIV in 1978 (before Murdoch)and Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life, which has sold more 35 million copies (after Murdoch).

So the portfolio includes semi-porn papers like the Sun and Bible publishers like the above. I somehow find it hard to get my mind around that.

Despite his Roman Catholic connections, Rupert Murdoch has been married three times.

In 1956 he married Patricia Booker, a former shop assistant and flight attendant from Melbourne with whom he had his first child, a daughter, Prudence, born in 1958. Rupert and Patricia Murdoch divorced in 1967.

In 1967 Murdoch married Anna Torv, a Scottish-born cadet journalist working for his Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph (not to be mistaken for the actress Anna Torv of Fringe who is the elder Torv's niece). During his marriage to Torv, a Roman Catholic, Murdoch was awarded the KSG, a papal honor.

Torv and Murdoch had three children: Elisabeth Murdoch (born in Sydney, Australia on August 22, 1968), Lachlan Murdoch (born in London, UK on September 8, 1971), and James Murdoch, (born in Wimbledon, UK on December 13, 1972). Anna and Rupert divorced in June 1999.

Murdoch with his third wife

Then seventeen days after the divorce, on June 25, 1999, Murdoch, then aged 68, married Chinese-born Deng Wendi (Wendi Deng in Western style). She was 30, a recent Yale School of Management graduate, and a newly appointed vice-president of STAR TV. Rupert Murdoch has two children with Deng: Grace Helen (born in New York November 19, 2001) and Chloe (born in New York July 17, 2003).

If Murdoch doesn't have enough problems with the phone hacking scandal in Great Britain, news has just come out that senior members of the Church of England are said to be "embarrassed" by the disclosure of the Church's links with the parent company of the News of the World.

The Church Commissioners, which manage investments on behalf of the Church of England, own almost 350,000 shares in News Corp, worth £3.8 million.

The Church's ethical investment committee has now written to Mr. Murdoch calling on him to hold senior executives to account over the "gross failures of management" over phone-hacking at the News of the World.

However, members of the Church's national assembly, the General Synod, meeting in York this weekend, demanded swift action to extricate the Church from the scandal.

The Rev Canon Jonathan Alderton-Ford, a vicar in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, and a General Synod member, said: "Senior figures in the Church of England are embarrassed by this ownership."

The Church's ethical investment advisory group said it would first seek to persuade Mr. Murdoch to discipline senior executives before considering the "nuclear option" of withdrawing its investment in the company.

Protester outside Parliament in a Rupert Murdoch mask with puppets of David Cameron and the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt (Photo: AFP/GETTY)

The statement was seen as a thinly veiled demand for Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International and a former editor of the Sunday tabloid, to be fired.

Professor Richard Burridge, deputy chairman of the ethical investment committee, said: "If we don't get a satisfactory answer then disinvestment comes on to the horizon, but you can't go straight to the nuclear option, you have to engage first."

In the letter to Mr. Murdoch, the Church described the behavior of the News of the World as "utterly reprehensible and unethical".

The closure of the newspaper, while welcomed, was not a "sufficient response" to revelations of malpractice at the newspaper, the group said in a statement.

"We cannot imagine circumstances in which we would be satisfied with any outcome that does not hold senior executives to account at News Corporation for the gross failures of management at the News of the World," the statement said.

So as Rupert Murdoch told me all those years ago that he was praying for Billy Graham, I wonder if now Billy, along with all of us, should be praying for this man who has such a responsibility to unravel the mess there in London. And what a mess it is!

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Dan Wooding, 70, is an award winning British journalist now living in Southern California with his wife Norma, to whom he has been married for 47 years. They have two sons, Andrew and Peter, and six grandchildren who all live in the UK. He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS) and was, for ten years, a commentator, on the UPI Radio Network in Washington, DC. He now hosts the weekly "Front Page Radio" show on KWVE in Southern California which is also carried on the Calvary Radio Network throughout the United States. The program is also aired in Great Britain on Calvary Chapel Radio UK. Besides this, Wooding is a host for His Channel Live, which is carried via the Internet to some 200 countries. You can follow Dan on Facebook under his name there or at ASSIST News Service. He is the author of some 44 books. Two of the latest include his autobiography, "From Tabloid to Truth", which is published by Theatron Books. To order a copy, press this link. Wooding, who was born in Nigeria of British missionary parents, has also recently released his first novel "Red Dagger" which is available this link.