Murdoch, Ink.

Two of the publishing world's most influential editors approached the tower at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan with apprehension. Headquarters of News Corp., the limestone-clad tower houses the company's pugnacious New York Post and Fox News Channel, favorites of the boss, Rupert Murdoch. When he's not hopscotching the seven continents, Murdoch rules his empire from his eighth-floor office here, which is decorated with a backlit, floor-to-ceiling map of the world—the better to pinpoint his hundreds of media properties, from Los Angeles-based Fox Broadcasting and the Silicon Valley headquarters of MySpace to the United Kingdom's BSkyB satellite-TV company. The dining suite where Murdoch hosts his guests has three separate rooms, each themed to one of the media Murdoch controls: newspapers, movies and television. The place whispers discretion, so the powerful who call on Murdoch needn't fret about surfacing the next day in the tittle-tattle of the New York Post's Page Six. Given the nature of their visit, discretion was important to the guests on a late spring day three years ago, the then Time Inc. Editor in Chief Norman Pearlstine and his deputy John Huey. The two men had come seeking support from the one media mogul whom other moguls most fear and respect.

Pearlstine and Huey were facing a potential public-relations nightmare. For months, they'd been trying to untangle Time magazine from "Plamegate," the scandal involving press leaks from the Bush West Wing that had compromised the identity of an undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame. Cornered by a special prosecutor who was probing the mess, the magazine editors were still pressing for legal relief, but also realized that their only other recourse might be to cross that most sacrosanct journalistic line: revealing their reporter's confidential source—who in this case happened to be Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. So they called on Murdoch to seek support for their legal position, recalls Pearlstine. Huey says they were also looking for a promise of a restrained response from Murdoch's minions if it were necessary to out the confidential source. They didn't want to land on the New York Post's front page with their heads superimposed on rats, for instance (such is the power of the Post over Manhattan's media elite). "Done," Murdoch said quickly, to the surprise of the editors.

With time to kill, the journalists turned their chitchat to the plight of Dow Jones, parent of The Wall Street Journal, of which Pearlstine had been managing editor from 1983 to 1991. Had Murdoch, they asked, read the recent Fortune story headlined DOW JONES: DOES THE FAMILY FINALLY WANT OUT? in which the longtime trustee of the controlling Bancroft family said they might be willing to sell "at $60 a share"? Murdoch hadn't, but he was intrigued. "For that price, I could buy the Journal and go there to be a proper newspaperman," Murdoch joked, eyes sparkling at the prospect of editing the iconic newspaper.

This week the Murdochian Era of the Proper Newspaperman has its debut. When readers open their newspapers Monday morning, they will discover a Wall Street Journal fashioned to the tastes of the man who revolutionized media markets from Australia to North America. With its increased focus on politics, international news, culture and sports, Murdoch's reconceived Journal represents nothing short of a formal declaration of war on that most venerable of journalistic institutions, The New York Times. Not since William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal challenged Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in the late 19th century has there been such a clash of newspaper titans. As was the case when Hearst took on Pulitzer, Murdoch—the son of an Australian journalist—still believes newspapers are the most influential media for shaping the public discourse, even in this new-media century. The fight could escalate in unknown ways if billionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ends up acquiring the Times. As NEWSWEEK has learned, top associates of the onetime information executive are encouraging him to do just that.

It isn't hard to guess which role Murdoch will play in this fight. Caricatured as the heir to Hearst's brand of yellow journalism, he was pilloried in much of the "respectable" press when he made his $5 billion, $65-a-share bid for Dow Jones last spring. Journalistic purists bellowed that he would sully the Journal with a mix of sensationalism and self-interested editorializing. But Murdoch presumably knows it would be idiocy to destroy the Journal brand (this is a flamethrower who appears to know the difference between scorching something and giving it sizzle). The new Journal is as respectable, restrained and readable as it has ever been—but with a broader world view designed to appeal to audiences well beyond its traditional, pin-striped base. But is that what Journal readers want?

To understand why the 77-year-old Murdoch has been itching for this particular fight, look no further than the mogul's three passions: print, power and respect. Using his knowledge of the first (he started his empire when his father bequeathed him Australia's Adelaide News when he was 22), Murdoch achieved the second. As for respect? Well, that's been more elusive, bestowed only grudgingly by those who simultaneously respect, detest and envy him. Murdoch has assembled one of the globe's biggest media empires, a conglomerate valued at $60 billion that will one day pass to his six children and seems destined to be run by his younger son, James. Critics like to paint Murdoch as a Machiavellian barbarian bent on world domination. So acquiring the venerable Wall Street Journal and then dethroning the nation's newspaper of record? Now that's something to bring a man respect.