Pretty great Rupert Murdoch profile in this week's Time. Former Fortune managing editor Eric Pooley caught the mogul in action as negotiations with the Dow Jones board over editorial independence for the Wall Street Journal were being conducted. Here's why the News Corp. head usually gets what he wants:

Murdoch hated the proposal. In his view, it would give the Bancroft family more involvement over the Journal after they sold it than they had exercised before. So he rolled up his sleeves and started working the phones, making his feelings known to key players in the deal, turning up the pressure and threatening to pull his offer — a move that would have sent Dow Jones stock plummeting back to earth. "Dave, you can put the $5 billion away," he told News Corp. CFO Dave DeVoe. He consulted with three advisers about whether to withdraw: group general counsel Lon Jacobs and corporate-affairs chief Gary Ginsberg, who were in the room, and his son and News Corp. heir apparent James Murdoch, the CEO of News Corp.'s European satellite-TV system, who called in from a yacht near Valencia, Spain. Murdoch wanted to jolt the Bancroft family back to reality, and if the deal was going to die, he wanted to be the one to kill it. "If we clean this up to our satisfaction, the family will reject it. So why don't we just reject them?" The phone buzzed again. [Dow Jones CEO RIchard F.] Zannino was on the line.

"Hello, Rich. I've read it," Murdoch said. "I don't know what you were thinking." He walked through all the ways the proposal was unacceptable. "Oh, yes, we reject this."

As it turned out, Murdoch didn't have to withdraw his bid. The threat of pulling was enough to get the family to budge.

There are some other choice quotes in the piece (our favorite: "The price of the Journal is $60 plus vitriol.") but one thing is made abundantly clear: The Bancrofts never stood a chance.

Elsewhere in Murdochiana, the Times reports that the "tentative accord on the editorial independence of The Wall Street Journal would leave Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation with the sole power to hire and fire The Journal's top editors," while the Journal says that "Dow Jones management is planning to give detailed presentations on the company to News Corp. today, a discussion that could last several days and is likely to lead the parties to a negotiation on price, these people said. Mr. Murdoch told Reuters he wasn't planning on raising his $60-a-share offer ." Meanwhile, News Corp.'s MySpace is relaunching it's video component as MySpace TV to better compete with Google's YouTube.
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