In an interview with The Guardian Mr. Woff suggests that Mr. Murdoch took objection with his biography, for which Mr. Murdoch sat for more than 50 hours of interviews and granted him extensive access to his family.

Mr. Murdoch expected the book to be more lionizing than anything else, Mr. Wolff told The Guardian.

The answer, Wolff believes, was that Murdoch was in the flush of his successful bid to buy the Wall Street Journal and wanted someone to chronicle the height of his career, his legacy-building. Over-excited, he forgot such basics as reading Wolff's previous work or managing the information the journalist was given.

Mr. Wolff says that not only did News Corp. papers avoid writing up the book when it came out, but that they attacked his character and his family, planting an item about an affair with a 28-year-old with Cityfile so that the Post could pick it up, circumventing the paper's requirements for printing items about extramarital affairs (at the time, Hamilton Nolan at Gawker suggested as much).

The Guardian checked in with the Post, who said Wolff's theory is "Bullshit."