Michael Wolff's often fascinating, sometimes frustrating new biography, "The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch," shows that the 77-year-old head of News Corp. is still at the top of his game.

Wolff writes about media and culture for Vanity Fair, and one of his book's strengths is his decision to structure it like an extended magazine article. He uses Murdoch's purchase of Dow Jones and its corporate crown jewel, the Wall Street Journal, in 2007 to provide a genuinely gripping narrative spine to his account. Along the way, he weaves in the story of Murdoch's rather eventful life.

Much will be familiar to people who have casually followed the mogul's career or who read British journalist William Shawcross' sympathetic biography in the early 1990s.

There's the usual stuff about the Australian-born Murdoch being shipped off to a posh boarding school, where he was rejected as a coarse outsider; about his undergraduate education at Oxford, where he was rejected as a coarse outsider; about his initial foray onto London's Fleet Street, where he was rejected as a coarse, self-seeking outsider; and into the American market, where he was ... well, you get the picture.

Wolff, who likes Murdoch because they share a basic fondness for newspapers and a distaste for most of the people who run them, persuaded the mogul to sit for more than 50 hours of interviews, and to give him access to his children and associates. There's plenty of good material there, particularly on Murdoch's 39-year-old wife, Wendi Deng, who appears to have shifted her husband's politics slightly left.

Actually, and despite his association with Fox News and the Weekly Standard, Murdoch's politics seem to shift with his interests. These days he's as comfortable with Tony Blair as he is with the Chinese Communist Party. What's fascinating in this part of Wolff's account is the way that Murdoch - King Lear-like - seems to be setting his progeny off for just the sort of dynasty-wrangling he's exploited in so many other companies, including Dow Jones.

There's something amusing about hearing that old Hollywood joke about Ovitz recycled to involve Murdoch, because during his brief interregnum as an "entertainment executive," he lived here and loathed the place and its people. Wolff is particularly good on that brief phase in the Murdoch rampage toward world domination.

Despite Fox's contribution to News Corp.'s bottom line ("Titanic" scored for the studio during this period), Murdoch "hates the Hollywood people. They hate him. Not least of all because he gets on a roll telling them how much he hates them."

Where Wolff, for all his breathless, irritating mannerisms, excels is in his acute eye for the accouterments of status as instructive social detail, and in his flawless ear for the dramatic in the ebb and flow of business deals. Nobody currently working at business journalism describes the art of the deal with Wolff's engaging verve. His account of the dialogue across the table during the secret lunch in which Murdoch proffered Dow Jones head Richard Zannino the offer for the Journal ultimately accepted by the Bancroft family is worth the price of the book.

Perhaps most instructive, Wolff has melded interview and observation into what might be called a plausible theory of Murdoch. In any situation, it is Murdoch's habit to play the role of the coldest, most dispassionate intellect in the room - impervious to sentiment or fellow feeling, relentlessly focused on the bottom line. There's power in that sort of detached objectivity, but Wolff has gone beyond it to identify the paradox that Murdoch frequently deploys in the service of essentially irrational strategic objectives. He pursues institutions and power generally for no better reason than desiring it. He wants what he wants and doesn't feel accountable to anyone or anything for its pursuit.

What Wolff ultimately paints is a portrait of Murdoch as not just the pre-eminent tabloid journalist of our age but perhaps its first tabloid business giant - a consummate miner of human weakness from the newsstand to the boardroom, an idiot savant who instinctively understands people want a justification for giving in to their lowest impulses.