COMPANY TOWN : Rupert Murdoch Takes a Slap at Dalai Lama

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. operates satellite TV companies in China, made a thinly veiled attack on Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in a rare interview about his personal life and business published this week.

“I have heard cynics who say he’s [the Dalai Lama] a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes,” Murdoch said in the interview in the October issue of Vanity Fair.

Murdoch also admitted in the interview that he may be influenced by “propaganda” from the Chinese government, which quelled an uprising in Tibet in 1959 against communist rule and drove the Dalai Lama and many of his followers into exile.

“Maybe I’m falling for their propaganda, but it was an authoritarian, medieval society without any basic services,” Murdoch told his biographer William Shawcross.

“The problem is, I think most people would say that life is better there than before--people are healthy and more prosperous. The problem they have is that half the people of Tibet still think that the Dalai Lama is the son of God.”

News Corp.’s main interest in China is Star Television, a satellite TV company broadcasting across Asia from Hong Kong. The company has Chinese-language channels that show original programming, sports and music videos.

News Corp. has a stake in Phoenix Satellite Television, which produces the Phoenix Chinese Channel and the Phoenix Movie Channel and is in joint ventures with the state-run newspaper, the People’s Daily.

Murdoch, 68, who rarely grants interviews and whose tabloid newspapers have long intruded into people’s private lives, discussed for the first time his divorce from Anna, his wife of 32 years, and his remarriage to Wendi Deng, a 31-year-old former employee of his media conglomerate.

The media tycoon said he was “a recently separated, lonely man” when he asked Deng out to dinner in London in 1998. He said it was “complete nonsense” that he began the affair while still married.

He said of his split from his wife: “I was traveling a lot and was very obsessed with business and perhaps more than normally inconsiderate.”

Murdoch said that public figures have no right to privacy. But when asked to compare his own public life and fame with the less famous whose private lives are revealed in his newspapers, he reconsidered.

“I have the most sympathy with the average sporting personality. Whereas film stars who try to project images of who they are and what they aren’t have less of a cause, I think.”