News Crips

Yesterday saw an apparently abject R. Murdoch begging forgiveness from the parents of the murdered schoolgirl whose voicemail his goons manipulated; not to mention the resignation of two of his closest fixers who were in charge of things during the in-house phone hacking project. One of these worthies was the head of Dow Jones, the U.S. company Rupe paid way too much money for, which publishes the, uhm, Wall Street Journal.

While evidence of outright thuggery in the States has yet to appear, everyone seems to be taking a sensible wait-and-see attitude about it. Frankly, in such an arrogant, macho, and belligerent corporate culture, one in which paranoia also has its place, conditions seem perfect for some kind of surveillance operation, if only against its own employees, quite distinct from the News of the World campaign.

We shall see, but in the meantime it is getting clearer by the day that even if no smoking wiretap is uncovered by the Feds, the corporate culture at News Corp is about to undergo a pronounced readjustment. A British investment blogger (via the terrific Guardian feed)
spells it out:

[Let's say] that I am the CEO of a public company. If I had indulged in the following:

1. Paid >$500m for MySpace and then sold it for $35m;
2. Paid $5.7bn for Dow Jones and written off $2.8bn;
3. Paid $615m for my daughter's business;
5. My company’s shares had underperformed for 15 years;
6. And some of my staff had engaged in criminal phone hacking and bribing Police officers and this had been covered up by my management.

I think the shareholders would have had me fired.

[...] why hasn't Murdoch been fired?

To the list I'd add the N.Y. Post which has been famously losing a million dollars a week (or more) for almost two decades, and the FOX business channel which--last I heard anyway--was venting money outward at a brisk pace.

Mr. Smith is nice enough to answer his own question: because the Murdoch’s control News Corp through differential voting rights: the Murdoch’s own 40% of the B voting shares. The much more numerous A shares have no votes, so the Murdoch’s are able to control a company in which they own only 13% of the issued share capital.

(And let me say in passing how discouraging it is to see an educated Englishman misusing the apostrophe as thoroughly as any U.S. high-schooler.)

Grammatical issues aside however, Mr. Smith raises a jolly good point, and one suspects that if all those class A shareholders have anything to say about it, the days of News Corp. remaining a family enterprise are numbered and few. (The latest Guardian story about who's up and down in such an eventuality gets the stock class conditions wrong, but is worth a read.)

The writer here seems to think that one winner would be Roger Ailes, but of that I wonder. Rupe has been Roge's chief shield from reasonable voices in and outside the company who consider his propaganda operation something of a national disgrace. The story also repeats the common proposition that FUX News makes money hand over fist--to which I've often wondered here how a channel whose top-rated shows attract no more than 2.5 mil. rather old viewers might qualify as such. If someone feels like explaining in comments, I'm all ears.