Next Time Leave the Cream on the Side
Well, there was no shortage of personal drama at yesterday's phonehack hearings. Even before the amateur performance artist decided that the event was not sufficiently about him. As far as favorite Wendi Deng Murdoch highlights go, my pick was not the volley-slap to the head of the shaving cream interloper. Instead I place my vote on the comparatively underrated moment early in the testimony when she none-so-subtly snaked her hand out to pat Rupert, signaling him to stop pounding on the desk quite so much. Murdoch pere convincingly portrayed himself as too doddering, befuddled and detached to share culpability in wrongdoing or run a multinational corporation. Murdoch fils likewise essayed an immortal characterization as a terrified sputterer of corporate buzzwords. Sadly I had to tear myself away to work and missed out on any penetrating character moments from Rebekah Brooks' set. Pointers to piquant video clips are henceforth solicited.
As a connoisseur of real-life political drama, I have to call this easily the most compelling since Iran/Contra, if not Watergate itself. The shocking implosion of the Murdoch empire has all the key elements:
larger than life characters topples from great heights the feared become the fearful resignations and criminal charges a look past the veneer of power a nation revising its view of itself low comedy oddly-timed deaths on the story's fringes, furrowing the ground for the conspiracy-minded the tantalizing (if inevitably illusory) possibility of cosmic justice Suffused with the fumes of the last-mentioned item, I will climb out onto a limb for the following prediction: Rupert Murdoch will not be running NewsCorp a year from now. Once all the shoes have dropped, it's the lawsuit seeking to amend the company's differential voting setup, which grants control of the corporation to a clan controlling 13% of its value, that will push him out, likely to some face-saving emeritus status. You'll still have 20th Century Fox and Fox News and the other valuable pillars of the media empire. The latter will retain its lucrative ideological slant. Though still informed by the back-alley Murdoch ethos, it won't be commanded by Murdoch the man, or any of his kinfolk.
