Nobody’s buying it, and it doesn’t help News Corp. to attack some of the report’s conclusions as “unjustified and highly partisan” (the tripartisan vote for the report was 7-3). If the culture of any company is set from the top, as they almost all are, it’s News Corporation’s. As I wrote last summer, “its entire reason for being is to reflect, imitate, and amplify Murdoch himself.” Harold Evans put it better three decades ago when he called Murdoch a Sun King, someone who rules a company “where policy derives from how the leader is perceived by others rather than by instructions or traditions.”
The glib denials that have served him so well for so many years aren’t working anymore—not with all we now know. This is someone who testified last week that “I’ve never asked a prime minister for anything.” This is someone who puts forward the idea that his company’s own internal investigation is legit and pretends that he doesn’t have a well documented history of manipulating these puppet panels.
The denials and obfuscations would be pathological if they weren’t so transparently the result of conscious decisions. Rupert Murdoch is in survivor mode, and with defenses like these, he’s in more trouble than we thought. And more is yet to come.
Years ago, a retired Skadden Arps guy started a campaign to require some basic ethics be added to the single thing (increase shareholder value) now required of corporate executives. His idea, as I recall it, was to subject recalcitrant corporate entities to charter revocation in the event they operated like criminal conspiracies. His exhibit A was the tobacco giants.
Many years ago, corporate charters were occasionally revoked by the chartering governments. It used to be understood that governments were the supreme authority in the land, and that incorporation and limited liability were privileges.
This idea is long overdue for revival.
News Corp could be a good test case. Revoke the charter(s), wipe out the shareholders, scatter the assets to the market at whatever prices they'll fetch and thereby send the message to investors: don't try to make money by backing guys like Murdoch.
#1 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Wed 2 May 2012 at 12:13 PM