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from Jack Shafer:
The leadership lessons of Chairman Rupert
This piece originally appeared in Reuters Magazine.
Rupert Murdoch has endured more crises during his 80-plus years than Richard Nixon and Odysseus combined, so the CEO and chairman of News Corporation can be forgiven for seeming nonplussed by his current predicament. He took over the family newspaper business in Australia at 21, when his father died, and expanded it. He fought the British unions in 1986 and won. He repelled the bankers in 1990, when he was close to insolvency. He has survived two divorces, the purchase and sale of MySpace.com, a bunch of other digital disasters, and even the predations of John Malone, who threatens Murdoch family hegemony with his purchase of News Corp stock. And now, referencing his media empire’s latest fiasco, the British Parliament has deemed Murdoch “not a fit person” to run an international company.
If Murdoch were the sort of pompous captain of industry who collected leadership maxims, Look for Trouble would likely top his list. He craves competition, and has repeatedly bet his company on new ventures like 20th Century Fox, the Fox Network, NFL football and his satellite operations.
Most chief executives think rewarding stockholders is their primary job. Not Murdoch. The Murdoch family owns the controlling shares in the company, so the chairman can largely ignore Wall Street to pursue a strategy that stretches across decades, not quarters. Yes, he’s impulsive, but creatively so.
I asked Ken Auletta, who has covered Murdoch for almost 40 years, to distill management maxims from the CEO’s adventures. He offered Ideology Is for Amateurs, which captures Murdoch’s political agnosticism. He leans right in his utterances, but subscribes to the politics of expediency, which explains how easily he shifted in the UK from supporting the Tories to supporting Labour and back again. Auletta says Murdoch’s genuine identity is that of a businessman. If he has any ideology, it’s What’s Good for Me?
from Breakingviews:
Rupert Murdoch’s sham governance on full display
By Jeffrey Goldfarb
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Rupert Murdoch still gets a kick out of the “fair and balanced” slogan used by his Fox News channel. He had a good laugh about it only last week at News Corp’s annual shareholder meeting. The results of a vote conducted at that gathering, released Monday, show that everyone’s now equally in on the joke about the company’s shameful corporate governance as they are the conservative bias of his TV news operation.
from MediaFile:
The future of journalism in the UK
By Mark Thompson
The opinions discussed are his own.
In the UK we are going through an unprecedented crisis in journalism, a crisis with the boundaries and techniques of investigative journalism at its heart.
We don’t yet know what will emerge from this crisis and from Lord Leveson’s Inquiry, but any recommendations about new laws or regulation will be studied with interest by Governments around the world.
from MediaFile:
Murdoch in good times and bad
By Sir Harold Evans
The views expressed are his own.
There is a clear connecting thread between the events I describe in "Good Times, Bad Times" and the dramas that led so many years later to Rupert Murdoch’s “most humble day of my life.” I was seated within a few feet of him in London on July 19, 2011, during his testimony to a select committee of MPs with his son James at his side. Not many more than a score of observers were allowed into the small room at Parliament’s Portcullis House, across the road from the House of Commons and Big Ben. A portcullis is a defensive latticed iron grating hung over the entrance to a fortified castle, the perfect metaphor for News International, which perpetually sees itself as beset by enemies.
Murdoch, as chairman and only begetter of the giant multi-media enterprise News International (NI), was called on to defend his castle and himself as best he could for the outrages of hacking and police bribery inflicted on the British public by his News of the World and the cover-up that he and his company conducted over nearly five years. The paper Murdoch most affects to despise, the Guardian, was the instrument of his undoing.
from Breakingviews:
In all, News Corp’s papers could be worth $6 bln
By Quentin Webb
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
LONDON -- The Sun is Britain’s biggest newspaper, outselling its two tabloid rivals combined by 50 percent. Yet it might fetch less than 500 million pounds ($800 million), were Rupert Murdoch’s embattled News Corp to sell up. Add in The Times and the Sunday Times, and a deal might be struck for 800 million pounds ($1.3 billion). His entire newspaper empire, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and nearly 150 Australian titles, may be worth between $3 and 6 billion. The industry’s terrible economics, and the UK hacking scandal, both discourage M&A. But trophy buyers could emerge.
from Felix Salmon:
A few Murdoch questions
After taking phone calls about Rupert Murdoch on Brian Lehrer's show this morning and then immediately doing an hour-long diavlog with Alex Massie on the subject, I'm beginning to get a little Murdoch-ed out. But there are three newish points that are worth raising.
Firstly, what was the mechanism by which it was agreed that Rupert and James Murdoch would appear in parliament together? Having James by his side was a godsend for Rupert, and James clearly took his role as a shield for his father very seriously. I'm sure the more aggressive MPs would have preferred to be able to grill Rupert on his own, as they did Rebekah Brooks. How did that not happen?
Constitution in crisis as tyrannical journalists devour cowed politicians
A sordid tale of excess and brutality, of a world dominated by journalists with their ears to the keyhole, of tyrannical newspapers wielding remarkable power and of a political class not only cowed, but consumed, by that power.
Sound familiar? With two of Britain’s most senior policemen out of a job, the prime minister under pressure for his serenading of News Corp and one of the world’s most powerful press barons, in the form of Rupert Murdoch, summoned to testify to parliament, it would be one way of describing the current state of affairs. 
from Breakingviews:
Tip for the Murdochs: don’t be yourselves
By Chris Hughes
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Don’t be yourselves. That’s probably the best tip for Rupert and James Murdoch as they prepare to face UK lawmakers over the phone hacking scandal engulfing the UK newspaper arm of News Corporation.
from MediaFile:
News of the World hacking scandal: UK’s Miliband speaks out
UK opposition leader Ed Miliband called on the British media to clean up its image and emphasized the need for a speedy public inquiry into the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. Watch clips of Miliband's comments at a Thomson Reuters Newsmaker event below:
Miliband to British media: "Clean up your image"
Miliband calls for judge-led inquiry into phone-hacking scandal
Miliband wants media watchdog scrapped
Miliband calls for BSkyB referral
Miliband urges UK Prime Minister David Cameron to apologize
Follow our live coverage of the phone-hacking scandal below:
from Reuters Investigates:
The end of an era for British tabloids?
No sooner had our special report today on British tabloids hit the wire than Rupert Murdoch's News Corp shocked everybody by announcing it would close down the 168-year-old News of the World.
Steven Barnett, professor of communications at London's Westminster University, spoke for a lot of people when he said of the news: "Astonishing. I'm completely gobsmacked. Talk about a nuclear option."
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The Wall
