"We've Handled the Crisis Extremely Well"

[wheelspinner]

So how does Rupert handle a crisis "extremely well"?

• fold a masthead that's been operating for 168 years and sack 200 people who mostly had nothing to do with the problems, just to protect the rest of his company from the stench
  
• expose the company to class actions from up to 4000 people whom his employees illegally operated against, not to mention the employees themselves who were unfairly dismissed
  
• after holding out for weeks, be forced into giving up on a key acquisition essential to the company's strategic future in the UK
  
• see a major contract in Australia imperilled by his UK executives' behaviour
  
• see more than 10% wiped off the company's share price on bourses around the world
  
• be forced to use the company's capital to fund a $5billion share buyback just to put a floor under its plummeting share price
  
• have Congress and renowned jurists in the USA call for an investigation into News under FCPA and RICO legislation
  
• have the former owners of the Wall Street Journal express regret that they ever sold it to him
  
• have former executives of his company arrested in relation to decisions made while there, under his and his son's auspices
  
• insist on sticking by an executive whose reputation is totally trashed and who has lost all credibility as a leader
  
• see a unanimous vote in the House of Commons that essentially told him and his company to pull their heads in
  
• constantly chop and change about his willingness to front a Commons committee on the subject of his company's actions; he might go, no he and James are heading back to the USA, oh hang on, now that we've been served a subpoena we'll deign to grace you with our presence
  
• convince himself that News Ltd investigating itself will be seen by an outraged public as an adequate action in lieu of a full public inquiry
  
• be seen grinning like a smug fool at every opportunity, oblivious to how this looks to people deeply offended by his company's actions

If this is managing a crisis extremely well, it's lucky he didn't f**k it up, isn't it?


We've handled the crisis extremely well, says Rupert Murdoch July 15, 2011 - 7:20AM

News Corp. chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch says his company has handled the phone hacking crisis in Britain "extremely well" and will recover.

In an interview with the News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal, Murdoch also said he would set up an independent committee to "investigate every charge of improper conduct" made against News Corp.

The 80-year-old Murdoch said the damage to the company in Britain, where News Corp. was forced to shut the News of the World tabloid because of the phone hacking, is "nothing that will not be recovered".

"We have a reputation of great good works in this country," he said.

Murdoch, in what the newspaper said were his first significant public comments since the scandal, said News Corp. has handled the crisis "extremely well in every way possible", making just "minor mistakes".

Murdoch also defended the handling of the crisis by his son, James, the deputy chief operating officer of News Corp. and non-executive chairman of British satellite TV broadcaster BSkyB.

News Corp. was forced to drop its bid for full control of BSkyB because of the phone hacking by News of the World reporters.

"I think he acted as fast as he could, the moment he could," Murdoch said of his son.

Murdoch also strongly denied reports he may be considering a sale of some of his newspapers. "Pure rubbish," he said. "Pure and total rubbish... give it the strongest possible denial you can give."

AFP


Read more: www.theage.com.au/business/world-business/weve-handled-the-crisis-extremely-well-says-rupert-murdoch-20110715-1hgm9.html#ixzz1S8hbw36I

[MacBeth]

They will have handled it brilliantly if he and his son avoid criminal charges on both sides of the ocean.....and my guess is that they will. They served up Rebekka in their stead. How many more will fall to protect those ultimately responsible?

[wheelspinner]

Jul 15, 2011 6:02:06 GMT -5 MacBeth said:

They will have handled it brilliantly if he and his son avoid criminal charges on both sides of the ocean.....and my guess is that they will. They served up Rebekka in their stead. How many more will fall to protect those ultimately responsible?

I'm not sorry for Rebekah Brooks - she is pure sleaze.

Her resignation is just another example of how Murdoch has totally mishandled this. A CEO who was on top of his job would have stood her down with pay the second he arrived in the UK. Instead Murdoch was grinning and hugging Hera and saying she was his number one priority. Now he is seeN to be backing down yet again, when Blind Freddie could have told him that she had to go as soon as it was rveald that News had hacked a dead girl's phone on her watch.

I believe this is the end of the road for Murdoch. Not because of the legal problems, but because investors will see his total inability to manage and respond to the damage done to News' share price, capital assets and strategic future, and will force him to retire. Not right now, but soon. The flight from News in the markets has a way to go yet, and every fall is bad news for the current regime.

[MacBeth]

I don't feel sorry for her either, but I am pretty sure she was handed the "we are behind you" nonsense and then cut loose. She should have expected it considering who she works for.

[joethree56]

All good fun innit?

[wheelspinner]

Jul 15, 2011 19:49:24 GMT -5 joethree56 said:

All good fun innit?

It's times like these that the word "schadenfreude" was coined for.

[MacBeth]

News Corp Phone Hacking Scandal May Spread To Australia


News Corp's phone hacking scandal threatened to spread to a third country Friday, as Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that she would be open to an investigation of the company's practices in Murdoch's native country.

Gillard told the National Press Club that she was "shocked and disgusted" at allegations of phone hacking at News of the World and foresaw a "long debate about media ethics in this country," the Australian (which is owned by Murdoch) reported.

The head of the Green Party, Senator Bob Brown, is leading calls to investigate News Limited, News Corp's Australian subsidiary, which controls a substantial portion of the media. Gillard said she would be "happy" to discuss such an inquiry.

Brown plans to seek support for a public inquiry, though Attorney-General Robert McClelland has ruled out the possibility of new legislation to regulate media.

An editorial in today's Courier Mail, which is owned by News Limited, insisted that the company's properties "have nothing to fear from any inquiry into media behaviour."

News Limited chief executive John Hartigan also dismissed the need for an inquiry into journalistic conduct as "totally unnecessary." He said that the company would submit to an inquiry, but differentiated between newsroom culture in Australia and the UK. "They're very sensational, they deal with people's lives, private lives and some of the behaviours that have come out are obviously being driven by the need to get in front of each other," he said of the British press. "I would argue very strenuously that we don't have those behaviours in Australia."




www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/15/investigation-of-news-cor_n_900098.html

[joethree56]

differentiated between newsroom culture in Australia and the UK. "They're very sensational, they deal with people's lives, private lives and some of the behaviours that have come out are obviously being driven by the need to get in front of each other,"

I see, so it was competition from other news gatherers that compelled Murdochs bunch to cheat to 'get in front'. Sound to me as if the Murdoch ethic is alive and well in Oz.

[wheelspinner]

"I would argue very strenuously that we don't have those behaviours in Australia."

No, maybe not. But what we do have is, under Hartigan's leadership:

• The Australian taking a public editorial stance that they are going to destroy The Greens as a party.
  
• News Ltd, particularly The Australian, taking a breathtakingly biased anti-government stance on almost every issue. Their opinion pages wold have to be weighted 90% anti-government at least, and the blog posts that they selectively publish are massively anti-government. These posts are moderated and my own get screened out nearly all the time, so there is clearly no attempt at balance in these posts.
  
• The Australian talking out of both sides of its mouth on climate change. They write editorials claiming they support action on climate change and decrying Tony Abbott's policy as unworkable, but publish masses of articles attacking the government over it and give air time to every crank denialist theory going.
  
• An NRL rugby team owned by News Limited were found to have been cheating on the salary cap for years on end, being stripped of two premierships and subjected to massive fines. Hartigan, chairman of the club at the time, explains this massive failure of corporate governance by saying that's different, the Storm are not a newspaper

If you write an editorial saying you are going to destroy a properly constituted political party that about 1 in 6 Australians vote for, and follow it up with relentless attacks, can you really be surprised if that party's leader thinks there needs to be an inquiry into media ethics?

[oskar]

Jul 15, 2011 11:27:57 GMT -5 MacBeth said:

I don't feel sorry for her either, but I am pretty sure she was handed the "we are behind you" nonsense and then cut loose. She should have expected it considering who she works for.

Remind you of former PretzelDunce George "You're-doing-a-great-job-brownie" Bush?

[wheelspinner]

Jul 16, 2011 17:17:50 GMT -5 joethree56 said:

Sound to me as if the Murdoch ethic is alive and well in Oz.

Oh, it certainly is ...

Rupert's gorilla tactics
July 17, 2011
OPINION

ALMOST 25 years ago, Rupert Murdoch strode into the Flinders Street offices of The Herald & Weekly Times and made its board an offer too good to refuse. Australian newspaper publishing and public debate have never been the same since.

It was December 3, 1986 - the landmark anniversary is just months away - and even though I was working overseas for the HWT at the time, I'll never forget it. That's because telephones rang at foreign bureaus around the world as Murdoch arrived at headquarters. By the close of business that day, he pretty much owned the company. The bid was audacious, perfectly timed and pitched - everything his failed BSkyB bid in Britain wasn't.

Murdoch sorted out the details in a matter of weeks and, after doing so, added the HWT's stable of what were then first-class newspapers, including The Sun News-Pictorial and The Herald in Melbourne, The Courier-Mail in Brisbane and Adelaide Advertiser, to his own. It gave him control of almost 50 per cent of Australia's daily and Sunday newspapers; now it's closer to 70 per cent.

The success of the bid was a direct result of the Hawke government's changes to media ownership laws that allowed proprietors to become, as Paul Keating put it at the time, queens of the screen or princes of print, but not both. Ironically, Keating was on the ABC this week citing the policy switch as evidence of good governance. He'd forced Rupert Murdoch to sell the HWT's television interests because the new policy wouldn't allow him to own a TV licence and a major newspaper in the same market. The law still doesn't. Anyone who values plurality would have to agree that's a good thing, but there are many who believe to this day that Murdoch should never have been allowed to buy the HWT and get such a stranglehold on our print media.

Almost a quarter century on, Greens leader Bob Brown is calling for a Senate inquiry into whether it's appropriate that one organisation controls more than two-thirds of the country's major newspapers. As Senator Brown put it: ''You can't avoid Murdoch-owned newspapers in a number of Australian cities.'' Or, by extension, their almost unanimous, right-wing views.

Senator Brown's inquiry would look at media ownership laws, how newspapers are regulated, journalist ethics, even the separation of opinion and news. Given the treatment the Greens have received in the Murdoch press recently and the conduct of News in Britain, I don't blame Brown for wanting to ask some hard questions. But I can save him and his colleagues a lot of trouble, particularly on the question of media concentration: not only is Murdoch's dominance of the print media here inappropriate, it's downright undemocratic. The Brits have been having conniptions last week over his control of 40 per cent of their newspapers. If it was 70 per cent, they'd be tearing down Big Ben. And, of course, they're outraged by News's trashing of journalistic ethics.

This week News Limited CEO John Hartigan was assuring us that there is no unethical behaviour at the company in Australia. That may or may not be the case; certainly in my most recent stint with News between 2004 and 2008 at, first, The Australian, and then the Herald Sun, I saw no evidence of anything significant.

But forgive me if I take Hartigan's comments with a grain of salt. A little over a year ago he gave evidence in an unfair dismissal case I fought and won against his company; in fact, he was in the witness box for more than a day of a six-day hearing. At the end of it, the judge in the case had this to say about the News Limited CEO: ''There were aspects about his evidence which lead me to be cautious about accepting a number of critical features of it.''

Of course, no readers of News Limited papers ever got to read the judge's comments or similar ones he made about other News witnesses. They simply chose not to report his misgivings. Fairfax did, though. And the ABC. But almost 70 per cent of Australia's major newspapers didn't.

That's the thing about having such enormous media power - you can pretty much create your own reality. It requires a great sense of responsibility, but clearly News Corporation, in Britain at least, has failed that test.

No wonder Hartigan was on the front foot last week, trying to quell any suggestions of poor corporate or journalistic behaviour here. The last thing he wants is for the British reader and advertiser revolt to spread to Australia. He doesn't support an inquiry into journalistic conduct either; in fact, he thinks it would be ''totally unnecessary''. So I suppose we'll just have to take the company's word that it's behaving ethically and responsibly here. But what if they're not or, at least, don't in the future? Who would uncover it?

British Labor MP Tom Watson last week likened the unravelling of Rupert Murdoch's British media empire to the parable about the emperor's new clothes. ''All of a sudden everyone knows that Rupert Murdoch's company was too powerful,'' said Watson, adding: ''We've now got fundamental questions to ask ourselves about what media ownership in the UK looks like going forward because at the heart of this was a company unaccountable and out of control and we let it happen.''

They are important questions that need to be considered here too.

Bruce Guthrie is a former editor of The Age, Sunday Age and Herald Sun and author of Man Bites Murdoch, twitter@brucerguthrie


Read more: www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/ruperts-gorilla-tactics-20110716-1hj4o.html#ixzz1SLkHmiX9

[MacBeth]

The timing of former News International Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks’s arrest “stinks”, the solicitor representing Milly Dowler’s family has said.

Brooks was arrested on Sunday two days before she was due to appear in front of the parliament at the culture media and sport select committee.

The Dowler family solicitor Mark Lewis told Sky News: “The timing, the timing stinks”.

He added: “I think it’s an incredible bit of timing I think it gives this impression that those questions can’t be answered...

"It looks deliberate I’m sorry about that but it looks deliberate.”

MPs have also questioned the timing of Brooks’ arrest, with Chris Bryant telling Sky News that it was “unusual”.

The Labour MP said: "I think this is rather odd timing, to happen on a Sunday and to happen just two days before her appearance.

"Maybe the police are trying to protect evidence, but plenty of people will be saying, 'This is an opportunity for her to get out of saying things to the Culture Committee.'"

Mr Bryant added: "It's good news that clearly the news Metropolitan police investigation and the new assistant commissioner's doing a thorough job - a job incidentally that should have been done in 2006."




www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/07/17/rebekah-brooks-arrested-m_n_900935.html?ir=UK%20Politics

[wheelspinner]

Jul 17, 2011 16:25:36 GMT -5 MacBeth said:

The timing of former News International Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks’s arrest “stinks”, the solicitor representing Milly Dowler’s family has said.
...

"It looks deliberate I’m sorry about that but it looks deliberate"

Have to say I agree.

[oskar]

Will she fall down the stairs?
Will she be declared mentally unfit?
Stay tuned for the next episode of "As The Stomach Churns".