Guardian UK: News Corp's great dictator on the brink

[marmar]

Rupert Murdoch: News Corp's great dictator on the brink
He was as combative, up against it and past his prime as 2011's other fallen tyrants. This was likely his last shareholders' meeting

Michael Wolff
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 23 October 2011





Under normal circumstances, Rupert Murdoch doesn't have much patience for the annual shareholders' meetings that are required by law of American public companies. He regards them as a farce, because they cannot change the outcome in a company where a voting majority is secure, and as an exercise in liberal corporate law designed to put him personally on the spot.

Still, his handlers, whose job is, in part, to protect him from himself, have long made him train for these meetings as though he's going into a presidential debate. Without rigorous practice, he is quite liable to not pay attention and appear quite bewildered, or pay too much attention and explode in fury, or worse, truthful exasperation.

"He's going to keep asking me why there are no women on the board," Murdoch once told me as his PR aide, Gary Ginsberg, was trying to cajole him into a practice session. "He wants to make sure I don't say, 'because they talk too much.'"

The fine line at News Corp has always been between Murdoch's almost deadset insistence that he be able to treat the company as his private preserve, and his handlers' (lawyers, CFOs, press people) more straightforward understanding that it is, in fact, a public company. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/23/rupert-murdoch-news-corp-dictator

[wakemewhenitsover]

1. What a dick. n/t

[MADem]

2. He was lucky they didn't grab him and toss him up on the hood, like a prize deer.

That happened to another tyrant recently, it ended badly for him, too.

[pacalo]

3. 'because they talk too much.'

Now, I do believe the meaning behind that is in a legal sense; that Murdoch, as extremely secretive as he is, doesn't want to hire those he pre-judges as looselip lucy's, getting him sent to prison.

Just a tad off-topic, did you catch this:

In some sense, it rather seemed that Murdoch just regarded this as shareholders – those dumb sons-of-bitches – doing what shareholders always do: complain into the wind. Just a little more so, with a little more security, with the company having to retreat to a fortified room behind the Fox gates (rather than the usual junky theater in mid-town Manhattan where they ordinarily conduct the meeting) – and with Murdoch himself having to offer a bit more self-justification than he might be used to.

I've been loving Tom Watson & his in-your-face visit to the stockholders' meeting.