I think it's fair to say that Rupert Murdoch is in the spotlight--to some, the crosshairs! Every day brings another raft of stories about the News Corporation's efforts to buy The Wall Street Journal--some 500 just today, according to Google News.
The Cable Gamer can't keep up with the play-by-play of that sort of flood of coverage, but I will venture this prediction: Rupert Murdoch will eventually succeed in buying the venerable paper. Because, as I have said in the past, the Bancroft family, which owns the WSJ won't get a better deal than they will from Murdoch. Not on money, and not even on editorial independence.
One of the rival corporate suitors, for example, is General Electric. GE is a great company, but its immediate past CEO, Jack Welch, got the nickname "Neutron Jack" because he was so ruthless in laying off employees. Hence the nickname--recalling the days of the 80s, when the Pentagon's "neutron bomb" was in the news. The idea was that Welch, like the neutron bomb, would leave the building standing and wipe out the people inside. Is that a good model for current GE CEO to follow if he owned the Journal? Of course not, but Welch, even in retirement, is still very much an influence on GE. So watch out, Journalistas, if GE gets ya, because "Neutron Jeff" Immelt could zap you in the name of "hitting the numbers."
And as for another Journal suitor, Ron Burkle, TCG wonders if the Bancrofts really want to turn their treasured newspaper over to someone who is so notoriously tight with Bill Clinton that even The New York Times took notice, writing in May 2006, "Mr. Clinton is rarely without company in public, yet the company he keeps rarely includes his wife. Nights out find him zipping around Los Angeles with his bachelor buddy, Ronald W. Burkle." So imagine Clinton and Burkle, zipping through the corporate integrity of their new corporate plaything.
But The Cable Gamer prides herself on chasing down stories that are her own size. And there was one little throwaway in a Business Week
story on James Murdoch, younger son of you-know-who, which I posted on last Friday, that did tantalize me a bit--tantalize me a lot, actually.
The throwaway sentence concerned the relationship between Jamess' older brother, Lachlan, and Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News. Here's what it said: "In 2005, Lachlan, now 35, bolted his job as News Corp.'s deputy chief operating officer, the result of one too many clashes with Fox News Network chief Roger Ailes." Now that was interesting, of course, but it was written so casually that I hesitated over what to make of it, if it was even true at all.
So rather than mention it--TCG loves gossip-mongering, but I pride myself on only mongering true gossip!--I did a little digging. And here's what I found: It's well known within 1211 (the insider term for News Corp. HQ, at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in NYC), that that other top News Corp execs who had problems with Lachlan Murdoch, and they had a motive to create the appearance of a rift between Ailes and Lachlan where one never existed.
And why not seek to blame everything on Ailes? After all, the Fox News chief is constantly being targeted by the likes of Media Matters.org and Newshounds.us, for everything this side of the heartbreak of psoriasis. As one News Corp insider told TCG, "Roger and Lachlan had a great relationship and anything to the contrary goes against reality." This source added that it would be no surprise at 1211 to see Ailes and Lachlan Murdoch working together in the future.
This has been a good source to me. So I am going with it. Sorry, Business Week--you got steered wrong.
So now I must end this long post, confident that even if this BW item didn't check out, there's plenty more skullduggery to be dug up in Cable Game-land.
