The resignation of two key lieutenants of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his own full-page signed apology in British newspapers — "We are sorry for the widespread wrongdoing that occurred" — is clearly a desperate attempt to save his News Corporation group from being incinerated in the firestorm of criticism for widespread telephone hacking, almost certainly illegal payments to policemen, and attempts to probe the private lives of politicians, royalty, the great and good, and victims of crime and terrorism. (Rebekah Brooks, the former News of the World editor, was arrested in London on Monday in the phone hacking scandal.)
It may prove a classic case of too little, too late. Only days before, Murdoch had claimed that with "minor mistakes" his British group had handled the crisis very well. By ditching both the flame-haired Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International, Murdoch's British newspaper arm, and her predecessor Les Hinton, who became publisher of the Wall Street Journal when Murdoch bought it, Murdoch clearly hopes to take his son and heir-apparent James, the chairman of News International and of the BSkyB pay-tv channels, out of the firing line.
But dissention runs deep, even into the tightly family-run group. A leading biographer of Rupert Murdoch claimed that his daughter Elisabeth had said at a book launch this month that James Murdoch and Brooks had "f**ked the company." The close Murdoch control of News Corp — the family owns 13 percent of the stock but 40 percent of the B voting shares — may make it hard for Rupert as well as James to run away from responsibility for newspapers without any sense of right and wrong.