james murdoch is now the clear heir. but a scandal is right around the corner, and james good fortune is about to be threatened. james murdoch is now at the top of the company, almost certain to succeed his father. and he s in the midst of trying to buy bskyb, the british broadcaster, when the hacking scandal breaks. outrage in britain is one used of hacking the phone messages of public figures. thousands of victims. the murdochs are going to need every bit of help they can get to outrun the scandal and get this deal done. who was going to succeed rupert murdoch? lachlan, elizabeth, and james
murdoch s prize, getting their hands on all of bskyb and all of its cash. aside from the bbc, bskyb is the biggest broadcaster in the uk. if you want premium tv, that s where you get it from. it controls things like the premier league. it has the deals for all the big hollywood studio movie rights. the murdochs have already owned 40% of it. they wanted to take full ownership of it. rupert has this desire to make bskyb into a copy of fox news, and full control would give them much more scope to shape bskyb as they wanted to. the kind of control over what people were consuming and watching and believing, that was really important to him. and also $1.6 billion in profit. that was significant. sky, in lots of ways, is james murdoch s baby at this point. if he can pull off the deal, that means it s just a smooth transition really into his father s chair.
cover-up boosted the whole project to uncover the truth. we now have allegations that actually this was something that was pervasive at the newspaper. andy coulson has denied those allegations. as more stories come out, more evidence comes out and the lawsuits start piling up, from really big names. sienna miller. i was relentlessly pursued, almost daily. steve coogan. that he had my passwords, my phone account and a number of personal details of mine. hugh grant. why do we have no regulation at all that s effective for tabloid press? and for the murdoch company to still trying to pretend that this was a rogue reporter, this punched a significant hole in that wall of lies. rupert murdoch s bid for the uk-based satellite broadcaster bskyb has been given the green light. james is inches away from finally providing his father with the jewel that s been
mr. mr. murdoch, no comment at all on the hacking scandal? okay, thank you guys. he looks at some of his lieutenants and says, do you think that i should fly commercial so that, you know, i can be seen as sort of a man of the people? and they re like, yeah, no, that s not going to do the trick. so he takes his gulf stream and he lands. here comes the boss. a newscorp jet arrived at luton airport this morning. its principal passenger left in the front seat of a range rover. by the time his car sped into wapping, he d picked up a little light reading, the news of the world, the paper he had just killed off. mr. murdoch. suddenly you saw this old man, really, for the first time in his life being the hunted prey. damage control in high gear, rupert murdoch and his son james in london trying to find a way to put out the fire. it s been a bruising few days for the murdoch empire, but even tougher days lie ahead. are you a fit person to run bskyb? gentlemen, please, p
we published on a wednesday. by friday night, they tried to turn the guns on the guardian. the murdoch company came out and accused us of deliberately lying to the british people. which is a very serious charge to make against the fellow journalists. so you have the hacking scandal bubbling away with the murdochs trying to keep a lid on the boiling pot, and nick davis raising the heat underneath it. and then you have james with this really huge career-defining bskyb deal. so it s almost like this absolute sort of powder keg waiting to blow. and yet, it doesn t blow. yet.