to anna murdoch, within ten years after her divorce from rupert, and she asks her to step in and reverse the course. and at the same time lachlan was urging his father to not do anything rash, just stand by james in this moment. he comes in from australia, he s tanned and rested, and rupert is immediately put at ease, his boy is back. rupert stands down. for the time being, james survives. the murdoch family have closed their flagship sunday newspaper, abandoned their bid for bskyb, yet the political and commercial fallout from this scandal is nowhere near done. and for rupert if all of this wasn t bad enough, he can t even protect the one person he did seem to try to protect, and that s rebekah brooks. rebekah brooks, chief
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. and james then is very much acting as if he s going to be the one. word starts circulating that he s even building his own shadow executive team that he can install at the top of the company. why do i believe we need to change direction as a matter of urgency? because we have analog attitudes in a digital age. the result is lost opportunities for enterprise, free choice, and commercial investment. in many ways, james spearheading this effort to
newspaper in britain i m not talking about that issue at all today. sorry. okay. no worries, mr. chairman. 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 a fellow journalist. 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.
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 news corp 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, please. everyone is clamoring for
emerged, james murdoch actually told colleagues that he thought that the worst of it was behind them, and then this whole thing explodes. the family of milly dowler is planning to sue the news of the world. i think this takes it to a completely different level. there s no words that could describe how awful this is. the most immediate thing that happens is that advertises for the news of the world say that they are going to boycott the paper. in james s mind this is just a third rate sunday tabloid that is sort of embarrassing, so he sees it as a very easy decision to make, to close the news of the world. it was the sort of sacrificial limb to trying to keep the bskyb deal moving forward. clearly practices of certain individuals did not live up to the standards and quality of journalism that we believe in, and that i believe in, and that this company believes in. this was not something his father would have done. for rupert, the news of the world has much more psychic