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' meetingMichael 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