Why is everybody picking on Rupert? He’s a lovable old bumbling bear, like Pooh or Paddington, who would never directly do anything to be mean or nasty to anybody, and he just wants to set things right. There’s no corporate-wide rot, there were just some aggressive subordinates who do bad things. They’re the ones to blame, and they’re gone.
That’s the image Rupert Murdoch would like people to believe — that he has a very large company, with lots of good people, and News of the World was only 1% of the organization, and he’s sorry about what happened, and that’s why he shut down the paper and withdrew his bid for BSkyB, so let’s put it behind us and move on.
If there’s one thing I can’t believe is in doubt, it’s that Murdoch’s corporation is run exactly the way he wants, and it has the culture and tone that he has set. It’s laughable when a tough, winner-take-all CEO like Murdoch claims no knowledge of major events and embedded business practices. Ken Lay did that when the Enron house of cards fell. Murdoch has a viable, financially successful media empire, and he hasn’t defrauded investors, but if Murdoch really didn’t know the particulars of what appears to be institutional corruption, it was willful ignorance. “Should we tell the chairman?” “No, the old man doesn’t want to know about this.”
Follow-up: Moments after I published this post, James Murdoch was asked if he knew the term “willful blindness,” and the name Ken Lay was used in the reference.