For a man running a small business, Michael Arrington has attracted a lot of attention in the past couple of weeks. By the time he agreed to leave AOL this week, he had stirred up a maelstrom across Silicon Valley and the digital media.
Revisit the question of wilful blindness at News Corp
At July’s parliamentary hearings into phone-hacking at the News of the World, Liberal Democrat MP Adrian Sanders wound up his line of questioning by asking James Murdoch if he was “familiar with the term ‘wilful blindness’”.
Mr Murdoch, now deputy chief operating officer at News Corp and head of its international business, asked Mr Sanders to elaborate, which he did:
It is a term that came up in the Enron scandal. Wilful blindness is a legal term. It states that if there is knowledge that you could have had and should have had, but chose not to have, you are still responsible.
The newspapers that should follow the New York Times
The success of the New York Times metered paywall – it has gathered 224,000 digital-only web subscribers in its first four months (as well as 57,000 Nook and Kindle subscribers) – raises one obvious question: who will be next?
I was sure enough that the NYT’s experiment, in which readers who access more than 20 articles a month have to pay a subscription although articles accessed through social media links remain free, would work that I made a bet on it with Felix Salmon, a vociferous sceptic.
Felix backed down gracefully this week, acknowledging that I am extremely likely to win. My bet was that the NYT would have at least 300,000 digital subscribers after two years, so my bet should go into the money fairly soon (and Felix will owe me $100 for every 100,000 NYT digital subscribers above that figure).
There is no doubt which Murdoch family member emerged best from the phone-hacking hearing before a UK House of Commons select committee this week. Leaping across the room to land a loud slap on the idiotic foam-pie protester who had assailed her 80-year-old husband, Wendi Murdoch was fearsome.
Rough justice in New York, cozy cops in London
The Murdoch phone hacking affair has made me reflect further on how powerful people who may have broken the law get treated in various jurisdictions – and revisit the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
I wrote a column in the FT earlier this month defending the treatment of Mr Strauss-Kahn (or DSK, as he is known) at the hands of the New York judicial system. I argued that the police and prosecutors had acted correctly in arresting him promptly on charges of sexual assault, and later disclosing weakness in the evidence.
That did not go down very well with a lot of readers – here is a letter criticising my piece that was printed in the FT. However, I think that the Murdoch affair, and the collusion it has revealed among British politicians, media figures and the police make the New York authorities look even better by comparison.
Would the real Rupert Murdoch please step forward?
Plenty of critics will say that Rupert Murdoch’s full-page apology for the “serious wrongdoing” caused by the News of the World in the British phone-hacking scandal comes too late. Likewise, the resignation on Friday of former editor Rebekah Brooks as chief executive of News International, News Corp’s UK subsidiary, looks tardy.
But News Corp should be more concerned about whether the 6m readers of the UK papers where Mr Murdoch’s letter will appear can trust the sender, given the winding route he took before delivering it.
Rupert Murdoch is not strictly the founder of News Corp – it started life as News Limited, the owner of an Adelaide newspaper, under his father – but he has embodied it for the past 59 years. The media empire is built around his gambles and opinions, with little regard to what others think.
News Corp’s tactical retreat from BSkyB
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat” (Sun Tzu)
News Corporation’s withdrawal of its bid for British Sky Broadcasting is the latest in a series of increasingly desperate tactical moves by Rupert Murdoch and his chieftains to limit the consequences of the UK phone-hacking scandal.
| About this blog | Blog guide |
John Gapper is an associate editor and the chief business commentator of the FT.
He has worked for the FT since 1987, covering labour relations, banking and the media. He is co-author, with Nicholas Denton, of All That Glitters, an account of the collapse of Barings in 1995.
Andrew Hill is an associate editor and the management editor of the FT. He is a former City editor, financial editor, comment and analysis editor, New York bureau chief, foreign news editor and correspondent in Brussels and Milan.
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