Sure, Rupert Murdoch may have seemed out of it and doddering during his testimony about the phone-hacking scandal that threatens his British (and possibly American) media empire, but maybe that's the point. His biographer Michael Wolff made the point last night on Countdown With Keith Olbermann that Murdoch looked frail and one couldn't help but feel some sympathy for this 80-year-old billionaire media mogul whose, as one critic complained, "Bill O’Reilly-ed, Glenn Beck-ed Fox News has done a great deal to coarsen the political discourse."
While shareholders found the testimony "painful to watch" because Murdoch seemed so old, stock analysts were pleased with his and his son James' performances, telling the NY Times, "This was the best day these guys have had in a really long time. No shoe dropped, no smoking gun was found, it all sort of sounded kind of contained." Internally, News Corp. executives were somewhat relieved, with saying, "No one is despondent, no one thinks this went poorly... I wouldn’t bet against those two." And some are suggesting that Rupert Murdoch's playing dumb gambit was echoing legendary mobster Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, who faked mental illness.
The Guardian has a closer look at the pair's testimony, which seemed very choreographed, what with Rupert's statement about this being the "most humble day" of his life: "Only once did Murdoch Sr stray from the pacific script, when he snarled against 'all our competitors trying to build up this hysteria'. But he soon compensated with two extra PR gambits. He recalled his father as a heroic journalist, who had exposed the truth about Gallipoli (though cynics say Sir Keith fixed the evidence), and then he made a brilliant grab for the friendship of the committee by recommending Singapore's approach to clean politics, which would involve paying MPs $1m a year. They laughed. He smiled. That's PR."
And then there was the shaving cream pie-and-ensuing slap seen—in slow-motion, on loop—around the world, when a prankster hit Murdoch with a pie and his much-younger wife Wendi leaped to his defense. As New York's Gabriel Sherman said on the Today Show, it was great PR, "It changed the entire narrative of the hearing."
