Russia ultimately won the Second World War thanks to its unique ability to sustain massive losses – and the same could be true for Rupert Murdoch and News Corp.
A huge legal settlement with rebel US shareholders yesterday added yet further to News Corp’s massive phone-hacking bill .
They accused the News Corp board of allowing Rupert to “siphon value away from News Corp and its shareholders for the benefit of Murdoch, his family and his friends”.
They also claimed the board had been negligent in the way it dealt with the hacking scandal.
The $139m settlement of that suit adds to the claimed $340m of costs incurred as a result of the hacking scandal to February this year.
Murdoch’s scorched earth policy since the hacking scandal has been as ruthless as it has been effective and something that few other media companies in the world could have afforded to engage in.
Since the July 2011 revelation that the News of the World had hacked the voicemail messages of Milly Dowler Murdoch has closed the biggest selling Sunday newspaper in Britain, the News of the World (sacking more than 200 staff) and has engaged in a forensic audit of his surviving redtop title – The Sun – which is unprecedented in UK corporate history.
The News Corp Management and Standards Committee’s internal purge has seen at least 23 Sun journalists arrested.
Whatever it costs, Murdoch is determined to win out in the long run by retreating as far as he has to and dynamiting his own assets along the way.
Back in July 2011, there was giddy moment for the Murdoch-haters when it looked like The Guardian’s revelations around phone-hacking had dealt him a fatal blow.
His willingness and capacity to absorb financial losses since then in order to salvage his newspaper empire shows that he is determined to win the long war.
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