Rupert Murdoch: News Corp's Great Dictator on the Brink

By Michael Wolff, Guardian UK

22 October 11

He was as combative, up against it and past his prime as 2011's other fallen tyrants. This was likely his last shareholders' meeting.

nder 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.

On this basic issue, push could not have come more to shove than at Friday's meeting. The fundamental sham of a public company - one run first and foremost by and for the Murdoch family, and countenanced by one of the famous quiescent corporate boards in American business - was being challenged by long-oppressed but newly galvanised shareholders.

It was a recognisable Murdoch in the midst of it all - as combative, determined, up against it and past his prime as the year's other fallen dictators. His hearing is shot and he won't admit it; thus he somehow seems to answer off-point (his handlers are allowed to mention his hearing issues, but there is a lot of prepping so that he can anticipate the questions). His mind wanders and he has to forcibly refocus; hence his pauses. But he remains sharp as a tack when he feels impatient or personally under fire.

Stephen Mayne, his long-time Australian gadfly antagonist, played his part, and Murdoch seemed almost relieved to play his. They've been doing this for years. Of course, there was Tom Watson, the British MP, whom Murdoch seemed to tolerate - if just barely - as an obvious publicity-seeker. And the various others whom he surely believed he had effectively dismissed, both by his own tartness and by closing down the meeting early.

In some sense, it rather seemed that Murdoch just regarded this as shareholders - those dumb sons-of-bitches - doing what shareholders always do: complain into the wind. Just a little more so, with a little more security, with the company having to retreat to a fortified room behind the Fox gates (rather than the usual junky theater in mid-town Manhattan where they ordinarily conduct the meeting) - and with Murdoch himself having to offer a bit more self-justification than he might be used to.

There was nothing really to indicate Murdoch might suspect that more had changed this year than at any time in the past, that his company would not be able to run as a private entity any more, that the forces set in motion would mount, not subside, and that, likely, this would be the last annual meeting over which he would preside.