Scandal Splinters a Family Business

By DAVID CARR
NYT

The News Corporation, the global enterprise controlled by Rupert Murdoch, has a history of living by its own rules and operating beyond consequence. That ended last week.

Mr. Murdoch, long a spectral presence who made his plays on a chess board of his own making, was brought low before a committee of Parliament composed of people he could not have been bothered with three weeks ago.

In testimony last Tuesday, he appeared as a supplicant, a faltering one at that, who interrupted his son James in the opening moments of the hearing, not to correct him, but to tell the members of the committee how sorry he was.

He is very sorry. Sorry that one of his tabloids hacked into the voice mail of a 13-year-old murder victim. Sorry that the scandal threatens to derail his plans of succession. And sorry to find himself suddenly in the public stockade.

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