| About time Monday, November 20th, 2006 The big boss of the whole thing, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp., finally came out into the open yesterday because there was no longer anywhere for him to hide. Murdoch is smart enough to know what everybody knows, that there is no O.J. Simpson book unless he signs off on it, no Judith Regan interview with Simpson on the Fox television network, that this wasn't just on some shrill, grasping book publisher, it was on him. There is an expression for this in Hollywood, where Murdoch is such a top guy now. There is only one person at the studio who can green-light a project this big, and it is the head of the studio and that means Rupert Murdoch himself. Now he stops the book, "If I Did It," and stops Regan's television special. Murdoch stops a cockroach of a project not out of any sense of decency, but out of self-preservation, because in the last week or so he figured out that the stain of something like this wasn't just on Regan, it was on him, and wasn't going away anytime soon. Murdoch stops it because the mud he likes on other people ended up on him this time and he didn't like it. Here is what Murdoch said in a statement issued yesterday: "I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project." There are always splendid examples of people, famous or not, getting religion a little late in the church service. You will never find a better one than this. Still you want to say this to Murdoch: Now? Now it's an ill-considered project? When was it anything else? When was it anything besides something out of Murdoch's senior management to make the world a little dumber and a little lousier? Murdoch's statement goes on this way: "We are sorry for any pain this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson." Now. They're sorry now. But where was their conscience before this? You think Murdoch and senior management found out about this book last week when the first stories about it hit the newspapers and the rest of the media? Books don't get published like that, even when you have somebody like Regan telling you how noble it was all going to be, how she wanted all profits to go to O.J.'s children. They say Murdoch will lose a million dollars or so on the 400,000 copies of "If I Did It" that don't make it to the bookstores. And he will lose whatever the payout was to O.J. It is tipping money to the CEO of News Corp. The real cost here, to the sky, is to his reputation, even if he now wants the country to give him the game ball for calling the thing off. "It's amazing that it ever got this far," a publishing executive who knows all the players said yesterday. "[Regan] must have whipsawed anybody who got in her way." Now Murdoch says no to Regan, now he acts like this was some kind of outrage, because of the public's outrage over the past week, because of the outrage in this newspaper and other newspapers and even outrage from Murdoch's own news network. "Judith Regan was always the Teflon Don of publishing," the same publishing guy said to me yesterday. "But they finally got her, too." Regan has made too much money, from both good books and bad books, to be through in publishing. But she is through working for Murdoch, whatever anybody says. Maybe it doesn't happen today, or tomorrow, or even next week. But she's through. Because she has committed the one unforgivable sin in the world of somebody like Murdoch: She has made him look bad, not just in front of the whole country this time, but in front of the world. Regan never saw it playing out this way. In her mind, her self-obsessed view of things, she was going to walk away from this interview as the new Barbara Walters. She had gotten this "confession" out of O.J. and somehow didn't think people would notice, or care, that it was the same as going into business with him. Why would she think that way? She had always gotten her way and now she got her way with Murdoch and she would take all the heat on O.J. because she thought she was going to be bigger than ever. Then the only person who could stop her did. Murdoch didn't do it because a Fox affiliate in Green Bay wasn't going to put O.J. on television, didn't do it because Bill O'Reilly was mad at him, or because of his concern for the Brown and Goldman families or because some moral alarm finally sounded. He did it because the mud got him this time. So he killed a bad book and a bad television show. You know what you call that with Rupert Murdoch? A start. |