In the Financial Times, a columnist writes that the Murdoch family won this round.
For connoisseurs of management, and moguls in particular, though, the proceedings offered a master class in crisis management. James Murdoch was good, if a little reedy, wordy and over-drilled by his lawyers. He did all the necessary blocking and tackling to get through a tricky afternoon. His father, though, was magnificent, initially as terse as an outback farmer, but slowly unveiling the lethal charm even his rivals describe as mesmeric. He may have been spinning, but it didn’t sound that way. …
The MPs did their best to challenge him, but they were up against a man who has built his company over 57 years, who employs 52,000 people around the world, who broke the British print unions, barged into US network television, and gave us Titanic and Avatar. … At times the Murdochs addressed the MPs as if they were a slightly dim MBA class. …
Defending his son’s handling of the scandal, Mr Murdoch said that in any given week James had to spend “a day in Munich, a day at Sky Italia where he had a particularly difficult situation, and a particularly tricky competitor, if I might say so”, a sly dig at Silvio Berlusconi. While the MPs pettifogged, he implied, the Murdochs ran the world.
