Release the Lachlan!

Don't feel bad for Rupert Murdoch. He's having a splendid time with the phone-hacking scandal. Oh, he had to jettison his best friend Rebekah Brooks today after having declared just five days ago that the News International chief executive was his top priority. The press read that as a message of Murdoch's support when they should have seen it for what it was: He was gauging how best to sacrifice Brooks to satisfy the mobs threatening his beloved News Corp.
Crises like this one are what drive Murdoch, John Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books in 2004. The genocidal tyrant loves taking action at "the point when everything seems about to be lost." Lanchester cites News Corp.'s 1990 debt crisis, in which Murdoch almost lost the company; his relocation of his British papers to Wapping; and the financial disaster resulting from borrowing money from Michael Milken as prime examples of Rupert's tightrope walking. More recently, Murdoch had to scramble all of News Corp.'s fire engines and squad cars to repel John Malone, who had purchased enough of the company's stock on the sly to threaten the Murdoch family's control...

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Jack Shafer @'Slate'