Monday, December 18, 2006

We put the Corp in News Corp

Admittedly, this is a lazy post, due to infrastructure issues at SCTS headquarters (i.e. our pipes burst). So I'm going with the first thing I saw on Media Bistro this morning, the report of Judith Miller getting canned for poor judgement. Uh, no, not for publishing a book about OJ Simpson murdering his wife and friend written in an entirely new verb tense called "what if". It seems poor judgement applies only to third party hearsay about ethnic slurs.

From the NYT (I told you, lazy):

<Rupert Murdoch personally ordered the dismissal of Judith Regan, the publisher of a widely criticized O. J. Simpson book, after he heard reports of a heated conversation Ms. Regan had with a company lawyer on Friday that included comments that were deemed anti-Semitic, according to two people familiar with the News Corporation’s account of the firing.
Mark Jackson, a lawyer with HarperCollins, a division of the News Corporation that includes Ms. Regan’s imprint, reported the alleged comments from a phone conversation with Ms. Regan to Jane Friedman, HarperCollins’s president and chief executive.
“And then Jane called Rupert and Rupert said he won’t tolerate that kind of behavior,” said one of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity.>

Here's a brief list of the behavior Rupert Murdoch will tolerate, to be updated when the infrastructure stops falling down. Please add anything you can think of:

Tony Blair
FOX News
Payola
Censorship