Sunday, November 30, 2008

Wolff: Murdoch ‘absolutely despises’ O’Reilly

It's extraordinary, but even Rupert Murdoch appears to be embarrassed by Fox News.

In Michael Wolff’s forthcoming biography of Rupert Murdoch, “The Man Who Owns The News,” the author writes that the media mogul has seemed to turn away lately from his cable news network, and isn’t fond its top-rated personality, Bill O’Reilly.

“It is not just Murdoch (and everybody else at News Corp.’s highest levels) who absolutely despises Bill O’Reilly, the bullying, mean-spirited, and hugely successful evening commentator,” Wolff wrote, “but [Fox News chief executive] Roger Ailes himself who loathes him. Success, however, has cemented everyone to each other."

“The embarrassment can no longer be missed,” Wolff wrote, in another section of the book. “He mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it. He barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not that he would give Fox up—because the money is the money; success trumps all—in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.”
Wolff describes Murdoch as not wanting News Corp. to be defined by Fox News. And so last year’s purchase of the Wall Street Journal, he wrote, “was in no small way about wanting to trade the illiberal—the belligerent, the vulgar, the loud, the menacing the unsubtle—for the better-heeled, the more magnanimous, the further nuanced.”
Ah, Rupert hopes not to be defined by the crap by which he has made his fortune.

It reminds me of that phrase by Quentin Crisp. "There's no point working in a pig farm for twenty years whilst saying, 'I want to be a ballerina"! After twenty years pigs are your style".

Live with it Rupert, Bill O'Reilly - that awful appalling man who even you appear to be embarrassed by - is the face of Fox, and Fox is your legacy. It's what you've given to the world.

Lap it up....

Click title for full article.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I always said Murdoch was a smart man.

daveawayfromhome said...

If you're going to put money ahead of integrity, decency, or even simple journalistic standards, then you get what you asked for.

Kel said...

And that moron O'Reilly is the natural consequence of that business plan.