It may too early to call the outcome of the British election [next Thursday] and the Sun King, Rupert Murdoch, may still see the Conservatives, who he backs, back into power, but this piece "Murdoch's election blues" from Business Spectator shows the way the man "behaves".
"If you thought Gordon Brown was having a bad election, spare some sympathy for Rupert Murdoch. After, you know, practically winning the election for John Major and the Conservatives back in 1992, and then giving Labour and Blair a massive leg-up in 1997, he's having a dog of a 2010 in terms of the wielding of political influence.
It seems Rupert was convinced by son James, who was convinced by former Sun editor and Murdoch clan confidant Rebekah Brooks (nee Wade), that his UK newspapers should support David Cameron, Britain's Conservative party candidate for prime minister.
"This took some doing," says Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff on Newser, "because Murdoch had become a good friend and pretty loyal supporter of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
But since the The Sun came out for the Tories the party has seen its poll rating drop from 41 per cent to 33 per cent, prompting the Financial Times to begin charting Cameron’s downward movement under the inevitable headline “It’s The Sun Wot Lost it”.
And when Lib-Dem candidate Nick Clegg emerged as the underdog alternative to Labour last week, the Murdoch papers embarked upon what Wolff described as "a full-scale attack on Clegg with hardly any pretence other than to help Cameron".
And then, last week, The Independent ran a front page with the headline “Rupert Murdoch will not decide the outcome of the election. You will.”
Such effrontery triggered what Wolff has described as "a coming-apart-at-the-seams scenario", in which Wade/Brooks and James Murdoch "stormed over to The Independent, breached its security systems, barged into the offices of the (paper's) editor-in-chief and top executive, Simon Kelner, and commenced, in Brit-speak, a giant row."
Their goal, says Wolff, was to put forward "that newspaper publishers don’t slag off other newspaper publishers in polite Britain," least of all the Murdochs. But they then went and undermined their argument, adds Wolff in a later Newser post, by "threatening to investigate Evgeny Lebedev, the son of The Independent’s new owner, Russian businessman, Alexander Lebedev (also the owner of the Evening Standard)."
"If you thought Gordon Brown was having a bad election, spare some sympathy for Rupert Murdoch. After, you know, practically winning the election for John Major and the Conservatives back in 1992, and then giving Labour and Blair a massive leg-up in 1997, he's having a dog of a 2010 in terms of the wielding of political influence.
It seems Rupert was convinced by son James, who was convinced by former Sun editor and Murdoch clan confidant Rebekah Brooks (nee Wade), that his UK newspapers should support David Cameron, Britain's Conservative party candidate for prime minister.
"This took some doing," says Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff on Newser, "because Murdoch had become a good friend and pretty loyal supporter of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
But since the The Sun came out for the Tories the party has seen its poll rating drop from 41 per cent to 33 per cent, prompting the Financial Times to begin charting Cameron’s downward movement under the inevitable headline “It’s The Sun Wot Lost it”.
And when Lib-Dem candidate Nick Clegg emerged as the underdog alternative to Labour last week, the Murdoch papers embarked upon what Wolff described as "a full-scale attack on Clegg with hardly any pretence other than to help Cameron".
And then, last week, The Independent ran a front page with the headline “Rupert Murdoch will not decide the outcome of the election. You will.”
Such effrontery triggered what Wolff has described as "a coming-apart-at-the-seams scenario", in which Wade/Brooks and James Murdoch "stormed over to The Independent, breached its security systems, barged into the offices of the (paper's) editor-in-chief and top executive, Simon Kelner, and commenced, in Brit-speak, a giant row."
Their goal, says Wolff, was to put forward "that newspaper publishers don’t slag off other newspaper publishers in polite Britain," least of all the Murdochs. But they then went and undermined their argument, adds Wolff in a later Newser post, by "threatening to investigate Evgeny Lebedev, the son of The Independent’s new owner, Russian businessman, Alexander Lebedev (also the owner of the Evening Standard)."
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