Richard Reeves: I Missed My Chance to Pee on Rupert Murdoch

[marmar]

from truthdig:




I Missed My Chance to Pee on Rupert Murdoch

Posted on Jul 13, 2011
By Richard Reeves


NEW YORK—I first met Rupert Murdoch at the urinal in the men’s room. It was 1976 in an office building somewhere in Manhattan. We were both about to go into a meeting about the fate of New York magazine, then a wild sort of publication staffed with street people—the people put on the street by the folding of the New York Herald Tribune.

The meeting was at a long table of directors, lawyers, financial people and a couple of old Trib scribblers like me. It was quickly apparent that the fix was in, that Murdoch had already won over a majority of the money people on the board, and he was going to leave the room the owner of the magazine we had made. Like many of us—Ken Auletta, Gail Sheehy, Pete Hamill, Gloria Steinem, Steve Brill, I can’t remember them all—I quit on the spot. We all knew we could not work for this man.

We the writers and the artists, Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard in particular, really had nothing to do with what was happening. It was about money. It was about Clay Felker, who created the magazine, and Murdoch, an Australian then—he changed his citizenship to own American television franchises like Fox—and what had been their friendship.

Murdoch, then, was a pariah in our business, scribbling and drawing. Except for The Australian, a serious paper there, the publications he owned were the equivalents of our National Enquirer plus. He had been thrown out of England when the powers that were there banded together to prevent this provincial from owning the crown jewels of British journalism, The Times of London and The Sunday Times. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/i_missed_my_chance_to_pee_on_rupert_murdoch_20110713/

[KoKo]

1. Ha...that's a good read about NY Magazine and what was done to it by Murdoch..

Let's keep hoping that Murdoch's empire is in it's last months. But, as we've seen, these people somehow manage to remain above the law and any kind of standard of human decency.