When things begin to go awry they often recrudesce in a manner that’s often beyond the realm of one’s imagination. But then that’s how the wonky state of affairs herald their beginning coupled with other tremors that soon set the very tectonic plates in fast-paced motion that were once the cornerstone of an individual. Alas! Rupert Murdoch is caught up in a situation of sorts as he still strives to get himself released from the pangs of the NOTW (News of the World) scandal with the prestigious and much talked about BSky Bid slipping off his hands. Perhaps there was no way out as well with the dissent taking the entire House of Commons by storm.
Perhaps the media mogul Rupert Murdoch should mull over Mad Hatter’s words that wouldn’t sound that cockeyed at this point of time for this otherwise fictional character from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s adventures in Wonder Land’ makes a lot of sense at the hour of grave crisis, “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” phew! Gasping for breath out there? Sure but the fact remains that the mess certainly needs to be cleared away and this time that sloshing around wouldn’t be allowed for even Mr. Murdoch’s reportedly close aides Prime Minister David Cameron seems to be riding roughshod these days. But then a friend in need is a friend indeed, come on buddy, that’s an archaic axiom certainly not meant to be adhered to when you are being grilled incessantly by the opponents, the comrades belonging to the Labor Party perhaps thriving at the opportunity as they hurl those acerbic questions and remarks at the eighty-year old magnate who started off with one newspaper in Adelaide, Australia and was ranked as the 13th most powerful person in the world as per the Forbes’ list, the man who escalated the bequeathed empire to another level as he catered to his whetted appetite by driving through some well-known mergers & acquisitions.
168-year old ‘News of the World’ tabloid had to bid farewell to one and all as it had enough of stifling existence ever since the baton came in Rupert’s hands in 1984 with the newspaper drooling over sex scandals and thus earning the infamy of ‘Screws of the World’ but the practice of mushrooming on tittle-tattle continued with the same gusto for yes, it was considered as a venial act, who would mind it anyways? Perhaps this is the very notion that propelled Rupert and his men at the NOTW to venture into the no-man's land and barge into other people's privacy for let’s accept the harsh truth that we are inhabiting the planet at a time when prurience rules the roost and more so when the print media is vying with the electronic and digital media to attain that stature in terms of figures, revenue and most importantly popularity among the masses.
That fetish for the yellow media garnered not only eyeballs but also those impressive darn numbers as well with the ‘muck-dressing’ fetching around 2,812,005 copies being sold out daily till October 2010. The troupe was evidently headed towards an imminent disaster quite oblivious of it with the cruise having gone berserk and a mast that led to any direction whatsoever. For how else would you explain the jolt that was inflicted on the newspaper in 2006, that left those at the helm of affairs almost undeterred, when the NOTW royal editor Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, a private detective by profession were slapped with serious allegations of hacking voice messages of the members of the Royal British Family. That was just the tip of the iceberg for more skeletons were to follow soon tumbling out of cupboard and spilling those beans!
Prince William’s intentions of going for that portable editing suit from ITV’s Tom Bradby to the piped-down on goings of the actors Sienna Miller and Steve Coogan, football agent Sky Andrew and television host Chris Tarrant were those that were the prospective prey by the these scoop-gashing beasts. No wonder then that Murdoch Senior is at the centre of so many zingers being targeted at him with one parliamentarian describing him as a cancer on body politic. Ah! I guess how they would try to curb the spread of this pestilence.
Hedge funds had poured into the BSkyB shares as the investors didn’t have whiff of a hint that this bid would turn hostile in near future thus resulting into the arbitrageurs losing around 260 million pounds. Guess the ramifications would even be gross in times to come, and as a scribe punned at Rupert Murdoch having allowed a few lunatics to run the asylum, perhaps it’s time for to snap up those who could ail this imperia getting rid of the unwanted entropy that has crept into it before it culminates with the resounding words, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again”!!
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