Rupert Murdoch withdraws NY Newsday bid
May 10th, 2008
By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor
News Corp’s decision to walk away from Newsday is an unexpected twist in the three-way bidding war for the paper. Murdoch and Tribune Co Chief Executive Sam Zell had an agreement in principle to sell the paper to News Corp, with Tribune retaining a small stake to create a way to defer large capital gains taxes that a total sale would incur.
As recently as three days ago, Murdoch said on a conference call with investors to discuss News Corp’s quarterly financial results that the deal with Zell was nearly done.
“I don’t think Cablevision will prevail,” Murdoch said, responding to a question about why he has not raised his bid, which he characterized as “competitively priced.”
I find newspapers interesting; Rupert Murdoch, very interesting:
Murdoch is not prone to the whining and woe-is-meism that so many other newspapermen practice. He’s willing to invest in his properties. He’s willing to lose money. For a 77-year-old man, it’s almost as if he has begun the first year of a 20-year plan to modernize his media portfolio, so he’s a real optimist.
Remember when he started the Fox Television Network? Everybody in the country said, oh, there are room for three conventional networks. And when he started Fox News Channel, people said, oh, there’s really only room for CNN. There can’t possibly be room for another.
And time and again, he goes in and he defies the so-called experts because he’s a force of creative destruction.
He will go in and he will steal anybody’s bacon. And he generally steals it honestly by competing, and for that you really have to admire him.
That’s Slate’s Jack Shafer talking. Here he speaks to Murdoch’s conservative reputation:
I think you’re making a mistake when you call Rupert Murdoch a conservative. He is a political opportunist. If you take a look and see who he supported in the most recent Australian election, it was not the conservative. It was the liberal.
Likewise, in the United Kingdom, Murdoch eventually put all the support of his daily newspapers there behind Tony Blair. […]
He likes to back a winner. He likes to have access. He threw a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s reelection bid for the Senate in 2006. This is a mistake people make all the time about Rupert Murdoch, the idea that he is some sort of conservative ideologue who has come to the United States to, I don’t know, guarantee the Reagan restoration, when all he really is, is a political pragmatist.
RELATED: Rupert’s launching an old-fashioned newspaper war against The New York Times.
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Rupert Murdoch, Newspapers, Journalism, Wall Street, Conservatives, Business, Money/Finance, As Yet Unassigned. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
