Punch drunk love: There are some things from which even Wendi can’t protect Rupert

Wendi Murdoch slugged the wrong guy. While she has won worldwide admiration in the press for leaping to her feet without hesitation to defend her husband from a humiliating shaving cream pie attack, clearly the attacker was not the one doing the most to humiliate Murdoch. That, of course, would be Murdoch himself, who, in the course of his halting, uneven performance before a British parliamentary committee yesterday, only succeeded in demonstrating that a management change is long overdue at News International, possibly the most influential media company in the world.

Sure, it’s tempting to say it was more humiliating for the anointed heir to the kingmaking top spot at News Corp., Murdoch’s son, James, to be caught on camera leaning away from the attack while his flyweight stepmom connected with her roundhouse. And it would be even more correct to say that James’s convoluted answers to questions about how the company handled the phone hacking scandal as it became revealed almost certainly disqualify him from further nepotism-assisted ascendancy within the company his father built.

But the hearing succeeded in clearly revealing that the company’s deep cultural flaws flowed directly from Rupert himself. His response that he was not ultimately responsible for the apparently widespread criminality and absence of ethics within the company said it all. What happened to the old notion that the buck stopped with the man at the top? Murdoch was willing to mouth words of apology and feigned humility but then moments later reveal his view that the public reaction to the phone hacking scandal was overwrought, a media feeding frenzy of the type he made a career both fostering and profiting from.

Son James’s responses to questions about who approved pay-offs to injured parties were also telling, of course. He noted that, because the amounts were comparatively low given the great size of the media conglomerate, they would never have come to the attention of top management like himself or his father. The fact that settlements concerning clear evidence of the worst kind of breaches of journalistic ethics wouldn’t have come to the attention of people at the top is evidence of either a tacit or explicit acceptance of bad behavior, a failure of checks, or gross incompetence. (Not that all of the above is not also possible.)

After the big show of the hearings a more damning development emerged Wednesday morning with the release of the findings of the Parliament’s all-party Home Affairs Committee which concluded — in one of the least shocking findings in recent memory — that News International "deliberately" tried to impede British police investigations into the phone hacking scandal. And that in turn was soon over-taken by the spectacle of British Prime Minister David Cameron defending himself in front of a special session of Parliament for having hired as his principal spokesperson one of the central actors in this sleazy affair while hobnobbing with others from the News Corp. hierarchy.

Cameron will likely survive this embarrassment. He is guilty only of seeking to advance his career by the same means of his predecessors, hitching his wagon to one of the most powerful media empires in the world. Murdoch should not be as fortunate. During yesterday’s testimony he made it even clearer that he had failed to protect the interests of the shareholders (not to mention the customers) of his company through some failing of either his character or that of his management approach or of his company writ large.

It is time for the old man to go — and that is a reality that even the nimble and courageous Wendi will not be able to swat away.