Delusional, Thy Name is Rupert Murdoch

OPINION

Rupert Murdoch is looking and sounding like every day of his 80-or-so years, during testimony before a Parliamentary committee probing allegations of phone-hacking by his British newspapers.

Not only does the billionaire “media mogul” seem to be confused and somewhat incoherent, but he has also inexplicably washed his hands of any wrongdoing at his corporation.

Either Rupert Murdoch has become senile, or he truly does not know what is going on among his underlings in his media empire.

Either way, it speaks poorly of News Corp, and the way the company is run.

Murdoch, appearing next to his son James, gave vague answers to most questions and issued half-hearted apologies for phone-hacking and police-bribe payments (acts he claims he knew nothing about and would not have condoned if he had known).
To other questions, he would respond that he couldn’t remember.
He also claimed he was unaware of large payments made by his company to potential litigants.

Perhaps the most outrageous statement by Rupert Murdoch was that he was unaware of the hacking of child murder victim Milly Dowler only two weeks ago -- when he read about it in The Guardian newspaper.

Several times, James would intervene in an attempt to complete or expand on his father’s non-answers, but he was prevented from doing so by the committee, particularly Labour MP Tom Watson.

At one point, Watson wryly observed that is revealing in itself what he does not know and what executives chose not to tell him.
Perhaps the pie-attack was the only moment he seemed to come alive.