Dipping below the radar

The word Radar … Radio Detection and Ranging … was coined by the Americans. Pity nobody shared it with US company News Corp. It has become self-evident that the Murdoch Empire did not have in place anything approaching a crisis management plan to deal with the fallout from the phone hacking scandal, which could still engulf the corporation. Leaving aside the issues of corporate governance, although the shareholders probably won't, it is extraordinary that seemingly nobody in the company was using radar to scan the horizon for potential incoming. After all, hacking is hardly new.

Perhaps even more extraordinary is that a media conglomerate seemed very unsure about how to deal with the media when the crisis broke. As we have pointed out before, summarily sacking 200 journalists who had nothing to do with the hacking does nothing to endear you to the Fourth Estate. There seemed to have been no joined up thinking. Do we appear before the Select Committee or stay away? How do we deal with the BSkyB bid? What are the key messages? Surely, it wasn’t just us who knew nothing about it?

A hacking good crisis

Maybe more of a Sun headline than that of a News of the World (NotW) lead, but after 168 years of exposures what more fitting end could there be for a paper dedicated to making the news? But is it the end? The Murdoch business machine is not going to easily let the circulation figures for NotW be lost and the rumours of a Sunday Sun seem to indicate the direction they are thinking of taking.

So post crisis planning and turnaround may already be well advanced and perhaps the only question left to answer is how to long to mourn the News of the World before launching its successor.