Investors Campaign To Oust Murdochs From News Corp

Hugh Pickens writes "Alan Mutter writes that the California Public Employees Retirement System, the nation's largest pension fund, has become the latest investor to say it would vote against the re-election of Rupert Murdoch and his sons to the company's board of directors, joining several other institutional investors opposed to the tenure of not only the Murdoch trio but also most of the rest of the leader's hand-picked board. 'The company appears to have devolved into a free-wheeling, cut-throat and paranoid culture that reached its logical conclusion in the phone-hacking scandal at The News of the World, where deceit and naked ambition trumped common decency, good judgment and even simple compliance with the law,' writes Mutter... Further proof of the anything-goes atmosphere at News Corp was supplied last week when the Guardian reported that ... the European edition of the Wall Street Journal evidently sold access to its news columns and created back-channel payment networks to lift the otherwise sagging circulation of the paper... 'It's not clear whether the outside shareholders have the votes to change anything at a corporation where Murdoch effectively controls 40% of the shares,' concludes Mutter, 'But adult supervision most certainly is in order, because News Corp. seems to be operating with only the sketchiest of business plans and no effective executive oversight of his many far-flung initiatives. '"

Comments

Oh I understand their business plan

[SlippyToad]

'But adult supervision most certainly is in order, because News Corp. seems to be operating with only the sketchiest of business plans and no effective executive oversight of his many far-flung initiatives

It's to terrorize a modern democracy into giving over control of our every institution to unelected morons with a bare-knuckled agenda of self-enrichment.

Fuck Fox News. Fuck Everyone Who Listens To Fox News. Fuck Everyone Who Opens Their Dumb Fuck Mouth On Fox News. Fox News Should Be Pulled Apart By Wild Weasels.

I've about had it with these vandals. Fucking freaks!

Tech news?

[grimmjeeper]

I know stories like this generate a lot of traffic but what does this have to do with tech news?

Re:I know Murdoch is crooked...

[trims]

Please. Public Pension systems are one of the last bastions of Good left in this country. And, I'm not talking about the pension system itself, I'm talking about some very, very responsible fund managers who run them (not just CALPers, but most state's public pension systems). These folks are paid significantly less than equivalent ones on Wall Street, and they put in a huge effort to get good returns for their funds. Part of that effort is to be more pro-active than a typical Wall Streeter, and not just game the system, but FIX the system.

So, you're strategy is "cut and run"? Where? Oh, to another company where the culture sucks so bad because the stockholders are sheep. The pension funds are right - they have to fight, since there's no where to move their money that isn't in some way corrupted by the current international "corporate culture standard".

There have been some major efforts by public pension systems (just in the past year, I can remember efforts from Louisiana, Wisconsin, New York, and even South Carolina) to reform the way companies are run. This has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with maximizing the pension's ROI - after all, that $100 million the board just paid the CEO comes right out of stockholder's pockets. Public pension systems are at the forefront of the reform movement, and it's all in very much self interest.

In the Murdoch's case, fighting to oust them can only HELP the ROI - NewsCorp is incurring massive losses (legal, circulation, etc.) directly due to the Murdoch-installed culture. Replace that culture with a more sane one, and the ROI goes back up.

It's not politics, folks, it's money. Pure self-interest, just it happens to be wielded for Good this time.

-Erik

Re:CALPERS

[datavirtue]

No, this is a good thing. Hopefully people wake up to this new form of democracy. Where if you don't act morally and for the benefit of employees, customers, and the earth then we pull our umpteen millions or billions out of your company now. Government has been dysfunctional for over thirty years in America. William Greider covered this in The Soul of Capitalism where he predicted this very thing. He said that people would start to act through their enormous pension funds to affect change in the world because government simply can't get it done, and it is easier to do this than to change government. Awesome. Get it done.