EDINBURGH, (Reuters) – Elisabeth Murdoch urged the media industry yesterday to embrace morality and reject her brother James’s mantra of profit at all costs, in a speech seen as an attempt to distance herself from the scandal that has tarnished the family name.
Addressing television executives, she said profit without purpose was a recipe for disaster and the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World tabloid – which has badly hurt her father Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire – showed the need for a rigorous set of values.
The comments from a woman who has powerful friends in the British establishment and the support of her PR husband Matthew Freud, are likely to be examined for whether she could one day run News Corp instead of her brothers whose chances have faded.
“News (Corp) is a company that is currently asking itself some very significant and difficult questions about how some behaviours fell so far short of its values,” she said in the annual television industry MacTaggart lecture.
“Personally I believe one of the biggest lessons of the past year has been the need for any organisation to discuss, affirm and institutionalise a rigorous set of values based on an explicit statement of purpose,” she said in remarks which drew applause.
Elisabeth Murdoch – a successful television producer who was overlooked for senior jobs at News Corp that went first to her brother Lachlan and then James – said a lack of morality could become a dangerous own goal for capitalism.
Rupert Murdoch last year closed the News of the World, which was owned by a News Corp unit, a m id public anger that its journalists had hacked into the voicemails of people from celebrities to victims of crime. A number of former executives have appeared in court over the case and the government set up a judicial inquiry into press standards.
“There’s only one way to look at this,” Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff told Reuters. “This is part of a strategic repositioning of Liz Murdoch within the media world, with the business world and within the family.”
The often humorous lecture delivered at the annual Edinburgh Television Festival came three years after James Murdoch used the same platform to confront a largely hostile audience with his vision for the industry.