What Story Is the Murdoch Story?

By Marty Kaplan, Huffpost.com

No wonder Rupert Murdoch felt compelled to interrupt his son at the top of his first answer to say, "This is the most humble day of my life." That was the frame his team had planned, not some "what did you know, and when did you know it?" storyline that the committee wanted to pursue. It would have spoiled everything to let Watergate frame the day, and not King Lear. But to my ear, Murdoch's intervention was one odd note off. Why "humble," and not "humbling"? "Humbling" would have had Murdoch acceding to forces beyond his control, would have him admitting to past arrogance, would have conveyed the sting of just deserts. Declaring it "the most humble day of my life" was too on-the-nose, the error of a neophyte screenwriter who tells rather than shows. It came across as a naked attempt to pick the day's sound bite, an image consultant's advice blurted out as a talking point. Interrupting his son in order to say it was an eruption of the very arrogance that he intended to declare extinct.