Rupert Murdoch is a very forgiving boss. He'll shrug off scandal, he'll laugh off journalistic crimes, he'll ignore breaches in social etiquette, he considers "ethics" to be a county outside London. But he does not like to be embarrassed in front of his friends or become a mockery to his colleagues on that Mister Burnsian level of power. The fact that he gave up all those ratings and all those book sales from Judith Regan's brainstorm, If I Did It, Here's How It Happened, means that Judith Regan embarrassed him greatly with her scheme to have OJ Simpson "confess" to the hypothetical murders of his children's mother and her friend.
Her disturbed and disturbingly cynical screed in the Drudge Report in which the very savvy editor claimed she was on the side of Righteousness and that she didn't pay OJ Simpson for the work was a laughable embarrassment. Yesterday's supposition that she may have actually concocted the book with her ex-lover the "ghostwriter" may also have led to Murdoch's decision to yank the book and proposed two-night television specials.
We're sure OJ Simpson will get his "kill fee" (money paid when a studio pulls out of a project.
But it doesn't look good for Regan. And on the surface, it doesn't look good for Geraldo Rivera, whose syndicated television show is hanging on by a thread or two, and whose loud preenings of outrage about the book and infomercial certainly embarrassed his Boss and exposed a hypocrisy that only begins with his (Geraldo's) blood-spattered exploitation of the Simpson murders and survivors that kept him in mustache wax for so long (Bill O'Reilly, the other loudmouth within Fox, is a success; as in his perverted sex scandal, he gets a pass).
We say on the surface because Fox insiders tell us to look to Roger Ailes-- who leads the Fox News and Fox TV stations, but does not run the Fox Television Network (not yet)-- as the one stirring up rebellion within the organization (some of his Fox stations were refusing to air the murder specials) and may have given Geraldo and O'Reilly the greenlight to attack their own corporation and very understanding Boss.