June 12, 2013 

'How To Read The Tea Leaves'

From The Hollywood Reporter — For much of the first half of 2012, Rupert Murdoch struggled with a decision he knew would affect his legacy as a media mogul: to split or not to split the far-flung entertainment and publishing empire he had built for six decades.

Investors, analysts, bankers and some of his own executives repeatedly had pitched the idea as a way to unlock the value of Murdoch's TV and film assets without the drag of his cherished but more challenged newspaper businesses. After the 2011 phone-hacking scandal at his U.K. papers, which the mogul called "the most humbling [experience] of my career," voices grew louder. But Murdoch, 82, wasn't ready to chop up a family business he grew from an Adelaide, Australia, paper he inherited from his father into a conglomerate with a market capitalization of about $75 billion — especially when critics would link it to the scandal.

Then, after revisiting the idea during a May 2012 visit to his ranch in Carmel, Calif. — sources say News Corp. president, COO and deputy chairman Chase Carey and CFO David DeVoe were key advocates — Murdoch finally changed his mind.