The New York Daily News’ Paul Colford reports on yesterday’s comments by NewsCorp chair Rupert Murdoch about why Judith Regan simply had to be let go. “She wasn’t for us,” he said, “She turned out not a team player, and that’s putting it mildly.” Interviewed at “Media Summit New York,” held at McGraw-Hill‘s headquarters, Murdoch recalled that he signed off on Regan’s OJ Simpson project, as long as payment would go only to the ex-jock’s kids. “I said [to Regan], ‘If it really reads like a confession, he gets no money,'” Murdoch said. “It’s my fault. I should have been closer to it.”
That’s because he “lost touch” with the project and learned about the public outcry at his ranch in Australia. But since he greenlit the project, that wasn’t why he okayed Regan’s firing: it was the Mickey Mantle book, which Murdoch called a “pseudo, pornographic thing.” Said Murdoch, “I thought, oh God, we don’t want to go through this again. Just cancel that book.” Others can, and will, point out the irony of Murdoch – a longtime peddler in tabloid news – calling Peter Golenblock‘s fictional memoir akin to pornography, but at least now there are on-the-record comments from the head guy…