Two More Heads Roll at Newscorp

Rebckah Brooks and Les Hinton are the last to to exit:

Two key lieutenants in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire resigned Friday as a widening scandal involving illegal phone hacking by Murdoch’s British newspaper journalists continued to engulf his company.

Leslie “Les” Hinton, head of Dow Jones & Co., the division of Murdoch’s News Corp. that owns the Wall Street Journal, resigned late in the day, providing a bookend to the morning resignation of Rebekah Brooks, the executive in charge of the company’s British newspaper unit.

Hinton, who had been in Murdoch’s employ for more than 50 years, and Brooks are key figures in the still-unfolding scandal. Hinton oversaw News Corp.’s British newspapers when one of its papers, the News of the World, began to pry into the phone accounts of hundreds of British celebrities, politicians and ordinary citizens. Brooks was editor of the News of the World at the time and succeeded Hinton as chief of the British unit, News International.

Murdoch, and his family are out at Newscorp, they just don't know it yet.

Basically what is going on is, to paraphrase Norman Schwarzkopf, is that, "First we're going to cut it off, and then we're going to kill it."

We are seeing the systematic removal their support structure, and they will be removed from the running of the media conglomerate.