According to the Daily Beast, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch is delighted by the personal and financial travails of Sumner Redstone. For years, Redstone, the majority owner of media empires CBS and Viacom, had been building up his reputation as a rival to Murdoch. Now that his marriage has crumbled and he’s facing a cash crunch at his holding company National Amusements, Murdoch is delighting in chronicling every last bump in the road. “Rupert’s going to run a story on him [in the Post] every day,” an executive told the Beast. Just yesterday they framed Redstone’s quest to refinance loans with 50 different banks as a desperate, fruitless one (and they made a funny picture of him chasing butterflies), even though it’s now looking like he’ll succeed.
But the Beast also hints that there might soon be more to write about for Rupert’s tabloid: There seem to be multiple parties involved in Sumner’s divorce from wife Paula. Actually, what writer Kim Masters specifically said was “[Sumner] appears to have had enough long-term polygamous entanglements to prepare him for membership in the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter-day Saints.” But anyway! All of this bad news for Sumner makes us wonder about all those pot deliveries to Viacom we read about in the Observer today. Were they going to the top office?
The Buzzards Are Circling Around Sumner Redstone [Daily Beast]
SUMNER SQUEEZE [NYP]
