Monocolumn: Comedic Intervention Lets Murdoch Off The Hook
Monocolumn is Monocle’s daily bulletin of news and opinion. Catch up with previous editions here.
In the minutes after attention-seeking idiot Jonathan May-Bowles was scythed down by Wendi Murdoch’s undeniably impressive airborne forearm smash, commentary in the online grandstands united around a single proposition.
The consensus was that May-Bowles, otherwise known – largely, it has to be suspected, to himself – as comedian Jonnie Marbles, had done Rupert Murdoch an enormous favour, unhitching the beleaguered mogul from the hook and ensuring that the following morning’s newspapers, even the ones he didn’t own, would concentrate on this inane frivolity at the expense of the serious business being conducted by the House of Commons’ Culture, Media and Sport Committee.
This view was inevitably proved somewhat correct – it would take a truly flint-hearted editor to resist a picture of the by no means unattractive wife of a famous octogenarian billionaire launching herself at an assailant armed with a plate of shaving foam.
However, if anyone has had their blushes spared by May-Bowles’ gormless intervention, it is not Rupert Murdoch, but his inquisitors. Had May-Bowles chosen to spend his afternoon doing something more conducive to the common good, the resonant image of yesterday’s proceedings would have been one of business as usual: the elected representatives of the British people hopelessly cowed by a foreign tycoon who wouldn’t be entitled to cast a vote for them even if he felt it was necessary.
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By Andrew Mueller
Recent Articles By Caroline Ku 
Caroline is a regular contributor to PSFK. She studies graphic design at George Brown College in Toronto and is interning at PSFK's New York City office for the summer.
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