Murdoch’s Secret Weapon - Joel Klein an expert at cleaning up messes

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Murdoch’s Secret Weapon

Wife Wendi may have the ninja reflexes, but Rupert Murdoch’s new consigliere Joel Klein is an expert at cleaning up messes—from New York City schools to Microsoft’s antitrust case.
by Lloyd Grove | July 21, 2011 1:51 AM EDT

His reflexes aren’t as quick as Wendi Deng Murdoch’s. He just sat there, poker-faced, as the madcap pie-thrower set upon his boss. But Joel Klein is Rupert Murdoch’s secret weapon in the battle to restore News Corp. to its former glory.
The 64-year-old Klein, his balding pate housing a bulky brain, was a gloomy, dark-suited apparition sitting behind 80-year-old Rupert and his 38-year-old son James, just to the right of Rupert’s ninja wife, in Tuesday’s televised Parliamentary hearings on the phone-hacking and police-bribery scandal plaguing News International, News Corp.’s British newspaper division.
Wendi had already uncorked her now-famous hook by the time Klein had roused himself to his full 5-foot-9 height and calmly surveyed the situation.

Getting in the middle of another public dustup was the last thing on his agenda when he joined Murdoch’s media empire last November as a $2 million-a-year executive vice president, leaving his flap-prone post as chancellor of New York City’s school system to sit on News Corp.’s board of directors and advise the company’s entry into the for-profit education market. Klein is nothing if not savvy in the ways of big media companies; his wife, Nicole Seligman, is chief counsel for the Sony Corp.

“He’s the last man standing,” says blue-chip Washington lawyer Jamie Gorelick, who worked closely with Klein both in the Clinton White House counsel’s office and at the Justice Department, where she was deputy attorney general and Klein was chief of the antitrust division. “He’d left this crossfire of running the New York public schools for what presumably was going to be a nice, quiet entrepreneurial business. I don’t think he was expecting a cushy corporate sinecure. I think he was expecting to use some of the things he’d learned for some of the businesses surrounding education to offer some investments to News Corp.—and not be at the center of a major controversy.”
Today he is Murdoch’s consigliere, the point man overseeing the internal investigation of the scandals at the now-defunct News of the World and possibly other News Corp. papers, as well as supervising the company’s cooperation with British and American law enforcement authorities.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/21/joel-klein-is-rupert-murdoch-s-secret-weapon-at-news-corp.html