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May 10 2007 3:03PM EDT

Today in Murdoch: Devilish Deals

To keep you up to speed on everybody's favorite media mogul:

•Rupert revealed yesterday that he had wanted to keep his Dow Jones bid quiet:

"It would have been our strong preference to negotiate our offer in a private setting, that was the manner in which we submitted it," he said in a statement at the start of the [News Corp earnings] call, which took place in New York. "But the news leaked last week, forcing all of us to deal with this in public."

This might help explain why Lehman Brothers analyst Craig Huber says he sees an 80 percent chance the bid will fail: as anybody in the M&A world will tell you, it's much harder to do a deal in the glare of publicity than it is when you're negotiating in secret. Especially when that publicity is unrelentingly negative.

•Rupert announced today that News Corp was going carbon neutral – an interesting move, considering his comments about "alleged global warming" only last month.

•Rupert decided to bring his brand of tabloid journalism to India, with a newspaper there called the Sun.

•Rupert cut the price of the New York Post back down to 25 cents, after raising it to 50 cents just weeks ago.

•Rupert decided that Roger Ailes should still get his bonus of 333,333 shares of News Corp stock for launching the Fox Business Channel in 2006, despite the fact that Ailes missed the deadline. With the stock currently trading a smidgen over $23 per share, the value of those shares today is a positively devilish $7,666,666.

(Related: the Congressional Black Caucus was accused of "dancing with the devil" when it did a deal with Ailes in March to televise a presidential debate on Fox News. Was that meant literally?)

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