Northeastern finance professor Harlan Platt says Murdoch is making the right moves in response to the hacking scandal, but the saga has probably not fully played out.

News Cor­po­ra­tion, the world’s second largest media con­glom­erate, and its CEO, media mogul Rupert Mur­doch, have been plagued by scandal since it was revealed that jour­nal­ists at the company’s British tabloid, News of the World, had hacked into voice­mail accounts belonging to celebri­ties, politi­cians, crime vic­tims and other public fig­ures. Harlan Platt, a finance pro­fessor in Northeastern’s Col­lege of Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion who spe­cial­izes in crisis response, says a com­pany needs to take imme­diate and delib­erate action if it hopes to sur­vive a major scandal.

In the event of a major crisis or scandal, what does a com­pany need to keep in mind in order to weather the storm?

The worst thing to do in a busi­ness crisis is to hide the evi­dence or stick your head in the sand. News Corp. appears to have done both since the offending inci­dents took place. Once the story broke, how­ever, News Corp. has behaved according to form. Offending par­ties were fired or dis­missed; Mur­doch deliv­ered a mea culpa speech; and the board of direc­tors issued sup­porting com­ments. There’s little more they can do other than to wait and hope that time heals the wounds, but I sug­gest News Corp. replaces Rebekah Brooks, the former chief exec­u­tive of News Inter­na­tional, with a well-​​known indi­vidual famous for his or her integrity.

Why is it impor­tant for a cor­po­ra­tion to take pro-​​active steps in its response to a crisis?

In the world we live in today, it is very dif­fi­cult to per­ma­nently hide any­thing — every­thing comes out. If you don’t believe that, talk to Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, or all sorts of com­pa­nies that have had problems. First and fore­most, a com­pany needs to be careful and spend some time and energy to be cer­tain that it under­stands pre­cisely what is going wrong. The one thing that it does not want to do is make a rev­e­la­tion and then come back two weeks later with another rev­e­la­tion. You want to put this thing behind you and get on with what­ever it is you do​.It is impor­tant to adopt an aggres­sive strategy in order to take con­trol of the problem. You want to demon­strate that the barrel is not rotten, but rather there were just some rotten apples in it.

Will this crisis even­tu­ally fade away for Rupert Mur­doch and News Corp?

In the case of Mur­doch, I don’t think this blows away. This is a problem that is now six years old and it’s one that a con­tin­uing suc­ces­sion of man­agers has brushed aside. In other words, it has had a long time to fester. Now that things have come out, it’s very clear that what News Corp did is quite nasty. Given that assess­ment, the next thing they need to do is deter­mine who’s going to pay the price. It looks to me that Mur­doch is swinging a very broad ax: any­body remotely con­nected to this trav­esty is being cut down, prob­ably wisely. The last step is to appeal to the public for for­give­ness and under­standing. You don’t always get it, but that’s the hope. If that doesn’t work, then Mur­doch him­self will have to go.