Judith Regan cut loose

by Jane Friedman. Those are the only facts we know—that her relationship with the HarperCollins division of NewsCorp is over, and that HarperCollins is taking over the very profitable Regan Books.

Eat the Press reports that it’s unclear if Regan has also been fired from NewsCorp. It doesn’t look that way, although Murdoch is certainly keeping her at arm’s length. My guess is that he’s not quite ready to let her go—she’s been a cash cow—but that the “ill-considered” O.J. project continued to reverberate inside his world in such a way that Regan had to be repudiated.

You can’t get more cynical than I am about the media and the public’s voracious voyeuristic appetite for the grotesque—particularly as we’re living in an era of almost incomprehensible horror, in which beheaders videotape their handiwork and broadcast it across the globe—but the term “shocks the conscience” was made for the O.J. project. Not only was the project offensive; Regan’s “explanation” of why she did it was equally offensive, because it was utterly implausible.

I still maintain that a culturally/socially comparable project in Britain would not have caused this kind of stir in Britain, where tabloid excess is considered first-rate entertainment, as I just mentioned here. In America, however, the Puritan spirit not only lives and breathes, it spits fire. (I’ve noted the trend for the last four or five years, and hope to explore this in depth…someday, when I get the time…because it’s central to my “infotainment rules” thesis.)

When it became public, the O.J. project stained everyone inside HarperCollins, offended everyone at Fox, and made NewsCorp look bad (yes: that’s possible). Curiously, Murdoch removed the stain from himself and NewsCorp rather easily, I thought. The talking heads gave him credit for pulling the plug. Fox got off, too.

Jane Friedman, however, works in a more rarefied atmosphere: the “publishing world.” Despite the fact that Publishers Weekly got behind her, Friedman was stained by the project. She approved it. Worse, she stained her employees with it, because, reportedly, she would brook no internal criticism about it while it was in process. She was called out on that unpardonable offense as soon as the scandal broke: HarperCollins started leaking like a sieve. Finally, she stained the authors who are associated with HarperCollins. In publishing, you really don’t want to do that: it’s bad for business. She stained the publishing world.

And the only remedy was to get rid of the proximate cause: Judith Regan. Actually, it’s a cheap way to remove “the problem” from the “publishing world,” where Regan is “an embarrassment,” as they say in polite society, and “everyone” loathes her anyway. Friedman even comes out ahead—she gets rid of a longtime thorn in her side, scores PR points (even if belatedly), and the profits from Regan Books’ coffers plump up her bottom line.

It’s surely not the last we’ve heard of Judith Regan, though. Stay tuned.