Rupert Murdoch and his confederates probably thought they really were going to get away with it — that they could ride out the storm, that it would surely die down in a day or two, that Judith Regan's interview with the loathsome O.J. Simpson was maybe going to be a sweeps-month ratings smash for Fox anyway, regardless of the clamor.

And so for days they sat on their thumbs, with Murdoch in a deep black hidey hole, in the face of a tidal wave of public revulsion — as Fox affiliates left and right announced their refusal to air the interview, as booksellers declared they would not stock the companion O.J. tome, as advertisers started fleeing for their good reputations against the onslaught of Fox's own newsmen angrily rising up to demand boycotts.

Finally, Murdoch had to concede the O.J. project to be "ill-considered" — as Monday he pulled the plug on the book and TV extravaganza. But in dismissing Regan's whole revolting plan — the one she hailed as a statement in solidarity with all battered women — as "ill-considered," Murdoch was extraordinarily gentle. This was, after all, one of the worst single ideas in the modern history of the popular entertainments.

What kind of utterly soulless corporate culture thinks up something like this in the first place? What kind of creepy mold grows in the petri dish that is Fox that someone could even imagine for a minute it was a good idea to pay O.J. Simpson several million dollars to discuss how he might have sliced his wife's head off? How many levels of bonehead management had to sign off on a project that so grotesquely affronted the simple human decencies?

Ah, tomorrow's another day. There are plenty of other grubby ideas out there, and publisher Regan, queen of the bottom-feeders, will surely soon find one that suits her, along with Murdoch's bottom line. As for Simpson, that's it for his TV show and that's it for his book, now that Murdoch & Co. have felt the wrath of an outraged American public.