Rupert Murdoch rolls the dice at News Corp.

Like him or loathe him, Rupert Murdoch is the last of the great media swashbucklers, a throwback to the pirates, cutthroats and visionaries who used to run the business before it was engulfed and devoured by giant risk-averse corporate behemoths. The earthquake that rocked News Corp. this week was a typical Murdoch seismic event. As one of his top executives once told me: "Rupert is a gambler. He tolerates noble failure more than complacency."

More than anything else, that maxim seems to best explain the dramatic moves Murdoch made Thursday. Before his longtime No. 2 man Peter Chernin had finished cleaning out his desk, Murdoch boldly revamped his company's executive superstructure. There were many moves in Rupert's chess game, but the key ones were all about Murdoch's lucrative but endangered profit center: the Fox TV business. He essentially has taken three executives who had great success propelling Fox film divisions and installed them in positions of power, running the TV wing of the empire.

20th Century Fox Co-Chairmen Jim Gianopulos and Tom Rothman, who've presided over the most disciplined and profitable movie studio of the past decade, will now also oversee TV production along with a host of Chernin's former duties, most crucially much of News Corp.'s new media ventures. This includes online media ventures such as Hulu that Chernin had practically willed into existence when most established media companies were still obsessed with suing YouTube and keeping their most valued programming off the Internet.

I've been tough on them over the past year, but giving Rothman and Gianopulos more clout was a no-brainer -- they've earned it. Murdoch's most unorthodox move is the promotion of Peter Rice, until now the head of the Fox Searchlight specialty film division, who will run the Fox TV network. Hugely successful as a specialty division czar, having made or acquired such hits as "Sideways," "Napoleon Dynamite," "Little Miss Sunshine," "Juno" and this year's Oscar winner, "Slumdog Millionaire," Rice has always been Rupert's fair-haired boy. For a man whose relationships with his own sons have blown hot and cold, with the offspring often chafing under their father's rule, Rice has been the good, dutiful son, his relations with Rupert unburdened by blood relations.