So Seth got me thinking this morning (it happens) in his succinct post "How to write for a billionaire."
With Rubert Murdoch's competitor-scaring bid for Dow Jones so high and so lacking in the normal economics of deal-making being considered by the controlling Bancroft family, it's worth considering that Murdoch's purchase of the esteemed Journal may actually be *a good thing* for American journalism.
“I’m sometimes frustrated by the long stories,” Murdoch says about the Wall Street Journal.
Yes, quite. So we might expect that to change.
Or, as Murdoch told biographer William Shawcross in 1983: “All newspapers are run to make profits. Full stop,” he said. “I don’t
run anything for respectability. The moment I do, I hope someone will
come and fire me and get me out of the place — because that’s not what
newspapers are meant to be about.”
As an advocate of citizen-driven journalism, it's strange that I've been an apologist for the frequently rabidly right-wing WSJ as long as I have. Certainly, the news pages of the paper produce some fine investigative reporting and, according to former staffers, some reporters commonly refer to the right-wing editorial page writers as "Nazis." So no one could accuse them of not knowing the enemy.
But it's seductive to think that a Murdoch-owned WSJ would ultimately destroy the paper.
Because there's no golden rule of journalism that says we have to suffer the whims and fancies of editorial writers that hold conspiracy-theorist fantasies about anyone to the left of, say, Paul Wolfowitz, in order to receive the wisdom and intelligent writing of great news reporters.
So I hope you get to buy the paper, Rupert, and then destroy it. And so allow the journalism that currently thrives there to rise from the ashes elsewhere. At least that way, I don't have to be reminded any longer that denouncements about such infringements on individual rights as labor unions are lurking just a few pages back, like fascists in the emperor's shadows waiting for their Machiavellian moment.
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