Rupert vs. the Republic

[EV_Ares]

By Jim Sleeper - TPM Cafe

"Rupert Murdoch has grown so desperate in his attempt to buy Dow Jones and its Wall Street Journal that he'll tell any lie he thinks will help," wrote Slate's Jack Shafer on May 24.

In half a dozen columns, Shafer himself has sounded a bit desperate to expose Murdoch's lies in order to discredit his bid. He's right to note that "Murdoch doesn't exasperate because he's a conservative; he exasperates because he has no principles." But the ownership and investment system which Murdoch is gaming doesn't have any principles, either. It will take more than investigative journalism, satire, or commentary like Shafer's or mine to pose the challenge that needs to be posed.

I share the desperation about Murdoch for two reasons. Contrary to a perception common on the left, the Journal's news pages are ethical and sparkling -- unlike its speculator-worshipping fact-challenged editorial pages. Second, my cousin James Wechsler was editorial page editor of the crusading, liberal New York Post when Murdoch bought it from publisher Dolly Schiff in 1977 and promised to maintain its political independence, only to make it a daily reminder that Australia was founded as a penal colony.

But it can have astonished no one that, after some fretting about journalistic integrity, the Journal's Bancroft family owners agreed to meet with Murdoch as the price of Dow Jones stock surged: What, besides profit, could have driven Dow's mostly anonymous whorl of shareholders, whose composition changes daily at the clicks of brokers' mouses?

The Bancrofts do retain legal control of Dow Jones and the Journal through Class B super-voting stock, along with some portraits of ancestors whose pieties about journalism as a public trust still ring in their ears. They might be able to withstand Murdoch's carrots and sticks for the sake of something besides free-market freedom – the freedom of intelligent stewards to run a company by more than just its bottom line.


(((entire article @ link below)))

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/jun/18/rupert_vs_the_republic