Yesterday, Wall Street Journal reporters from across the country staged a surprising walk-out to protest Rupert Murdoch’s impending takeover of the newspaper. After seeing some of the comments Murdoch made to Time’s Eric Pooley, it’s hardly a mystery why WSJ professionals are worried.
“CNN is pretty consistently on the left, if you look at their choice of stories, what they play up. It’s not what they say. It’s what they highlight.” (CNN, which is also owned by Time Warner, hotly disputes this charge.) Then he mumbles conspiratorially, “And if you look at our general news, do we put on things which favor the right rather than the left? I don’t know.” Has Murdoch just said what I think he said? Has he flirted with an admission that Fox News skews right? If so, he quickly backs away. “We don’t think we do. We’ve always insisted we don’t. I don’t think we do. Aw, it’s subjective. Neither side admits it.”
Murdoch is usually more careful than this. “Neither side admits” what, exactly? Murdoch didn’t say. Then again, he didn’t have to.
In the meantime, Bill Moyers is weighing in on the pending sale:
“Rupert Murdoch has told the Bancrofts he’ll not meddle with reporting. But he’s accustomed to using journalism as a personal spittoon,” Moyers says. “His worst offense with Fox News is not even its baldly partisan agenda. Far worse is the travesty he’s made of its journalism. Fox News huffs and puffs, pontificates and proclaims, but does little serious original reporting.”
Now Murdoch is vying to bring under his wing one of the best national newspapers we have left…. “The problem isn’t just Rupert Murdoch,” Moyers concludes. “His pursuit of the Wall Street Journal is the latest in a cascading series of mergers, buyouts and other financial legerdemain that is making a shipwreck of journalism…. Instead of checking the excesses of private and public power, these 21st-century barons of the First Amendment revel in them. The public be damned.”
And Paul Krugman is even more concerned.
Defenders of Mr. Murdoch’s bid for The Journal say that we should judge him not by Fox News but by his stewardship of the venerable Times of London, which he acquired in 1981. Indeed, the political bias of The Times is much less blatant than that of Fox News. But a number of former Times employees have said that there was pressure to slant coverage — and everyone I’ve seen quoted defending Mr. Murdoch’s management is still on his payroll.
In any case, do we want to see one of America’s two serious national newspapers in the hands of a man who has done so much to mislead so many? … If Mr. Murdoch does acquire The Journal, it will be a dark day for America’s news media — and American democracy. If there were any justice in the world, Mr. Murdoch, who did more than anyone in the news business to mislead this country into an unjustified, disastrous war, would be a discredited outcast. Instead, he’s expanding his empire.
As for the notion that Murdoch might not interfere with the WSJ’s news coverage, one need look no further than his record with other papers.
A detailed examination of Mr. Murdoch’s half-century career as a journalist and businessman shows that his newspapers and other media outlets have made coverage decisions that advanced the interests of his sprawling media conglomerate, News Corp. In the process, Mr. Murdoch has blurred a line that exists at many other U.S. media companies between business and news sides — a line intended to keep the business and political interests of owners from influencing the presentation of news. […]
At all newspapers, owners have a say in broad editorial direction. Mr. Murdoch has a long history of being unusually aggressive, reflecting his roots as an old-fashioned press baron. From his earliest days, like some other newspaper proprietors of the last century, he ran his companies with his hands directly on the daily product, peppering reporters and editors with suggestions and criticisms.
This may seem like a business story regarding one major corporation dealing with a different major corporation. The stakes are higher than that.