Murdoch & the 'Journal'

No one who enjoys even a passing acquaintance with modern media would accept Rupert Murdoch's promise to preserve the editorial independence of a newspaper. Yet the Bancroft family, for a century the hands-off managers of the global economy's newspaper of record, proposes to accept just such a pledge--and $5 billion--for the Wall Street Journal and the Dow Jones empire it sits atop. Jim Ottaway Jr., an old-school publisher and the largest voting shareholder on the Dow Jones board outside the Bancroft family, is right to dismiss such talk as a "fig leaf" to justify a sale that "would not be a good thing for Dow Jones, for the Wall Street Journal, for American journalism or for the integrity of business and financial news in America, upon which our free markets rely."

Ottaway's concerns are seconded by Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, who questions whether Murdoch's fifty years of media moguling have "created even one serious, authoritative and truly independent newspaper." The Journal's news division, as distinct from its editorial page, is all those things, a lonely holdout for serious reporting and analysis in an age when the craft of journalism is endangered by media consolidation, Paris Hilton-obsessed "content" and record profit-taking. It's one of the major daily newspapers that are not routinely referred to as "once great."

But the paper that Americans--surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press--rate as the nation's most credible won't survive as an independent voice under Murdoch. The remarkable thing about the Journal is that in an era when large papers are casually pegged as liberal or conservative, this newspaper with a rabidly right-wing editorial page maintains a global newsgathering operation so free of ideological bonds that it wins high marks from just about everyone--except Murdoch, who makes little secret of his view that the Journal is too thoughtful and, yes, too independent.

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