Murdoch's Wall Street Journal
Wednesday August 1, 2007
Categories: Media
I wish I had a strong opinion about Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the Wall Street Journal. I don't regularly read its news pages, except for the features section on Friday (which I very much doubt he'll mess with; he'd better...
Filed Under: Murdoch
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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The WSJ has always held a conservative bias, but I never considered it a rag.
I hope I don't have reason to do so inthe future. Time will tell, to be sure, but if Murdoch does to the WSJ what he did to cable news, God help us.
Well, that post was unexpected! I agree 100%.
Murdoch is definitely a fascinating man and even though I don't like all the programming and style of news he brings to the media he owns, I admire him for his intelligence and ability. There was an Atlantic Monthly cover story on him and the media in general a couple years ago which was great!
That being said, I'm not sure him buying the WSJ is a good thing. I generally would like to see our media outlets in diverse hands rather than consolidated. The fewer people who own media, regardless of their politics, isn't a good thing, in my mind.
We have so few good, high-level news sources, I think there is a fear he will do the WSJ what he did to the Times of London (made it into a second-tier paper just above the tabs) or make it an agenda-driven tool like the NY Post and Fox News.
And the Sulzberger-run NY Times, of Jason Blair quality, doesn't have an agenda? Nor CNN and Time Warner.Right. Murdoch for a brief time owned the very liberal Village Voice, and it didn't change that paper much at all. Murdoch won't change much at the WSJ because it would be bad for business. It is still a fair concern that media companies are being consolidated in the hands of a few. But as the internet breaks down the walls of the old media, that may mean less and less going forward.
The WSJ's news pages are very agenda-free, once you accept it's a business newspaper and not a news newspaper. Its editorial page is agenda-driven, as it should be, and its Friday features section is also fairly agenda driven (especially the taste page). The fear is the news section will become Mudoched, the way the "news" is Mudoched in the Times of London, the New York Post, and Fox.
For all the crap that Jim Cramer gets, I bet he's revelling in his win here. He's been speculating on this outcome since May http://www.stocktagger.com/2007/07/cramer-speculates-on-higher-price-for.html
Daniel -
Actually, past media studies have found the WSJ to be among the most liberal - if not THE most liberal - of the major American papers.
http://alendalux.blogspot.com/2007/08/useful-reminder.html
That said, the WSJ has been consistently in 2nd place in circulation in the US, only behind the USA Today. What's more, I don't know the most recent numbers, but over the past couple years, WSJ was one of the very few newspapers to increase circulation, however modestly.
I think the WSJ has an advantage in the type of news it reports. Most people don't bother with the print version b/c they can get it online once they get to work. I'd be willing to bet the WSJ (along with the Financial Times) has a significantly larger number of readers who read it during the morning commute. I know that is the case on the trains from NJ into NY. People want to be ready when they get to work, when the markets open. They don't necessarily have time to sit around and read the news online with their cup of coffee. Papers like the NYT don't have the same advantage.
Bottom line, I think the unrest among the news staff is reaction to the name, b/c it's become known that Murdoch is the only newsman out there with any kind of political ideology. Which should by itself tell us something about the political affiliations of the people in the newsroom.
Also, what are you talking about Murdoch killing off The Times to being nothing but one step above the tabloids? First of all, circulation of tabloids blows the broadsheets out of the water in Britain. But among the broadsheets, The Times is second only to The Telegraph (and the Sunday Telegraph). It has significantly more readers. It has significantly more readers than the Independent, the Guardian, the Observer and the Financial Times. And from reading the Times from time to time, I would rank it as a pretty serious publication. I was in England for all of the war back in 2003, and the Times consistently had some of the best coverage.
http://www.abc.org.uk/cgi-bin/gen5?runprog=nav/abc&noc=y
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