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JEREMY GREENFIELD
The New York Times, The New Yorker: Murdoch Only a Few Steps Away from Corrupting the Wall Street Journal?  According to The New York Times (June 25), Rupert Murdoch and Dow Jones & Co.- controlling Bancroft family are close to agreeing on a way to sell DJ to Murdoch while also protecting the flagship-WSJ’s editorial integrity. According to the article, an agreement on a way to protect the Journal does not necessarily guarantee a sale; the sale price still would have to be determined. (For full details of the proposed compromise, go to the article at NYTimes.com here, or above.)If The New York Times is correct, then The Wall Street Journal is headed for a whole lot of trouble, according to the July 2 The New Yorker. Ken Auletta writes a lengthy piece about Murdoch’s history with “protecting” editorial integrity and finds him a lacking advocate for editorial independence. For the record, Auletta admits in the article that he wrote a piece on Murdoch for a 1995 issue of The New Yorker on Murdoch that Murdoch didn’t like and so has declined to sit with him for an interview since. Some choice excerpts (pick up a copy of The New Yorker or visit NewYorker.com for the complete article, which is worth reading if you’re interested in this story): “He vowed to appoint a Bancroft to the News Corp. board. He said that he would be willing to establish an independent board to assure that editors were free from his whims—promises he has made, and broken, elsewhere.” [Auletta quoting Phillip Knightley, an Australian born journalist who was asked to analyze Murdoch’s possible behavior by English journalists in London in 1981 during the takeover of the Times of London and the Sunday Times]: “In Australia, a proprietor owned the paper and considered it was his to do whatever he liked with it. Proprietors used their newspapers to support or oppose political parties, settle private feuds, and cross-promote their other interests. Any idea that they could not do this would have met with bewilderment.” [Auletta quoting Harold Evans, ex-editor of the Times of London, who was axed by Murdoch within a year after acquiring the paper and “promising not to interfere in the editorial operations”; from his memoir “Good Times, Bad Times”]: “The most charitable explanation of Murdoch’s attitude to a promise was that he meant it when he made it; only circumstances changed.” “The unappetizing reality was that only three options remained, none of them good: sell to Murdoch; sell to someone else, who hasn’t yet emerged; or refuse to sell, and watch the stock plummet.” If both The New York Times and Auletta are to be believed, The Wall Street Journal—the paper whose integrity Americans trust most, according to Auletta’s article—is headed down a rather dark path; one with “fair and balanced” as its motto. See The Minsider for more. COMMENTS
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