{"id":1286,"date":"2017-03-23T03:18:28","date_gmt":"2017-03-23T08:18:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/18.217.136.120\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Murdoch-takes-the-WSJ-2.docx"},"modified":"2019-05-01T19:06:16","modified_gmt":"2019-05-02T00:06:16","slug":"murdoch-takes-the-wsj-3","status":"inherit","type":"attachment","link":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/?attachment_id=1286","title":{"rendered":"Murdoch takes the WSJ"},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"class_list":["post-1286","attachment","type-attachment","status-inherit","hentry"],"description":{"rendered":"

Murdoch takes the WSJ<\/a><\/p>\n

July 6, 2007<\/p>\n

Invasion of the Body Snatchers: another good journalist lost, along with The Wall Street Journal<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Jim Sleeper <\/p>\n

Stepping lightly into his grave as an American writer in the grand cemetery he and other well-known journalists have designed for the American republic, TIME’s Eric Pooley seems as ecstatic as a jihadist ascending to another world. It’s frighteningly instructive to read his July 9 apologia-cum-hagiography on Rupert Murdoch for what it tells us about how American journalism is changing, especially now that Murdoch has virtually won his bid for The Wall Street Journal and its parent company Dow Jones, according to sources on the company’s board. The deal is done, they say, though Dow Jones is denying it, perhaps pending a formal announcement expected next week. But even if it fails, something has been lost in the anticipatory applause of people like Pooley.<\/p>\n

At least Pooley, TIME’s star composer of breathless encomia to great men (like Rudy Giuliani after 9\/11) who’ve broken the rules and borne lesser mortals’ uncomprehending rage to change the world, paused to take note of the rage at Rupert, the latest, weirdest addition to his pantheon. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe notion of this tabloid terror controlling the world’s leading business journal [The Wall Street Journal] is being met with ferocious opposition,\u201d Pooley allows, assigning the protesters their seats in the past (including me, presumably). \u201cSome of the opposition is principled, some of it is sanctimonious, and some of it seems driven by a tangle of ideological and commercial motives. Each day brings another investigative story about Murdoch using his media properties to boost his business interests, reward his friends and punish his rivals, and each story carries the message that this man will destroy the Journal by using its hugely respected news pages as his personal fief. <\/p>\n

\u201cOf course,\u201d Pooley adds, waving off those critics, \u201cthe Journal\u2019s editorial pages are already more conservative than Murdoch.\u201d Actually, those pages are less conservative in any Burkean or Buckleyan sense than they are fanatically delusional, and Pooley knows that the presence of a few editorial bats in the Dow Jones attic \u2013 the batty James Taranto, John Fund, and the ghost of Robert Whitewater Bartley \u2013 didn\u2019t justify anyone\u2019s selling the whole mansion to the Count Dracula of journalism. <\/p>\n

The real reason, Pooley argues, is that the mansion itself is old-fashioned and decrepit, at least by the go-go marketing standards his own Time-Warner Corporation shares with Murdoch\u2019s News Corporation. Murdoch is the herald of an economic and civic climate change larger than himself, and Pooley is hot to introduce us to the inevitable. He hints often at the intimacy of his access to the Great Man, though not so loudly that you wonder why he was granted it. Time-Warner and the News Corporation are rivals, but they\u2019re partners in weaning us of old-fashioned civic republican morals. They do that subliminally every day. <\/p>\n

So let\u2019s try to notice what\u2019s getting lost here, including Pooley himself, who used to care about America\u2019s republican integrity. He\u2019s surfing the tidal wave of our collective corporate destiny by rendering Rupert as a charming rogue and great explorer of this century\u2019s vasty deeps, a pirate\/pilgrim as awesome as Columbus or Cortez, and never mind the sins and sicknesses they brought with them. The profile reflects a shift in American journalism, which is giving up the ghost of civic-republicanism to follow our new conglomerate masters\u2019 obsession with market share uber alles. <\/p>\n

Pooley offers a sprightly tutorial on this to all who aren\u2019t yet clued in — a terrific read for Time-Warner\u2019s long-sought demographic, twenty-somethings who are sloughing off the musty liberal arts they wasted four years getting graded on in college. (I include here those balding, 50\u2019ish twenty-somethings who zoom past me on the Meritt Parkway in their BMWs and armored vehicles; there seem to be millions of them). <\/p>\n

Pooley waves aside any lingering suspicion that we Americans shouldn\u2019t be just speculators and self-marketers but citizens who require good journalism as much as we do oxygen to achieve a common good. He and Murdoch are administering euthanasia to all that, and in this quick joint venture they do it more entertainingly than Jack Kevorkian: <\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018They’re taking five billion dollars out of me and want to keep control,\u2019” Rupert Murdoch was saying into the phone, “\u2019in an industry in crisis! They can’t sell their company and still control it–that’s not how it works. I’m sorry!\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a little before 5 o’clock on Friday, June 22, and the chairman of News Corp.–the world’s third largest media conglomerate, with a value of $68 billion, and one of the few mega-corporations controlled by a single individual–was at his desk on the eighth floor of his midtown Manhattan headquarters, trying to shore up a deal he had dreamed about for a decade\u2026. He was speaking in soft bursts to an investment banker on the other end of the line. Murdoch had stripped off his jacket and tie, and his thin, dyed-brown hair was scattered across his scalp. His controversial $5 billion deal to acquire Dow Jones & Co. and its crown jewel, the Wall Street Journal, was in danger of crashing. Murdoch was playing poker: to get the deal back on track, he had to threaten to walk–and mean it.\u201d <\/p>\n

He\u2019s plays more than poker. In 2005, Murdoch outbid Viacom for MySpace at a price few thought it was worth, but soon he \u201clooked like an Internet visionary,\u201d Pooley tells us, as he told Murdoch himself. \u201c\u2018I love being called that,\u2019” Murdoch answers, \u201c\u2018but the truth is, I’m just lucky and nimble.\u2019\u201d He \u201cgenerates his own good fortune by being perhaps the most gifted opportunist in media,\u201d echoes Pooley, calling him \u201cthe last of the true media moguls, the one who’s still building — grabbing Dow Jones, dreaming about trading MySpace for a big chunk of Yahoo!, trying to launch a Polish TV network. News Corp.’s voting stock, of which the Murdoch family owns 31%, has gone up 18% in the past year, making him worth $9 billion.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cHe lives like an old-fashioned tycoon too,\u201d Pooley swoons, \u201chopscotching the planet on his 737 and recharging on his yacht off St. Tropez. Recent stop: London, where he got thrown from a horse (but didn’t break anything–too busy). His likeness was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery and he threw a party in Kensington Gardens for 400 friends, including incoming British Prime Minister Gordon Brown\u2026.\u201d <\/p>\n

But what about those sins and sicknesses? Isn\u2019t Murdoch a right-winger who\u2019s corrupting news and public discourse? Naw, Pooley assures us: <\/p>\n

\u201cMurdoch isn’t a party-line guy. He’s a pragmatist. He likes strong politicians and change agents and winners;… he has supported moderates like Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton. But he has a stubborn populist streak, and his populism finds an outlet on Fox News, a channel that gives voice to angry middle-aged white guys.\u201d Then Pooley lets Rupert himself do the spin: \u201c\u2018[I]f you look at our general news, do we put on things which favor the right rather than the left? I don’t know\u2026. 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.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cHas Murdoch just said what I think he said?\u201d Pooley asks disingenuously. \u201cHas he flirted with an admission that Fox News skews right?\u201d Since we can\u2019t respond to this phony question, he does: \u201cIf so, Murdoch quickly backs away. \u2018We don\u2019t think we do.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

It\u2019s Pooley who keeps backing away from glints of skepticism he musters for theatrical effect while setting up Murdoch\u2019s responses with his soft-ball questions. Compare with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Noting that 60 percent of Americans have believed that Iraq and Al Qaeda were linked, that W.M. D. had been found, or that world public opinion favored the war with Iraq, Krugman reported that only 23 percent of PBS and NPR audiences \u201cbelieved any of these untrue things, but the number was 80 percent among those relying primarily on Fox News\u2026. [T]wo-thirds of Fox devotees believed that the U.S. had \u2018found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

Pooley doesn\u2019t report that Murdoch became a U.S. citizen in 1985, to get around rules limiting foreign ownership. By my lights that makes him even more un-American than Dick Cheney for rousing of 3500 young Americans to die in desert sands. But maybe citizenship is as marginal to the brave new world of conglomerate media as Columbus\u2019 Italian-Jewish nationality was to the Spanish empire-builders Ferdinand and Isabella. <\/p>\n

What about Murdoch\u2019s degrading his news outlets? Krugman calls him \u201can opportunist who exploits a rule-free media environment \u2014 one created, in part, by conservative political power \u2014 by slanting news coverage to favor whoever he thinks will serve his business interests.\u201d Now, there\u2019s a conservatism the Journal\u2019s editorial-page bat-heads champion, whatever their jitters about Murdoch\u2019s telling them how to do it. And it\u2019s what the paper\u2019s brave news side has kept at bay. Again Pooley bobs and weaves: \u201cMurdoch waves away the past and cuts to the heart of the matter: the Journal. \u2018Why would I spend $5 billion for something in order to wreck it?\u2019 he asks\u201d \u2013 as does Pooley, who fleetingly acknowledges Rupert\u2019s nasty record but just as quickly portrays the Journal as a basket case that only a market visionary like Murdoch could save. <\/p>\n

Pooley glances at Murdoch\u2019s phony populism but then veers back to calling him a bold explorer-inventor, unlike \u201csanctimonious\u201d journalists \u2013 that word again, Pooley\u2019s word \u2013 who still consider serious reporting the lifeblood of democracy. Murdoch\u2019s own editors aren\u2019t sanctimonious, of course; one of them throws Pooley their line: Murdoch may meddle, the editor allows, but \u201cif he\u2019s not interested, then where is the money going to come from\u2026. if Dow Jones wants to grow globally?\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cShow me the money.\u201d That shuts up most would-be do-gooders these days. But what if \u201cgrowing globally,\u201d like growing imperially, involves dying internally? What if only aroused republics can channel or limit that growth? What if that requires honest reporting? Pooley never asks, because Murdoch shows he tolerates only the doom-eager populism he pumped up for Iraq. <\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Journalists should think of themselves as outside the Establishment, and owners can’t be too worried about what they’re told at their country clubs,\u2019\u2019\u201d quoth Rupert (a bit sanctimoniously). But he doesn\u2019t mean it, and Pooley, realizing this, pretends to doubt him, calling him \u201cthe man who influences Prime Ministers and Presidents and still poses as a scrappy outsider.\u201d But he adds just as quickly that \u201cassociates say he’s finally considering his legacy and wants to run the Journal impeccably to upgrade his reputation\u2026.\u201d <\/p>\n

Murdoch \u201cscoffs at the notion. \u2018I’m not looking for a legacy, and you’ll never shut up the critics. I’ve been around 50 years. When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies–and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.\u2019 Murdoch has invested billions in newspapers when few others were willing, but he has also kept them alive through a lowest-common denominator approach typified by the trashy Sun, with its topless Page 3 girls\u2026. Murdoch wouldn’t be Murdoch if he didn’t love sticking it to sanctimonious J-school toffs. \u2018When the Journal gets its Page 3 girls,\u2019 he jokes late one night, \u2018we’ll make sure they have M.B.A.s.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

So, laugh it all off, okay? But notice, too, what you were supposed to have forgotten during Pooley\u2019s pirouetting: By crowning Rupert an empire builder, however scrappy, he\u2019s buried any thought that journalism must remain outside the establishment with anything more than the fake populism of war machines and of topless girls. <\/p>\n

Pooley wheels in more apologists: \u201c\u2018Those who say he’ll wreck the Journal are in for a surprise,\u2019\u201d a British professor of journalism tells him. \u201c\u2018What they miss is that he really does distinguish between his tabloids and his serious papers\u2026. At his serious papers, there’s much more of a discussion.\u2019” Much more of a discussion? \u201c\u2018There’s such a thing as a popular newspaper and an unpopular \u00e9lite newspaper,\u2019\u201d Murdoch concurs. \u201c\u2018They play different roles. We have both kinds. Just like we have the Fox network with American Idol and 24, and we also have the National Geographic Channel. It’s hard for outsiders to understand that.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

Is it hard to understand that Fox does a lot more damage to the republic than National Geographic does good? <\/p>\n

Pooley has given Murdoch his say as if he had no other way to be heard. But Rupert Murdoch is a liar, and Eric Pooley is his enabler. Everything in this profile, circling the globe in TIME\u2019s foreign editions and online, is disingenuous and self-serving. You read lie after lie and wait for Pooley to challenge Murdoch\u2019s credibility as Krugman did and as the Columbia Journalism Review did in an editorial on his promises not to ruin the Journal: <\/p>\n

\u201cA familiar fable tells of a scorpion that asks a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is sensibly fearful of getting stung. But the scorpion is persuasive, pointing out that if he stings the frog, they will both sink into the water and die. Why would he do such a thing? So the frog agrees. Midway across the stream, the scorpion stings. The dying frog asks: Why? It’s my nature, the scorpion explains\u2026.. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe appreciate that the Bancrofts [the Journal\u2019s owners] have come to realize that Dow Jones needs a fresh direction. And it is easy for outsiders to ask people to walk away from a $5 billion offer. But this is their moment in history. We hope they find a way to keep this American treasure away from Rupert Murdoch, who will smile even as he raises the stinger.\u201d <\/p>\n

Surely he\u2019s smiling this morning. But let\u2019s assume that for the first year after he takes over, Murdoch will pump more resources into the Journal than it has ever enjoyed, transform its outreach, and sustain its reportorial independence, just enough to get his critics on record saying they were wrong. Then the Journal will begin its inexorable, tawdry decline into a Murdochian half-life, complete with a fantastic position for Pooley. <\/p>\n

I get an “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” feeling watching the transformation of writers \u2013 Nicholas Lemann at The New Yorker, Ronald Brownstein at the Los Angeles Times — who used to care about reporting for a republican polity they apparently no longer believe in. It isn\u2019t just Murdoch who has swept away their old coordinates as free citizens. A tidal wave of conglomerate consolidation and relentlessly strange and intrusive marketing has done that. <\/p>\n

Joseph Schumpeter wrote about capitalism\u2019s powers of \u201ccreative destruction;\u201d Pooley names Murdoch one of the creators. What he can\u2019t afford to tell us, or himself, is that tidal waves are awesome but meaninglessly destructive and that the empire builders riding them hurtle from the sublime to the ridiculous. Sooner or later, as Jonathan Schell demonstrates brilliantly in his The Unconquerable World, better people show them — as Ghandi did the British, King the American South, Mandela the Afrikaners, and Havel, Michnick and Walesa the Soviets — that empires aren\u2019t really as strong as tidal waves, or as irresistible as democratic hopes.<\/p>\n"},"caption":{"rendered":"

Invasion of the body snatchers: Another good journalist list, along with the Wall Street Journal, as Rupert Murdoch takes over
\nJuly 6 2007<\/p>\n"},"alt_text":"","media_type":"file","mime_type":"application\/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document","media_details":{},"post":null,"source_url":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Murdoch-takes-the-WSJ-2.docx","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1286"}]}}