Really, you have to wonder. The “cultural paradigm” is shifting. The core values of the Wall Street Journal are under threat. That man Murdoch has moved in, literally has an office, and is already hiring and firing.
You’d swear something nasty had just got into the chicken coop.
I've been doing pieces on the WSJ/Murdoch dichotomy for a while, and the level of naiveté, as well as disingenuous commentary, never ceases to fascinate, not to say sicken.
The guts of
this New York Times piece is that Murdoch is cleaning house. People are coming and going, the Journal staff have woken up to the idea the guy has set foot in a media operation before, and there’s a lot of water cooler level comment with its grammar corrected, for news content. Murdoch is also funding the Journal like a modern operation, which is winning some sort of respect, for the money, at least.
NYT has come up with a breathless account of skullduggery and intrigue… I don’t think:
“
In the last few months, Rupert Murdoch has moved into an office at Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal. He has pushed the paper’s editors for shorter articles and more hard news. He has personally wooed reporters he wants to keep out of his competitors’ hands.”
Then comes some unattributed content. NYT says Journal staff are remaining anonymous when commenting. This is what I mean by “water cooler”:
“
Mr. Murdoch has said that he wanted The Journal to step up its coverage of politics and national and international affairs, making it a more direct competitor to The New York Times. He has lobbied for more hard news and more succinct articles — a marked shift in tone for a newspaper whose signatures include long, often quirky news features that start on the front page.”
“Lobbied”?
News? In a newspaper?
You’d swear this was a saga of ideological polarities, like Lord of the Rings with bylines, if it weren’t for the slightly musty odors of the perspective. Dealing with the topic of the unseemly haste with which things are happening, we get this insight:
It’s like Dueling Museums, sarcophagi at ten paces:
“
“This kind of decisiveness and moving rapidly, not just at the top but deep into the organization, is unusual in media takeovers,” said Louis Ureneck, chairman of the journalism department at Boston University. “There tends to be some patience about getting to know the operation and making a smooth transition. But he’s operating like a young man who’s bought a sports car and can’t wait to hop in and drive it around.””
Seriously, I like NYT, and this article just isn’t its finest hour. They had to go to Boston to get a comment like that? The significance of the article, as I see it, is like “The aliens have landed.” There’s a level of wide eyed mystification which is almost incomprehensible. Also unbelievable. Apparently some NYT people have been approached to work for the Journal, and offers have been “
mostly” refused.
Oh, yeah.
That’s just sad.
A million years ago, during the takeover, I commented that Murdoch is about doing business. So is this shake up, which reads more like a spring clean. Much has been said about Murdoch’s policies, editorial style, etc. The theory seems to be that there’s good guys and bad guys. That’s the actual “news” where Murdoch is concerned, for his competitors.
All this ethical positioning, about how a business media operation is put together, what its editorial policies should be, and who shouldn’t have editorial policies, is like organized crime demanding tougher sentencing.
Excuse me if I don’t shed too many tears of grief when any business news medium gets a shake up. If there’s a part of news media which can be described as corrupt to the core, it’s business media. They’re more of a publicity machine than a news source, and they do pretty well out of it. Disinformation, spin, “insider” spruikers of worthless stocks, you name it, it’s been done, and done regularly.
Have a look at the sedate response across the business news spectrum to the recent economic horrors.
Outrage? Verbal vivisection? Anyone who knows business law or stock market rules could write an encyclopedia on the last three months about things that should have happened and didn’t. Any historian will be able to say when and where the subprimes should have been shut down before they got dangerous.
Not these guys. Much of the global business media, without any help from Mr. Murdoch, has been holding a hand-wringing competition. No bad reviews of anyone, no “naughty financial sector”, no ideas. That’s left to professors of economics, Treasury Secretaries, the Fed and John McCain.
If any business media on Earth can claim that to be any form of editorial position, all I can say is that the Eunuch’s Kama Sutra must be hard up for material.
As for “ethics” in business media, I’ll believe it, if and when I ever see it.
Twenty years and counting, at this point.
This may not be obvious, but I’m not much of an admirer of America’s approach to handling its various economic disasters, particularly the media’s limp wristed perspectives and sheer ineffectuality.
Murdoch isn’t necessarily a good guy or a bad guy. He’s a tougher guy than the industry he’s in. Ironically, because he’s too big to push around, he might be the guy to get these characters producing some actual information.
He’s not sitting in that Dow Jones office trying to get a tan.
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