Rupert Murdoch moves in on Dow Jones
What is one to make of the news that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. wants to buy Dow Jones? A decade or two ago everybody would have called it a travesty, of course. But lately Murdoch has come to look like the media titan with by far the longest view. He certainly shouldn't be expected to go in and tear apart the company or its crown jewel, The Wall Street Journal. He's been willing to stick it out at much more troubled newspapers than that.
Then there's Murdoch's politics. It's not like he's going to make the Journal editorial page any more right-wing than it already is. I guess one could worry that he might mess untowardly with the paper's news pages. But then one could worry about most anything.
The more interesting question may be whether, with control of so many of the nation's major conservative media voices (Fox News, the New York Post, the Weekly Standard, and now possibly the editorialistas of the WSJ), Murdoch will now pull the same kind of shocker he did in the UK a decade ago -- when his Sun dumped the Tories for Tony Blair -- and switch his properties' allegiance to Hillary Clinton.
Update: My fellow Time newbie David von Drehle has a smarter take on this than I do. Dow Jones staffers aren't happy about the prospect of Murdochization. The Bancroft family says it doesn't want to sell. And investor Michael Price, one of several people who tried to put Dow Jones in play a decade ago, has been talking up the idea of a Bloomberg bid for Dow Jones lately, I'm told.
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1
HAHAHA, I almost peed myself when I read that last line. The business implications are certainly interesting, but even though the WSJ editorial couldn't get more right-wing, you can still take it certainly. Over the past year how seriously can the viewing public take Fox News - we certainly never took the NYP seriously.
At the very least, as skewed as WSJ could be, sometimes more than others...it's the WSJ and their perspective was based on some material facts and figures. Murdoch likes to control content way too much, he likes to shape perspectives to his own. Is it any wonder more of us readers simply don't bother with the MSM when you have a guy like him shaping so much of it? -
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Murdoch is willing to overpay for DJ, because his News Corp stock is overvalued, and he might as well try and accumulate more assets before things go south (again).
If I was the family that Dow Jones, I'd signal a willingness to sell, and see who wanted to offer the best deal....
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On the one hand, I'm glad that you bring up the possibility of Murdoch getting on the Hillary train. I tell people that all the time and they laugh at me -- even when I bring up Blair.
Hey, why don't you do a post about that? Why Murdoch might make an alliance with Hillary? He'd get Fox to pull its punches on her and she wouldn't nail him with any FCC reforms if she gets in. I'd like to see this wild-eyed (and admittedly completely unsubstantiated) conspiracy theory fleshed out by a real journalist, rather than blurted out incoherently by me after a few drinks.
I do think he might screw with the newsroom of the WSJ, though. That's what's scary about this.
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I too fear for the WSJ newsroom. I've wondered how it has survived for this long. Anybody have a line on that dynamic?
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