Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is now going to own the Wall Street Journal. That’s bad news for print journalism and it’s probably bad news for the WSJ’s bottom line. As Eric Alterman points out, Murdoch consistently loses money on his newspapers.
Take a look at his flagship American publication: the New York Post. It’s dumb, celebrity-obsessed, spineless, corrupt, unreliable and reactionary, and even with all its pandering, it still manages to lose, by its own estimation, $30 million to $50 million a year.
It’s not just the Post that Murdoch operates as a de facto nonprofit. The Times of London lost $89 million in 2004, and according to a News Corp. executive quoted in a recent Wall Street Journal article, even the Australian “doesn’t consistently make money.”
The WSJ is a strange newspaper. They stubbornly resist modern innovations…like photography. They combine an excellent news reporting team with the most dishonest editorial board in the history of major newspapers. They’re kind of like Fox News, if Fox News had great reporting by day only to switch over to Hume, O’Reilly, and Hannity by night. The WSJ editorial board and Rupert Murdoch are a perfect fit for each other. Together they will mightily increase the ricocheting power of the right-wing wurlizter machine. But Alterman offers a ray of hope.
The silver lining of this takeover is that when Murdoch destroys the credibility of the Journal–as he must if it is to fit in with his business plan–he will be removing the primary pillar of the editorial page’s influence as well. In this regard his ownership is a kind of poisoned chalice.
That’s not much of a silver lining. I was kind of hoping that we were already at the point where the WSJ editorial board has little credibility. I think we’ll get nothing out of this. The editorial board’s product will get even more play on Fox News, and the news section will become slyly unreliable…used like the UK Telegraph, to spread disinformation at key moments.
The Washington Post has become increasingly unreliable and unfriendly during Bush’s second term. The New York Times has taken huge hits to its credibility during the Bush era. Pretty soon, there won’t be any papers of record left. Credibility is a terrible thing to squander. And that’s what has been done during this decade as the media Establishment has struggled to adapt to an administration of thieves and liars, and to the war that these miscreants insisted was necessary.
