The Murdoch Charm Offensive Peters Out

There are limits to the effectiveness of Rupert Murdoch’s

charm offensive, it would seem. Judging by today’s news, indeed, the offensive

seems to have worked only on the journalists who were physically in the room

with him when he was putting his case.

On Sunday, the reporter who interviewed him, Andrew Ross Sorkin,

gave him a follow-up

wet kiss in the NYT, in which he explained that "Mr. Murdoch may be

the perfect publisher of The Wall Street Journal." Among Rupert’s attractions

is that he’ll increase spending, rather than cutting it, Sorkin says, along

with the fact that he’s "farsighted" and "creative". He

even goes so far as to say that selling to Rupert is the best way of "preserving

the Dow Jones legacy".

On Monday, however, Sorkin’s colleague David Carr gets out

the long knives. He doesn’t believe for a minute Murdoch’s protestations that

he would ensure editorial independence for the Journal, and he also sees, contra

Sorkin, "a tough scrubbing on costs" at a newspaper which has already

suffered no little cost-cutting.

And the man who is possibly the single most influential shareholder in Dow

Jones, James H Ottaway Jr, released a statement

which was harsher still:

[Murdoch] has for a long time expressed his personal, political and business

biases through his newspapers and television channels,” Mr. Ottaway

said. The Post “regularly runs biased news stories and headlines supporting

his friends, political candidates and public policies, and attacks people

he personally opposes,” while at Fox News, “one man’s political

opinions have become the editorial and news policy.”

He accused Mr. Murdoch of caving in to political pressure to advance his business

interests, contrasting the actions of a News Corporation property, Star TV,

in bowing to Chinese government censorship, with The Journal’s editorial

page censure of Chinese human rights abuses. “I doubt its freedom to

criticize the Chinese government would continue under Murdoch ownership,”

he said.

The right answer to the News Corporation bid, Mr. Ottaway added, is that “Dow

Jones is not for sale, at any price, to Rupert Murdoch.”

Of course, the only way of ensuring that Dow Jones never be sold to Rupert

Murdoch is to ensure that Dow Jones never be sold. Anybody else could and quite

possibly would simply flip the property.

Nevertheless, Dow Jones stock is still trading over $55 a share: the market

still believes a deal will be done. As David Carr says, "brute-force capital,

like flood waters, always finds a way to break through."

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