Dow Jones deal is what WSJ has reported for past century

Brian Cathcart, a journalism professor in England, writes in the News Statesman that the proposed deal to sell Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal, to News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch is simply the story of business that The Journal has reported for the last 100 years.

Cathcart wrote, “Let us imagine that a century-old manufacturing company based in a Midwestern town is being stalked by a corporate asset-stripper. The company turns a modest profit and is both the backbone of the local economy and, through tradition and good works, the heart of the community. What does the Wall Street Journal say?

“It says bad luck, the predator can take your company and pull it apart in the name of efficiencies, synergies and the like, and your town must suffer because the market must have its way. That has been the Journal‘s message for generations, a message delivered with a consistency and vigour that few other papers, even the People’s Daily of Beijing, can rival.

“So you might think that, when Rupert Murdoch came knocking on the Journal‘s door with his $5bn takeover bid, the paper’s staff, and particularly the senior staff, would put their hands up and go peacefully to the fate they have wished upon countless other managers and employees.

“But no, the Journal is special, we are told, and shouldn’t be bought and sold like other businesses. And Murdoch is especially bad, so he must make pledges not to meddle with the paper’s editorial independence.

“From this distance (both geographical and ideological), it is a little hard to swallow.”

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