Shafer: Abolish WSJ editorial oversight committee

Slate media critic Jack Shafer calls the editorial oversight committee designed to protect The Wall Street Journal from meddling by owner Rupert Murdoch a bunch of “high-paid flunkies” and says it should be abolished.

The committee is being criticized for not doing more to protect managing editor Marcus Brauchli, who resigned last week.

Shafer writes, “On this point, Murdoch never disappoints. For instance, when he bought the Times of London in 1981, he promised new editor Harold Evans editorial independence. He started breaking his promises almost immediately, and when Evans confronted him, Murdoch allegedly said, ‘They’re not worth the paper they’re written on.’ As Evans writes of Murdoch in his 1984 book, Good Times, Bad Times, he’s like ‘the philanderer who convinces each new girl that she’s the one who’ll change him.’

“Like Brauchli, Evans had a committee ‘protecting’ him. This one, established at government insistence, required a majority vote in the event that Murdoch wanted to sack an editor. But when Murdoch wanted Evans gone, he performed the same end run that just eliminated Brauchli—a big shove and a settlement agreement.

“The denutted Dow Jones Special Committee issued its wimpy statement yesterday, vowing that it ‘intends to exercise fully its role in the approval of a successor managing editor and to take the steps necessary to prevent a repeat of the process it has just been through.’ What they meant to say was, We’re each paid $100,000 annually, a lot of money for very little work, so if Rupert wants to drive by and hose us down with a swift, hard piss again, just make sure the checks clear.”

Read more here.