How the WSJ has drunk the News Corp. Kool-Aid

Jeff Bercovici of DailyFinance.com writes about how the bluster from Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson about the paper’s competition with the New York Times is indicative of how the business newspaper has bought into the News Corp. culture.

Bercovici writes, “It’s a tactic straight out of Murdoch’s Fleet Street handbook: Declare victory, however prematurely, and express nothing but contempt for the competition. Of course, it’s utterly bogus. Bill O’Reilly may not savage Keith Olbermann and GE boss Jeffrey Immelt the way he used to, but behind the scenes, the Fox News PR machine remains on the lookout for any opportunity, however tiny, to stick it to NBC and MSNBC. (Don’t forget that this rivalry has another front, with CNBC crushing fledgling Fox Business in the ratings as badly as Fox News crushes MSNBC.)

“Likewise, Thomson and his boss are positively obsessed with putting the hurt on the Times, locally and nationally. But you needn’t take my word for it. Just look at the speech Thomson gave when the Journal introduced its ‘Greater New York’ section, which was almost entirely devoted to attacking the Gray Lady. Or recall that Thomson personally suggested using a photo of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to illustrate a story about men with feminine facial features.

“I understand why Lewis engages in this kind of counterfactual posturing — that’s what he’s paid to do. But Thomson is supposed to be a journalist, not a flack. Surely he could delegate the spinning to somebody else?”