Murdoch ownership of WSJ will be a "poisoned chalice"

Eric Alterman writes in The Nation that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch‘s ownership of The Wall Street Journal will be a “poisoned chalice.”

Alterman wrote, “The news pages in the Wall Street Journal are about the smartest and bravest of any newspaper in America. Some people, like Dow Jones CEO Richard Zannino, enjoy stock holdings that offer roughly 20 million good reasons to believe that such journalism can continue unimpeded within the Murdoch empire. But the rest of us might as well believe in Peter Pan.

“For nonconservatives the Dow Jones dance of death with Rupert Murdoch presents an additional complication. For all the–deserved–praise being heaped on the paper’s news pages of late, its editorial pages already operate with Murdoch-like sleaze. News staffers frequently wake up to find their reporting attacked and undermined by the editorial page ideologues. When speaking anonymously, Journal reporters have been known to say things like ‘To have [editorial page editor] Paul Gigot as our captain is bullshit. It’s not for real,’ and ‘They’re wrong all the time. They lack credibility to the point that the emperor has no clothes.’ And yet without the power and prestige of the newspaper in which these edit page opinions come wrapped, they would be taken no more seriously than, say, the latest ravings of Rush Limbaugh or David Horowitz.

“Alas, this very quality makes the edit page a perfect fit for the Murdoch modus operandi, so it comes as no surprise that Murdoch says he loves it–or that Fox News scooped up its taxpayer-funded talking-heads program, which failed so miserably to find an audience when Bush Administration operatives foisted it on PBS. 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.”

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