WSJ needs Murdoch like another hole in head

William Powers of The National Journal takes issue with all of the coverage of the proposed News Corp. acquisition of Dow Jones & Co. that emphasizes that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch is a media genuis who will save The Wall Street Journal.

The three articles that Powers mentions as espousing this theory are in the New York Times, New York magazine and BusinessWeek.

Powers wrote, “No question that Dow Jones has had a lousy business record over the past few decades. The mistakes and missed opportunities are notorious. But if The Wall Street Journal doesn’t hold the ‘dominant position in business journalism,’ who does? Isn’t that exactly why Murdoch is willing to pay such a premium to get his hands on it? One of the miracles of The Journal has been how consistently excellent it remained — brave, principled, beautifully written and edited — despite frequently daft corporate oversight. In short, it has been a mediocre business but a terrific news outlet.

“It does not follow that the best way to fix this imbalance is to reverse it, by selling one of the world’s great newspapers to a man who, in order to keep making his piles, is almost certain to undermine many of the things that made the paper great in the first place. But that’s what they’re saying.”

Read more here.