Professor News: Murdoch bid bad for public

Paul Janensch, who writes the Professor News Q&A column for the Connecticut Post, writes that News Corp. CEO Ruper Murdoch‘s bid to buy Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal, has some good points, but is bad for the public.

Janensch wrote, “Business news is hot these days. The Thomson Corp., based in Canada, is buying Reuters, based in Britain, for about $17.2 billion to create the world’s biggest financial news and data provider. The deal still needs regulatory clearance and shareholder approval. Thomson’s U.S. operations have offices in Stamford, and the company once owned the Connecticut Post and other North American newspapers but sold most of them to focus on serving specialized information markets.

“Back to Murdoch. Besides entertaining us and informing us, this modern-day William Randolph Hearst wants to influence us — for whom we vote and the way we view business. Depending on how it covers the news under his proprietorship, The Wall Street Journal could vastly increase Murdoch’s power.

“For you and me, that might be bad news — very bad news.”

Read more here. Janensch is a former newspaper editor who teaches journalism at Quinnipiac University.