"War at The Wall Street Journal" is definitive

Lloyd Grove of The Daily Beast has a review of Sarah Ellison‘s “War at The Wall Street Journal” in the Sunday New York Times, and he calls her book about the takeover of the newspaper “definitive.”

Grove writes, “In ‘War at The Wall Street Journal,’ Sarah Ellison has written a definitive, indeed cinematic, account of the News Corporation’s conquest and occupation of this venerable business publication, and of the subterranean battle of motives and moods in the Bancroft family psychodrama. Perhaps ‘war’ — as in a contest between nearly equivalent adversaries — is not the right word. As with the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary, Murdoch’s hegemony was never really in doubt. But it resulted in a clash of cultures (swashbuckling News Corporation meets stuffy Dow Jones) as his trusted lieutenants — the Australian Robert Thomson, appointed editor in chief, and the British-born publisher, Leslie Hinton — transformed The Journal from a niche-market second-read into a general-news-driven first-read, poised to compete head to head with The New York Times. Last month, The Journal even began publishing a metro section.

“The Times, Ellison suggests, is Murdoch’s great white whale, a source of bitter resentment to the self-styled billionaire populist. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Murdoch is genuinely bothered by The Times’s occasional tut-tutting about his down-market methods, especially his alleged use of the News Corporation’s media properties to further his political and business interests. ‘I’d love to buy The New York Times one day. And the next day shut it down as a public service,’ he once joked to an audience of business executives. More recently, The Journal cheekily used a photograph of the lower half of the face of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The Times, to illustrate a weekend feature on women who are attracted to feminine-looking men.”

Read more here.