September 25, 2007
A tribute to Rupert Murdoch
Even if Rupert Murdoch does not change a thing about the Wall Street Journal, there will be plenty of people convinced that he has done so, mostly for the worse.
However, it does not take a conspiracy theorist to be struck by the last paragraph of a column by Dennis Berman in the WSJ this morning. The article is mostly an interesting discussion of the parallels between Facebook and GeoCities, the community networking site bought by Yahoo for $4.7bn in 1999.
Then there is the final paragraph.
MySpace owner Rupert Murdoch, had it right when he summed up the state of 125-year-old Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, which he is now buying. "The first road to freedom," he said of Dow Jones, "is viability."
This is odd on various levels. First, Mr Berman introduces Mr Murdoch when the latter is not particularly relevant to what has gone before. Second, he baldly praises the views of his forthcoming (the deal is not yet completed) employer. Finally, he implies that his current employer was in terminal difficulty before News Corporation saved it.
Very strange.
