December 12, 2007
Who is more independent than whom?
Roy Greenslade is upset about a story in today’s New York Times about Rupert Murdoch’s impending takeover of the Wall Street Journal. Personally, I cannot see too much wrong with the article, although it might have made more of the fact that the NYT is directly in Mr Murdoch’s sights.
But I do wonder about one line in it, the statement that:
For The Journal’s editors and reporters, this is a time of both anxiety and anticipation about what will happen when more than a century of independent family ownership reaches its end.
Actually, Dow Jones & Co was not family-owned. It was a public company controlled by the Bancroft family through a two-tier share voting structure and it has been bought by News Corporation, a public company controlled by the Murdoch family through a two-tier share voting structure. I am not sure how much of a change in status this amounts to.
Granted, Dow Jones was a small company and News Corp is a big one. Granted also that the Bancrofts did not take a view on editorial content while Mr Murdoch has ink all over his fingers. I still find that bald assertion of the Journal losing its "independence" debatable.
This is particularly so when reported in The New York Times, a newspaper that presumably regards itself as "independent" but is owned by a public company controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family through a two-tier share voting structure.
Independence can be in the eye of the beholder.
That the structure of the shareholding hasn’t constitutively changed does not imply that there will not be a change in management style that hurts journalistic integrity. Murdoch’s fingers have been covered in ink for some time, and there is scant solid evidence that he intends to wash his hands. What matters is that those who now control Dow Jones have shown that they do not value good journalism.
What may preserve the WSJ’s high standard is that its readership would not tolerate its lowering - or, perhaps, those that habitually read the WSJ’s (historically right-wing) editorials may be ideologically aligned with Murdoch and would not react so negatively to it influencing the rest of the paper.
Posted by: Tom Joseph | December 14th, 2007 at 5:42 am | Report this comment