Soccer Dad

The path to irrelevance

Gleefully trashing his former employer, David Ignatius writes in The path that led to Murdoch

For Journal alumni, the past decade has been like watching a car wreck in slow motion. The people driving the car were our friends, the journalists we respected most. Now an ambulance of sorts, in the person of Rupert Murdoch, has arrived to pick up the bodies.

People will bemoan what Murdoch does to the Journal, no matter what it is. They will say that he is killing a great newspaper. But the sad part of this story is that "the empire," as we reporters once liked to call it, was already dying -- and that so many of its wounds were self-inflicted.

It's sort of odd reading this from one of the most vapid and dense op-ed columnists around. As Maryland Conservatarian wrote about a recent column

Actually, I have no idea what David Ignatius is saying…which is alright because I doubt anyone else reading him will gleam anything useful from this piece

It is a sentiment I often feel when I'm reading Ignatius too.

Ignatius may cast no tears over the acquisition of his old paper by Rupert Murdoch, but it isn't like he's exactly been covering himself in glory during the past 20 years.

But still I wonder is it that bad that Murdoch is acquiring the Wall Street Journal? Did he really destroy the Times of London as critics predicted when he purchased that institution?

The Spine doesn't have any such worries.

And as for the reliability of family control: what about the Times? Could Rupert do worse to the Journal than the Sulzbergers have done to the Times?

Remember there is always the Financial Times out there, eager to compete with the WSJ. That is a big constraint. Also Rupert is very smart. And so is James.

But Jay Ambrose might well put David Ignatius's fears to rest, to the reporting staff of the Journal isn't exactly a hotbed of conservative ideologues.

Conservatives have reason for concern, but it has chiefly been liberals worrying themselves silly about Rupert Murdoch’s $5 billion deal to purchase Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal. They should cheer up. The incessantly maligned media mogul has conceivably saved a publication that, among mainstream newspapers in this country, may be without leftist peer. In its news sections, that is.

Still what Ambrose points out that is important is that Murdoch plans to make the Journal part of something bigger.

It’s largely because of those holdings that the purchase made sense for Murdoch and that the prospects of the Journal are vastly lifted. He can use the Journal’s outstanding talent to help create an interlinked TV-newspaper-online financial-reporting organization that just may leave competitors far behind while soaking up oceans of advertising.

Finally Ambrose points to the one factor that sets the Journal apart from most other newspapers these days.

Comfort can be found in this fact, though it would be more comforting, still, if American journalism returned to the sort of standards pronounced early in the history of the paper as it began to establish itself as America’s foremost financial news source: Opinion is to stay out of the news. Get that old ideal more firmly entrenched in mainstream media outlets today, and it would be yet more difficult for even so forceful a personality as Murdoch to push editors around, which can in fact happen.

The ideological divide between the Journal's opinion and news pages is obvious. It is not at all clear that such a divide exists at most major newspapers. Instead of taking aim at his former employers perhaps Ignatius should be taking instruction.

wall street journal, rupert murdoch.