There are limits to the effectiveness of Rupert Murdoch’s
charm offensive, it would seem. Judging by today’s news, indeed, the offensive
seems to have worked only on the journalists who were physically in the room
with him when he was putting his case.
On Sunday, the reporter who interviewed him, Andrew Ross Sorkin,
gave him a follow-up
wet kiss in the NYT, in which he explained that "Mr. Murdoch may be
the perfect publisher of The Wall Street Journal." Among Rupert’s attractions
is that he’ll increase spending, rather than cutting it, Sorkin says, along
with the fact that he’s "farsighted" and "creative". He
even goes so far as to say that selling to Rupert is the best way of "preserving
the Dow Jones legacy".
On Monday, however, Sorkin’s colleague David Carr gets out
the long knives. He doesn’t believe for a minute Murdoch’s protestations that
he would ensure editorial independence for the Journal, and he also sees, contra
Sorkin, "a tough scrubbing on costs" at a newspaper which has already
suffered no little cost-cutting.
And the man who is possibly the single most influential shareholder in Dow
Jones, James H Ottaway Jr, released a statement
which was harsher still:
[Murdoch] has for a long time expressed his personal, political and business
biases through his newspapers and television channels,” Mr. Ottaway
said. The Post “regularly runs biased news stories and headlines supporting
his friends, political candidates and public policies, and attacks people
he personally opposes,” while at Fox News, “one man’s political
opinions have become the editorial and news policy.”
He accused Mr. Murdoch of caving in to political pressure to advance his business
interests, contrasting the actions of a News Corporation property, Star TV,
in bowing to Chinese government censorship, with The Journal’s editorial
page censure of Chinese human rights abuses. “I doubt its freedom to
criticize the Chinese government would continue under Murdoch ownership,”
he said.
The right answer to the News Corporation bid, Mr. Ottaway added, is that “Dow
Jones is not for sale, at any price, to Rupert Murdoch.”
Of course, the only way of ensuring that Dow Jones never be sold to Rupert
Murdoch is to ensure that Dow Jones never be sold. Anybody else could and quite
possibly would simply flip the property.
Nevertheless, Dow Jones stock is still trading over $55 a share: the market
still believes a deal will be done. As David Carr says, "brute-force capital,
like flood waters, always finds a way to break through."