Is This Supposed to be a Death Blow?

The Times ran its second "Murdochracy" article today, and again told us stuff we already knew, with a few added details. The upshot seemed to be that Rupert, unlike a grownup news organization, was willing to do favors for the powers that be in return for access to markets. On China, Rupert's hands are dirty. We all knew this already. He has consistently trimmed his news and content to suit the Party, and has gotten some but not all that much in return. In this, he differs from the other media conglomerates only in the degree to which he has succeeded, which also corresponds to the degree to which we know about his dealings. This is not to say that the point of the Times piece is wrong, but that it does not make the larger point: that it is the nature of media conglomerates to pervert journalism. Instead, by framing Rupert as egregious, it makes the opposite point.

Rupert's operatives have sort of swatted back, and the Times piece does the honorable thing:

News Corporation officials in Beijing and Hong Kong declined to comment for this article. After The New York Times began a two-part series on Monday about how Mr. Murdoch operates his company, the News Corporation issued a statement:

“News Corp. has consistently cooperated with The New York Times in its coverage of the company. However, the agenda for this unprecedented series is so blatantly designed to further the Times’s commercial self interests — by undermining a direct competitor poised to become an even more formidable competitor — that it would be reckless of us to participate in their malicious assault. Ironically, The Times, by using its news pages to advance its own corporate business agenda, is doing the precise thing they accuse us of doing without any evidence.”

Of course News Corp is right, in one sense, and wrong in the other. The agenda of the Times is clear--it has invested resources in a rare and highly visible way on a story that will work against News Corp's takeover of Dow Jones. But it's not about the business interests of the NYT Corp. We know it's just News Corp they object to--that the Times doesn't have the same problem with and wouldn't run the same stories on GE or Google or any other player taking over Dow Jones. Rupert doesn't belong because he's a barbarian, not because combining Dow Jones with News Corp would make it too powerful a competitor. In fact, any other suitor would pose a bigger bidness challenge to NYT Corp. Rupert would move WSJ toward a different market niche--less about prestige public affairs journalism and more about simply money, I suspect--turn it more into the IBD.

No, it's ideology, not financial self-interest, that impels coverage like this. Hooray for ideology, when it works. Like a broken clock, the notion of professional autonomy in journalism within the media industries is going to produce the correct time once or twice a day (depending on the type of clock, of course). I was hoping that this series would be one of them. No; but it could have been worse.