RM + WSJ: Let's Do The Math

While much of organized journalism recoils in horror from Rupert Murdoch's latest business gamble, let's see, as a thought experiment, if we can construct a case for his taking over the Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper business is battered these days, with rich folks buying up properties at fire-sale prices and proceeding to slash costs. Avista Capital Partners just cut 50 newsroom jobs at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Philadelphia public relations executive Brian Tierney laid off 71 at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Chicago real-estate mogul Sam Zell hasn't taken a wrecking ball to the Tribune papers yet, but the chain's jewel, the Los Angeles Times, announced plans to eliminate another 150 editorial jobs. And none of these new owners had a previous day of newspaper experience.

Along comes Murdoch with a generous offer to buy Dow Jones, and he's not talking about slashing costs. In fact, he told the New York Times he wants to expand the Journal's Washington coverage.

Love him or hate him, the Australian-born newspaperman knows something about running media businesses. He created a fourth American network, won the rights to NFL football, built the top-rated cable news channel and snatched up the hugely popular networking site MySpace. Now, at 76, he wants to own the nation's premier financial newspaper so badly he offered to pay two-thirds more than the parent company's stock was worth.

Murdoch runs a successful public company in News Corp., but he has shown a high tolerance for losing money on such properties as the New York Post and the Weekly Standard. And since the Journal already has a pugnaciously conservative editorial page, the impact there would be minimal.

The concern, of course, is the news pages, and whether Murdoch can keep his thumb off the journalistic scale. Is he smart enough to realize that meddling would ruin the very asset he thinks is worth $5 billion?

The record is not encouraging, and not because Murdoch is a committed conservative; rather, he is a man of shifting political alliances whose media outlets tend to follow his lead.

He is a throwback to the William Randolph Hearst era, when publishers were openly partisan, made backroom deals and even ran for office. And Murdoch makes no secret of his views. At a conference last month, he praised President Bush as "persuasive, strong and articulate" and told Journal Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot: "Apart from your newspaper and mine, there's a sort of monolithic attack on him every day of the year."

This is an owner who thought nothing of donating $1 million to the California Republican Party in 1996 or, more recently, hosting a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. Anyone who thinks that didn't result in more respectful coverage of the senator in the New York Post hasn't been reading that paper very carefully.

To win control of the nearly bankrupt Times of London and Sunday Times in the early 1980s, the owner of the tabloid Sun -- famous for its topless Page Three girls -- made promises of editorial independence. Harold Evans, who was later ousted as Sunday Times editor, says Murdoch broke those promises. In a book, interestingly enough, Evans wrote that Murdoch ordered up more sports pages at the expense of financial coverage, saying: "What do you want this [garbage] for, anyway? Two pages is plenty for business news."

Murdoch and his British newspapers were staunch supporters of Margaret Thatcher. But after a dinner with Tony Blair, followed by a Blair appearance at a News Corp. conference, the Sun hailed the Labor leader's "Maggie-style crusade" to "make Britain fit for the 21st century."

Murdoch's willingness to play politics while pursuing business with China is well documented. He dropped the BBC from his satellite television service after complaints from the Chinese, and his HarperCollins publishers killed a book by a former Hong Kong governor that criticized Chinese officials. As Slate's Jack Shafer and others have observed, the Journal won a Pulitzer last month for reporting on dangerous conditions and inequality in China. Would such reporting fall out of favor if Murdoch ran the place?