Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has quite publicly put up about $5 billion to buy-out Dow Jones & Company, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, News Corp. has cash on hand to give all shareholders more than their current stakes are worth on the stock market.

What is Murdoch after? By most accounts, Murdoch’s ostensible plan is to draw on the unparalleled brand name of the “paper of record of the economy” for a cable network that News Corp. plans for later this year. That network will plan to unseat CNBC’s primacy in the cable financial news business. Reaction from media reformers and the Journal’s own union came fast and furiously after the announcement last week. Um, they’re opposed.

Early signals are that the Bancroft family, which ones 62% of the vote on the Dow Jones & Co. board, are also opposed. It doesn’t want Murdoch to do to the white shoe media company what he has brazenly done to other media properties. That’s to say that the Bancrofts and other major investors actually want the Journal’s investigative journalism divisions to continue seeking out truth over sensation and the overtly right-wing agenda of the notorious baron. At least, that’s what we hope right now. Apparently, Murdoch is a real charmer (money will do that), and deals are being negotiated in the boardroom or where ever these things happen as we speak.

So this is what it’s come to. What does it mean that progressives now are rooting for the Journal’s old guard? The Journal’s opinion pages, after all, are as dogmatically neo-con or right-wing as anything spewing from hacks like William Kristol (The Weekly Standard’s debt is graciously shouldered by owner News Corp) and Bill O’Reilly (the biggest big mouth in the News Corp lot). Make no mistake about it: for the Bancrofts, this unsolicited buy-out offer is all about high-minded things like truth and integrity.

The Journal’s investigative news departments have broken many of the most important stories in the recent past. Its most remarkable investigations have uncovered, for example, insider trading in the 1980s, the illegal and convoluted dealings lurking behind Enron’s amazing rise in the 1990s, and the prevalent and illegal practice today of backdating stock as a way of compensating managers at the nation’s biggest companies. The editorial page and the news pages are, as they say, night and day. For all their misplaced and staunch newconism, the Dow Jones leaders of the newspaper seem to appreciate that there ought to be a firewall between opinion and news.

The stock market, however, appears to be betting on Murdoch. Shares are up almost 50% since the announcement last week. Who’s your money on?

So what else is new? The infamous media baron of our day has been after media properties like the Journal for decades. The notable thing is that News Corps.’ most recent effort seems counterintuitive. Newspaper circulation is declining according to the most recent Pew studies. (Circulation does not include the number of hits or eyeballs any given newspaper’s online presence gets.) The catch, of course, is that there are a handful of national newspapers whose circulation and distribution continue to grow and generate profits. The most notable biggies are USA Today, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Moreover, these major players have diversified their brands into all kinds of information or news services. Dow Jones has been among the best at it.

So Murdoch is just doing what he’s almost always done: seeking out media properties that can generate money. And, in the process, he is flouting antiquated and obsolete FCC rules that for decades have tried to tame people just like him.

So, assuming the market is right, we’ll have no choice but to reorient ourselves to a world even more dominated by Murdoch. We’ll have to wait and see how committed Murdoch is to preserving the very thing that has made the Journal’s investigative news arm what it is today. That is a scary, scary thing to count on – even as it relates to the Wall Street Journal.