"Rupert Murdoch has grown so desperate in his attempt to buy Dow Jones and its Wall Street Journal that he'll tell any lie he thinks will help," wrote Slate's Jack Shafer on May 24.

In half a dozen columns, Shafer himself has sounded a bit desperate to expose Murdoch's lies in order to discredit his bid. He's right to note that "Murdoch doesn't exasperate because he's a conservative; he exasperates because he has no principles." But the ownership and investment system which Murdoch is gaming doesn't have any principles, either. It will take more than investigative journalism, satire, or commentary like Shafer's or mine to pose the challenge that needs to be posed.

I share the desperation about Murdoch for two reasons. Contrary to a perception common on the left, the Journal's news pages are ethical and sparkling -- unlike its speculator-worshipping fact-challenged editorial pages. Second, my cousin James Wechsler was editorial page editor of the crusading, liberal New York Post when Murdoch bought it from publisher Dolly Schiff in 1977 and promised to maintain its political independence, only to make it a daily reminder that Australia was founded as a penal colony.

But it can have astonished no one that, after some fretting about journalistic integrity, the Journal's Bancroft family owners agreed to meet with Murdoch as the price of Dow Jones stock surged: What, besides profit, could have driven Dow's mostly anonymous whorl of shareholders, whose composition changes daily at the clicks of brokers' mouses?

The Bancrofts do retain legal control of Dow Jones and the Journal through Class B super-voting stock, along with some portraits of ancestors whose pieties about journalism as a public trust still ring in their ears. They might be able to withstand Murdoch's carrots and sticks for the sake of something besides free-market freedom – the freedom of intelligent stewards to run a company by more than just its bottom line.

They might, that is, if times were better and if some Bancrofts weren't dividend hogs themselves. "As a rule," the Journal itself reported, "trustees have a fiduciary duty to serve the interests of the beneficiaries, but the Bancroft trust documents generally don't stipulate that the trustees must maximize the value of the trust's holdings of Dow Jones shares."

But now that Murdoch's offer has driven up the price of Dow's more public, Class A shares, those brokers' mouses will roar if the family turns him down. The stock will plummet as greed whirls elsewhere, and shareholder lawsuits may claim that the family abdicated its fiduciary responsibilities. New offers by others may "save the day," but for what? That's the important question.

In the republic we used to have alongside loose-limbed markets, informed citizens (including capitalists) were supposed to choose when to rise above narrow self-interest. Voters could organize to curb or even contravene some market forces to achieve public goals which self-interested consumers and companies can't achieve alone. The hitch is that for some time now corporations have enjoyed the legal status of "persons," entitled by law and enjoined by their charters only to maximize profits and market share. The consequences for republican freedom are closing in on us all.

If a General Electric subsidiary can profit by pumping porn movies into hotel rooms, why not? It's legal. Corporations are "persons" entitled to freedom of speech, no matter that the republic's founders intended this freedom only for persons who could persuade one another, in open debate, to set aside self-interest sometimes for the greater good. When was the last time you debated Murdoch's News Corporation? If he can make more by scaring or titillating customers than by informing them, no one can balk. If the Bancrofts balk, other Dow Jones shareholders may balk at them.

On the job, every media-corporation employee has to do whatever management thinks will glue the most eyeballs to the newspaper or TV screen. Citizen activists who try to talk with corporate minions in civic terms often have an out-of-body experience. Just reading or watching what's churned out by the glad-handing, goosing, scare-mongering producers of Fox and even the NBC Nightly News is an out-of-body experience for anyone seeking enlightenment or reinforcement of the values and virtues without which no republic can cohere.

Murdoch is especially bad here because his huge engines so brilliantly stimulate fear, mistrust, and impulse buying, often subliminally. But he's merely an especially duplicitous excrescence of bottom-line imperatives that have corrupted many great newspaper families and broadcast pioneers before the Murdochs and the Bancrofts. Even the most civic-minded heirs must bow to shareholder pressures like those Murdoch has goosed here.

Journalists' responses are often wrenching and sad. Newspapers that were dying through no fault of theirs amid conglomerate and technological upheaval get editors and writers whose consumerist pandering only makes their papers deserve the deaths they're dying. Some editors attempt a phony irreverence, offering us noisy simulacra of freewheeling controversy in which nothing I've mentioned above can be discussed. Some even bait liberals at home and enemies abroad. That distracts these courtiers and servants of the quarterly bottom line from facing their own slavery and fills them with illusions of liberation and righteous mission.

But let's try a less desperate, less damning approach to capitalist masters. I'd like the Bancrofts to meet Matt Pottinger, a former employee of theirs who has put his life on the line, hoping to defend the very freedoms the Bancroft family claims it wants to strengthen.

Some Bancrofts may recall opening their Wall Street Journals one morning shortly before Christmas, 2005 and reading an op-ed piece by Pottinger entitled, "Mightier than the Pen."

"When people ask why I recently left The Wall Street Journal to join the Marines," he began, "I usually have a short answer. It felt like the time had come to stop reporting events and get more directly involved. But that's not the whole answer" – especially because he was already 31 when he changed venues.

Reporting on China had taught him "what a non-democratic country can do to its citizens" – and to reporters. He learned "that governments that behave this way are not the exception, but the rule…. That makes you think about protecting your country…. What impresses you most, when you don't have them day to day, are the institutions that distinguish the U.S.: the separation of powers, a free press, the right to vote, and a culture that values civic duty and service, to name but a few.

"I'm not an uncritical, rah-rah American. Living abroad has sharpened my view of what's wrong with my country, too. It's obvious that we need to reinvent ourselves in various ways, but we should also be allowed to do it from within, not according to someone else's dictates."

The Journal received letters of soaring praise for Pottinger from its editorial page readership's many armchair warriors. But what if he's risking his life to defend the Bancrofts' right to choose maximum gains over good journalism? When he signed up to protect his country, he seemed not to have noticed who and what is endangering our freedom to reinvent ourselves from within. What if the most immediate threat comes from Dick Cheney, not Saddam Hussein, or from Murdoch (and the Bancrofts, if they sell to him), not Al Quaeda?

Marines can't protect republican freedoms against predators like Murdoch. A liberal capitalist society has to rely on virtues and beliefs which neither the liberal state nor free markets themselves can enforce or nourish because, in the name of freedom, they can't draw distinctions between bold free spirits and parasitical free riders. Citizens alone can draw such distinctions, exercising their sovereign freedom to discover, describe, debate, and legislate a few necessary parameters.

That's just what good journalism promotes. Two years after joining the Marines, Pottinger wrote another op ed, on May 31, entitled "A Trust Murdoch Won't Keep" and addressed to "Dear Shareholders of Dow Jones & Co." Writing from Iraq's Anbar province, where his unit had just barely escaped a crater-generating explosion, he told of his realization that journalism like that of "the Wall Street Journal isn't a commodity -- it's a vital national resource. It is possible that there are only three or four U.S newspapers of its reach still willing to do what it takes to dig that last foot for a story and to strictly observe the 'church-state' divisions among news, opinion and an owner's broader commercial interests.

"It is no coincidence that Rupert Murdoch does not own such a paper. His mission is to blur the lines between church and state…. Some things in America need to be protected, and none more than a free and intrepid press…. [T]he loss of [the Journal's] rigorous, undiluted reporting would be a hole in America's heart deeper than that hole in the road."

Pottinger gives damning specifics about Murdoch. How did the Journal letter writers who'd praised him in 2005 respond now that his warnings pointed back home? We've not heard from them, because the Journal's speculator-driven op-ed pages, which are panting for Murdoch, didn't publish Pottinger this time. Patriotism is fine on those pages as long as it's window dressing. Pottinger's true patriotism had to run in the Washington Post.

The republican freedoms Pottinger invoked aren't only American, of course; they're "the cause of all mankind," as Tom Paine put it. They depend not only on the right to dispose of capital as one wishes but on capitalists' obligation to keep public trust. We aren't just speculators and self-marketers. We're fellow citizens, or we are lost. Profit-seeking that bypasses the republican brain and habits of the heart on its way to the lower viscera, degrading our lives together in order to spur sales, is an enemy of our freedom.

Those who sparked and led a fight for that freedom in Paine's time pledged their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor" within and against what they'd recently believed was their own English realm and monarch. Now Matt Pottinger has pledged his life and fortune and sacred honor against enemies abroad, but also, apparently, at home. Can the Bancrofts pledge at least some of their fortune and honor to rebuff Murdoch? Rejecting his offer would be risky, but it might be an American shot for freedom heard round the liberal capitalist world.