Murdoch’s Apologists on Parade
Having lived through two monumentally wasteful American wars and the souffle-like collapse of several newspapers, I like to think myself tough-minded and knowledgeable in the ways of the world. But it never ceases to amaze me that the progenitors and captains of such calamities always come on as the tough realists and strong leaders – and often bow out that way, too -- while convincing most people that it’s the dissenters who are naïve. Call it the anthropology of power: People don’t trust nay-sayers who have no capital or troops, and hence no cachet.
Noticing recently that one of my T-shirts was “Made in Vietnam,” I wondered if free-market powers would have defeated Hanoi’s socialism, for good or ill, without sending 50,000 young Americans and countless more Vietnamese to grisly deaths. At least Robert McNamara, the super-confident Secretary of Defense who computerized all that, admitted later he’d led us into a fog of war. But Henry Kissinger, who deepened that fog and folly, is unrepentant and often celebrated as the bearer of Metternichian wisdom.
Now comes a new parade of apologists and accommodators for Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal. All’s well, they tell us, although, of course, we must watch Murdoch skeptically (and impotently) as he makes the paper’s journalism his own.
Never mind that 3700-plus young Americans have been blown to bits in desert folly in no small part because 80% of Murdoch’s Fox News viewers, who include watchers of all the TV sets at U.S. military facilities, believed war rationales that were lies. Never mind that they get their politics from watching Fox factotum Nick Cavuto yell at and dress down Senator Dick Durbin and other Democrats he is supposedly interviewing.
Never mind that Murdoch’s media, very much unlike the present Journal, kow-towed so shamelessly to China’s ugly Communist Party that he even dropped the BBC’s straightforward reporting from his satellite service there and cancelled publication of some “offensive” books. (Maybe that makes Murdoch a good Maoist!)
Never mind, because, last night, on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Norman Pearlstine, former managing editor of the Journal, reassured us -- just as Murdoch himself assured TIME’s Eric Pooley -- that he wouldn’t spend $5 billion to acquire the Journal if he intended to ruin it.
And George W. Bush wouldn’t have run for President if he intended to ruin government as we know it.
It matters how you define “ruin,” and the truth in both cases is that too few players and citizens have a civic-republican understanding of what makes journalism good or government strong. So we don’t begin to realize what’s at stake.
Some on the “worse is better” left don’t care what happens to the Journal because they’ve let its right-wing editorial pages blind them to the bravery and discipline that go into its news coverage of, say China, or, say, American poverty.
Even worse than the “Who cares?” crowd are soothsayers of the center, like Pearlstine and the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, who reminisces fondly this morning about his stint at the Journal but decides that it was dying, anyway: “People will bemoan what Murdoch does to the Journal, no matter what it is. They will say that he is killing a great newspaper. But the sad part of this story is that ‘the empire,’ as we reporters once liked to call it, was already dying -- and that so many of its wounds were self-inflicted.”
Well, yes: Some newspapers that have been dying as venues for serious reporting, through no fault of their own amid conglomerate and technological upheaval, have found themselves with editors and writers whose consumerist pandering only make those papers deserve the deaths they're dying.
But not the Journal. The real reason for its travails is given by another soothsayer, this one an unreflective apostle of conglomerate capitalist logic. William Zabel, a trusts and estates lawyer, yesterday stepped right up for the captains of calamity (in this case, the Bancroft family members who sold the Journal to Murdoch) to tell New York Times readers that “The requirement for prudent investing by the trustees overrules the right to retain the Dow Jones stock. The lack of any competing offer would appear to make it legally unreasonable for them not to sell.”
Talk like that, untouched by dissenting analyses such as mine here, has a mind-freezing effect on most people, especially college students, who’ve barely heard of thinking that assigns citizens, and hence boardroom directors, a little more sovereignty over meaningless market riptides than Zabel ever would.
And if most citizens’ and opinion-makers’ minds are frozen like this, what can one expect of their political leaders? Well, this time even I found myself amazed to read in the Times on July 18 that “Mr. Murdoch's potential stewardship of The Journal gained an unlikely endorsement yesterday, given both his and The Journal's traditionally conservative politics. In an interview, former Vice President Al Gore defended Mr. Murdoch as someone who supports independent voices and keeps his word. Mr. Gore was referring to his own experience negotiating a contract to carry Current TV, a cable channel he helped found.
“Mr. Gore, who has spoken out against media consolidation by conglomerates like the News Corporation in the past, said that he was mainly concerned with ownership of broadcast outlets. ‘That's an issue -- but on the question of his openness to independent points of view, I want you to know that my experience has been that when he gave his word, he kept his word.'”
“That’s an issue” – it sounds like the reporter had to remind Gore what’s in his new book, The Assault on Reason, which I described here. But, hey, Murdoch kept his word to Al on a business deal, and that’s what counts in America today. And, hey, he’s gracious to Hillary Clinton, too.
I may as well close by covering my own rear like everyone else in this sorry parade. But I’ll do it only slightly. Contrary to what the “worse is better” crowd thinks, Murdoch’s Journal will probably get better before it gets worse. As I wrote here last month, “…let’s assume that for the first year after he takes over, Murdoch will pump more resources into the Journal than it has ever enjoyed, transform its outreach, and sustain its reportorial independence, just enough to get his critics on record saying they were wrong. Then the Journal will begin its inexorable, tawdry decline into a Murdochian half-life…”
My worry is that by then, few in our amnesiac, gullible former republic will notice what’s been lost. They’ll have forgotten what real journalism and good government are, anyway. Edward Gibbon’s description of how Rome seeded its own decay as a republic even at the peak of its felicity and power jumps right off the page these days. John Adams saw it coming here, too even in 1786, and warned us:
“‘Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud’ is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of the people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching…. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, … until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
Good journalism bucks swift currents that run toward lassitude in republican vigilance and demagoguery as its alternative. Because breasting those currents isn’t profitable, it ‘s becoming harder and lonelier than ever, although publications like New York Times (which Murdoch will try to outfox with his new Journal) and the Columbia Journalism Review have been keeping the faith. These days, increasingly, a good reporter’s calling is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the journalists.
Comments (23)
as a child of the sixties--witness of the "irrational exuberance" of the time--I bemoan the apathy and moral moral lassitude that grips our young.
From whence will come rejuvinating forces to save us from the barbarians at the gate?
Unfortunately the barbarians are within.
August 2, 2007 1:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm guessing that the numbers wouldn't be very different.
August 2, 2007 2:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
As Bill Bryson wrote in "Notes From a Small Island" of his experience at the Times of London, expect a new editor/publisher to stand before the staff of the WSJ and similarly announce that they are moving the operations to some cheap piece of land outside the city with new, technologically advanced equipment, remove labor protections and labor union affiliations, fire a good deal of the staff.
At the time, of course, Britain was going through tough labor union problems as the US was at the time when Reagan fire air traffic controllers, a very dangerous policy indeed, and as France is today. The Times was under heavy fire from a printers union strike when (or following) Murdoch takeover. This is what Bryson says, "On January 24, 1986, the management of The Times abruptly sacked 5250 members of the most truculent Unions.." And then he goes on to describe going to work through picket lines and then how the staff was given an ultimatum by their editor (in the hilarious tone of Bryson) that they'd be moving from Fleet St. to the new offices in Wapping, East of London and not very desirable, swamp filled land, or they would be sacked.
Even through some of the pick-me-up talk of Ignatius, Gore and others, look for staff to be demoralized, quit, then new, younger, and cheaper journos come in to replace responsible, reliable veterans, the format of the paper to go to sound-bites (as Murdoch has said publicly that the lengthy reports turn him off) and un-WSJ-like color photos for greater appearance, and coverage of and greater priority to more entertainment news, and the WSJ product integrity will decrease, as is the pattern with Murdoch ventures.
August 2, 2007 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Fine column, Jim Sleeper:
While it probably isn't a good idea to romanticize the past, there were giants in the days of Ben Bradley, Walter Lippmann, James Reston, and hosts of others. Now the Ombudsman of the Washington Post puts her imprimatur on the journalistic worth of cleavage and haircuts:
There's populism for you, bread and circuses for the masses, So perhaps print journalism in the country is beyond redemption regardless of Murdoch's privateering ways. And Al Gore's comments make me less eager for him to get into the contest this year. Hopefully they don't represent the best of his thinking on this.
Apart from the principal issue of your essay, I was struck by this:
I wondered something similar in one of my classes last year, in which I had two young Vietnamese international students. It was an intellectual history survey of the idea of Democracy.
We're starting a cooperative venture with a private university in Ho Chi Minh City now...student exchanges, faculty changes, the works. I doubt Fox will approve, but we're below its radar anyhow. Thanks again for a good read.
aMike
August 2, 2007 7:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
On Robert McNamara: Regarding Vietnam, he wrote:
"We were wrong, terribly wrong."
http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/mcnamara/top.htm
Well, Bob, you sure got that right, better late than never. You got that nice bank job while 20,000 more young Americans died in that faraway land. Sure took you a while to see the light, considering all your systems analysis experience. I guess you weren't too bright after all.
August 2, 2007 7:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Interestingly enough, even some of the wingers I know admit quite openly that Murdoch will probably turn the WSJ into a rag. What's particularly interesting here is that they seem a little apprehensive about it, as they work in financial services, and know what an excellent publication it has always been, and how important it is to the industry. It's kind of a tacit admission that Fox News, which they all watch and argue, quite passionately, is the only "unbiased" news source, is actually, well, what it is.
Crooked cops, crooked lawyers, crooked judges, crooked politicians, crooked doctors, crooked scientists, crooked clergymen -- but no crooked journalists. An amazing record for an amazing class of people.
August 2, 2007 7:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
WSJ RIP!
There is a silver lining. Under Murdoch WSJ news pages will become as disreputable as its editorial page and that is a good thing. Its news pages gave cover to its unhinged radical right wing editorial page. That is all gone now.
Re; Norman Pearlstine
Not surprising. Pearlstine probably wants to stay on Murdoch's good side. Who knows he might need a job some day.
August 2, 2007 11:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I see today's journalism as quite similar to baseball, each has a major and minor league. The major leaguers, Russert, David Broder, Bob Schiefer, Britt Hume, Stephanopolis, Wolf Blitzer, Chris Matthews, etc. sit in their perches and won't do, say, or act in any way that threatens their perch. They go up to the line of good journalism but once there, won't cross over and follow a story substantively. This is how we got into Iraq and why a majority of the public thought Iraq and Saddam were involved in 9/11.
Minor leagures like David Gregory, John King, Anderson Cooper, Major Garrett etc, all hope to advance to the Majors and won't do, say, or act in any way that might lessen their chances to climb the ladder into the Majors. No one is going to criticize Murdoch as they may seek employment from him some day.
Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler tells of how some of them sit in their multi million dollar mansions on Nantucket where ex GE head Jack Welch holds court.
August 3, 2007 3:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for these comments. For all of you looking in, a picture may be worth a thousand words. Have a look at Jim Fallows' quick blog comment and photo on the prospects of Murdoch takeover:
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/reading_comprehension_quiz_chi.php#more
Don Bacon may want to know that I have been very public and sometimes strident critic of the New York Times and that I will continue to be. (See my Liberal Racism, chapter 3, for instance.) But at least there's something there worth criticizing, because there are some serious professionals there who take note.
To aMike, thanks; and, given your students' backgrounds and the exchange program you mention, do check out that Fallows bog and his articles on China in The Atlantic.
Miri11 gives us the "worse is better" logic of the old left: The worse things get, the better it will be for progressive forces, because people will see through the perfidy of the ruling class. Not. A society can be dragged down and down and down -- from either end, incidentally. That was the point of my quote from John Adams at the end of the piece, above.
August 3, 2007 5:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Watching Murdoch's promise not to change the New York Post to it becoming one big rightwing editorial was sad but not too serious thanks to the Daily News, the Times and Newsday. The Journal is unique in its focus on business news. One can only hope that the needs of readers for accurate business news will keep Murdoch from tampering with it too much. However, if it is true he only wants the brand for his new TV business channel one has to presume the Journal will never be the same news organ.
The irony is that on the web where only sex and business seems to make money the Journal suffered like all other newspapers. Ebay, Craigslist and all such sites like TPM have hammered papers.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
August 3, 2007 7:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Some days I wonder who causes the most damage to our system the 12 to 14 million illegal immigrants or the one legal one who is the subject of this piece. I might be willing to legalize the illegals if we could deport that slime ball and seize his American assets as public property and convert them into an American BBC like organ.
August 3, 2007 8:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
The problem with the Murdoch takeover will be the inevitable interference and elimination of fearless political reporting that exposes the powerful. That is where Murdoch's new editor in chief is going to slice. I can't imagine that the new WSJ will be able to break stories like problems at the FDA making sure food is safe or issues with Chinese products or corruption in Alaska. It's the political reporting that will be gutted. Remember Roger Ailes complaining that MSNCB and Bloomberg were "anti-corporation" in their reporting? If the news doesn't uphold the heroic narrative of free market enterprise and its leaders it will be cut. I know it is immensly childish and ultimately self defeating, I mean as an investor you need the unvarnished truth to place your cash properly, but this is how the people Murdoch hires think and he seems too old to change his ways now. Is there any hope with his sons? I don't know.
August 3, 2007 8:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
Damn, this was a great piece. I was applauding all the way up to the penultimate sentence: "Because breasting those currents isn’t profitable, it ‘s becoming harder and lonelier than ever, although publications like New York Times (which Murdoch will try to outfox with his new Journal) and the Columbia Journalism Review have been keeping the faith."
Gasp!! The NYT?? Keeping what faith??
Here are some excepts from Norman Solomon's "War Made Easy" regarding the New York Times.
p. 79: In February 1988, New York Times correspondent James LeMoyne wrote a vivid account of an El Salvador atrocity--the public execution of two peasants by FMLN guerrillas. But the event never occurred. It had been invented by a Salvadoran army propaganda officer and placed in a right-wing San Salvador newspaper--which LeMoyne read and reported as fact. It took six months petitioning before the Times would even acknowledge the error.
p. 120: Chris Hedges covered the Gulf War for the New York Times. "The notion that the press was used in the war is incorrect. It wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort. . .I boycotted the pool system, but my reports did not puncture the myth or question the grand crusade to free Kuwait. I allowed soldiers to grumble. I shed a little light on the lies spread to make the war look like a coalition, but i did not challenge in any real way the patriotism and jingoism that enthused the crowds back home. We all used the same phrases. We all looked at Iraq through he same lens."
p.121: On the [NYT] newspaper's op-ed page, columnist Thomas Friedman [regarding the 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia] made explicit his enthusiasm for destroying civilian necessities: "It should be lights out in Belgrade: Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and wr-related factory has to be targeted." On the front page of the NYT: NATO begn its second month of bombing against Yugoslavia today with new strikes against military targets that disrupted civilian electrical and water supplies."(sic)
And so, on and on.
Regarding Iraq, the NYT wrote p. 46: "he [Powell presented the United Nations and a global television audience yesterday with the most powerful case to date that Saddam Hussein stands in defiance of the Security Council . . ." and President Bush "showed a wise concern for international opinion." Along with Friedman as an Iraq War promoter there was the infamous Judith Miller who boosted the invasion of Iraq with false stories. p. 100: a NYT headline "A Solems Call for Toughness in Time of Peril," an Iraq analysis. The following week, a Times editorial expressed confidence in "the fortitude of average citizens, who are able to accept the cost of war whenever they are confident that the cause is right."
And just a few days ago and being used by the White House there was the pure propaganda piece, with more holes than Swiss cheese, "A War We Just Might Win" by O'Hanlon and Pollack.
There have also been articles on Iran stating (falsely) as a fact that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
The NYT--not keeping faith (with reality).
August 3, 2007 9:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Perfectly written, but then again I guess that's your job.
As a loyal reader of the WSJ for years, I just skip over the sociopathic editorials and feast on the actual news in the paper. Most other papers are just AP feeds with varying ad content. And they wonder why they die.
Murdoch will corrupt the Journal, no doubt, and the day I even begin to suspect I'll cancel. But it won't matter, he supposedly loses money hand over fist at the post and he keeps that going just as a personal mouth piece.
August 3, 2007 10:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Jim,
Thanks for responding to our rants. It's not typical on this site and I for one deeply appreciate it.
Re: "My worry is that by then, few in our amnesiac, gullible former republic will notice what’s been lost. They’ll have forgotten what real journalism and good government are, anyway. Edward Gibbon’s description of how Rome seeded its own decay as a republic even at the peak of its felicity and power jumps right off the page these days."
I'd like to suggest that "real journalism" is what we're engaged in here, something John Adams couldn't foresee. First a thoughtful, insightful piece and then some give-and-take, some ancillary facts and whatever in order to arrive at reality. Thoreau: "Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainment." [This was before shock-and-awe.]
As we discuss this, Yearly Kos is taking place in Chicago, with a lot of hoopla and visits by presidential candidates, an indicator on where the netroots are going. Let's continue to build and make Murdoch and his kind obsolete with this new journalism. Good government will take a little longer, I'm afraid.
August 3, 2007 10:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
from foreignpolicy.com
Everyone's biggest worry seems to be that Murdoch will force the WSJ to espouse his personal ideological viewpoint. There has always been a very thick wall between the editorial pages (which, frankly, are already far more ideologically conservative than Murdoch) and the rest of the paper. There's no reason to think that wall won't continue to stand. Managing Editor Marcus Brauchli is one of the most respected newsmen in all of media, and Murdoch has promised to leave him at the helm. In a memo to WSJ staffers, Brauchli vows he'll hold on to that independence, and if there's anyone who will stick to that promise, it's Brauchli. Plus, with so much attention over the past three months, Murdoch has become accountable to the media at large, not just to WSJ staffers.
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/5705
I guess Sleeper is suggesting that Brauchli will last about a year. Murdoch vs. Brauchli? No contest.
August 3, 2007 10:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm for what's done on sites like this, but 80% or more of what we do on these sites is utterly dependent, for its factual basis, on work done by reporters employed full-time by news organizations. At its best, actual reporting takes resources, teamwork, discipline, and high standards -- things that sites like this cannot and would not want to provide or impose, because our purpose here is different, and equally vital in its way.
A lot of what we do involves connecting dots that are already out there on the public record but have not been noticed or connected. That's a great boon, and sometimes even a liberation, for journalism as well a democracy. But without the resources and discipline of actual news organizations, a lot of those dots we connect wouldn't even be visible to us, except in some people's excited imaginations, and pretty soon we'd all just be shouting at one another or writing fiction. So we have to be humble enough to "know our place," and to give credit where credit is due, even though our role is sometimes so vital that it's like providing oxygen.
August 3, 2007 11:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
My Googling abilities failed me
or maybe I dreamt the whole thing. On one of the Public Radio shows...don't remember if it was The World, Morning Edition, All Things Considered, or Market Report, a conversation with an English editor (I think he worked for Murdoch over there) was held re: Murdoch and what he might do to the WSJ. One thing I remember him saying was that Murdoch would "tighten up the editing," that WSJ and NYT stories were too long, and that one shouldn't have to turn to p. 29A to complete reading the story.
This sounded a lot like dumbing down the WSJ to me. Did anyone else hear this, and if they did, can they give me a reference to help my fading memory? Thankee very much.
aMike
August 3, 2007 1:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mike,I'm pretty sure it was the NPR "Marketplace" host interviewing a British journalist (a woman), who did say something like that. Murdoch himself told Time Magazine's Eric Pooley that he didn't like the long, Page 1 features in the Journal, which he puts aside and never finishes.
But the real issue -- as some commentators here above have said well -- is whether fearless and intrepid reporting of problems in business and politics will continue under Murdoch. And there's just no evidence from his record that it will -- except when it suits his interests.
Again, this may not be evident for a year or so, partly because he'll be reorganizing the paper technologically and commercially as well as editorially.
August 3, 2007 2:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe almost relevant here, the Saturday interview in the NY Times business section, with the publisher of London's Independent (and also the Irish Independent) has a classic line. Maybe it's the Journal's future as well: "We’ve had to mutate: we’re not doing news any more."
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
August 4, 2007 5:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's especially pleasing to see TPM delivering actual, high quality reporting via Muckraker.
August 4, 2007 7:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the response. I'm glad I didn't imagine it. So, I guess the best we can hope for is fearless and intrepid reporting geared to Murdoch's attention span <grin></grin>. And the worst? To plagiarize Thomas Hobbes, reporting which is "nasty, brutish, and short".
aMike
August 4, 2007 8:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
"as a child of the sixties--witness of the "irrational exuberance" of the time--I bemoan the apathy and moral moral lassitude that grips our young."
They are behaving precisely as their narcissistic forbears (left and right) taught them to behave. Where the hell did you get the idea that the problems with America are a result of the "apathy and moral lassitude" of the under-30 crowd?
August 4, 2007 10:10 AM | Reply | Permalink