Not that anyone reading this has doubted my warnings here, here, and here about what Rupert Murdoch’s control of The Wall Street Journal will bring, but can you imagine a Murdoch newspaper running today’s front-page Journal story by Nicholas Zamiska exposing the perils of health-care privatization in China?

Everyone knows that, unlike today's still-pre-Rupert Journal, Murdoch’s media have kow-towed so shamelessly to China’s ugly Communist Party that he dropped BBC reporting from his satellite service there and cancelled his HarperCollins house’s publication of books Chinese officials found offensive, such as the memoirs of the last British governor of Hong Kong.

Just imagine how Murdoch would feel if one of his reporters exposed a scandal in health care that raised doubts about privatization – especially if it revealed what today’s Journal does.

Zamiska’s report is shocking American physicians (as interviews in the story itself make clear) with the revelation that Chinese doctors at public hospitals, sometimes working on the side to make a buck, are pushing thousands of mental patients into exotic, sometimes damaging brain-drillings that are barred in the rest of the world except for extreme cases. Desperate Chinese families have shelled out life savings and gone deeply into debt for these procedures in hopes of uplifting depressed and schizophrenic offspring.

That’s explosive in itself, but what are the chances you’ll read sentences like the following in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal after he formally takes ownership next month or early year?

China’s system is vulnerable to abuse because doctors make as much as 90% of their income through bonuses tied to business they generate…

Under Mao Ze Dong, the state provided basic but near-universal health care. The safety net was gradually dismantled as Beijing began privatizing health care in the 1980s, leaving individuals – and thousands of ailing state-run hospitals – to fend for themselves.

That last sentence appears again in a chart, “Cerebral Matter,” that highlights the main points of the piece. Well, maybe the sentence would appear in a Murdoch paper, too, on the grounds that the best tonic for the poor and sickly is the bracing draughts of risk they take as they “fend for themselves.”

But leave aside big questions about health care for a moment if you really want to appreciate the need for serious journalism like this. Zamiska notes that “the health department of the People’s Liberation Army” -- which still nominally runs many Chinese hospitals -- “agreed to do a ’thorough investigation’ in response to written questions from The Wall Street Journal about the surgeries.”

Under Murdoch, the government won’t have to do that, and thorough investigations will be conducted only at the behest of politicians whose purposes only accidentally include bringing justice to the suffering families whose ordeals and documents Zamiska risked those politicians' wrath to reveal.