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  Davis Merritt  

Murdoch takeover bad for democracy

With his billions and the heft of his News Corp., Rupert Murdoch can buy almost anything he wants. The tragedy for America is that he wants its newspapers.

As I wrote last July when Murdoch was conning the Bancroft family into selling him Dow Jones Co. and the Wall Street Journal, his pledge that he would not abandon the principles of one of the nation's most important newspapers was simply not credible. He had promised the same thing when he bought the once-prestigious Times of London and promptly trashed it. Same with the New York Post. He knows how to manufacture and sell schlock.

His blandishments to the Bancrofts and the staffers at the Journal (aside from a 65 percent premium on their shares) included an agreement not to fire the top editor of the paper, the journalistically solid and well-liked Marcus Brauchli, without the approval of a five-person outside oversight committee.

Fewer than four months after Murdoch took over, Brauchli is gone (Murdoch called the committee last week to report Brauchli's "resignation"), and the Journal is in a meat-grinder reorganization that will turn a solid, in-depth business newspaper into Murdoch's personal vision of journalism, which is bad news for democracy. A study by the well-regarded Project for Excellence in Journalism found last week that the front-page content of the Journal is changing rapidly, with much less emphasis on business news and much more on politics. Other observers have noted that stories are shorter -- that is, in less depth -- and coverage of "culture" and even sports is increasing.

Also last week, Murdoch was bidding to buy Newsday from the Tribune Co., which would give him control of three of the nation's 10 largest-circulation newspapers. That would add to his communications empire that includes Fox News Channel and the Fox network, which reflect his personal value system for news and entertainment.

At least a part of his strategy is to take on the New York Times, both in the city and nationally. Newsweek magazine reported that he sent a letter to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. declaring, "Let the battle begin."

Perhaps the Journal needs to broaden its appeal beyond its 2 million avid and dependent business readers, and perhaps the Times could benefit from a bit more competition. But as demonstrated by the outlets he has owned for a while, Murdoch's idea of competition isn't to raise the level of watchdog and investigative journalism; it's to pander to base instincts and narrow prejudices at the expense of those values.

Journalism is different from all other enterprises because our liberty is directly tied to the synergy between serious journalism and democracy. They are totally interdependent.

When journalism's essential role of keeping watch on government and other powerful institutions is sublimated to marketplace ambitions, we have everything to lose.

For a couple of decades, the erosion of U.S. newspapers by market pressures has left our ability to know about government and institutional excesses and errors increasingly dependent upon only five companies, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal.

We will now witness the deletion of the Journal from that too-short list.

Davis Merritt is a former editor of The Eagle. Reach him at dmerritt9@cox.net.