The Wall Street Journal two years after Murdoch

Posted by Nestor Bailly on December 14, 2009 at 4:07 PM
murdochWSJ.jpgSunday was the second anniversary of Murdoch's purchase of The Wall Street Journal, an event that many press and journalism experts decried as sullying the hallowed status of the respected paper. 

But two years later the WSJ is still going strong with high circulation and one of the most successful paywall schemes on the web, ensuring a strong future in the digital age.

Under Murdoch's leadership, the Journal has turned away from business-only analytical focus and towards broader general interest stories and politics with big front-page photos.
Glenn Simpson, who left the paper in March, is not a fan. 

"Murdoch didn't ruin The Wall Street Journal; he just rendered it into a much more ordinary paper," he said. 

Furthermore, there are indications that life-long conservative Murdoch wants to tilt the traditionally neutral paper towards the right of the aisle. 

The top editors at the Journal, Robert Thomson and Gerard Baker, have been instrumental in slanting Washington coverage. According to several former members of the Washington bureau and two current ones, the two men have adopted a more conservative tone, editing and headlining articles to reflect a chronic skepticism of the current U.S. administration. 

Mr. Baker is a well-known neoconservative columnist and has played an active role in ensuring coverage of Obama is reflexively critical, banning the phrase 'health care reform' by focusing on the costs rather than benefits, and promoting global warming skeptics according to WSJ staff, who have raised significant grumblings and resistance. 

In response to questions about bias in the newspaper, a Journal spokesman sent along the following statement: "The Journal has always provided its readers with unique, objective news reporting from our Washington Bureau." 

Members of the Journal's staff spoke anonymously with The New York Times about the agenda behind the conservative editorial filtering. "A lot of it is about what goes into the pipeline and then what does, and does not, come out," one said, who noted that the Washington coverage was 'out of step' with other stories because of an agenda at work. 

The blending of press and politics is not something American journalists are very familiar with, so WSJ staffers were rightly surprised. However, Mr. Murdoch fancies the British newspaper model under which news organizations influence and take sides on the politics they report; the Sun's dropping its traditional support of the Labour party is a prime example. 

Thus is Murdoch's influence on the sacred neutral ground of American journalism; his newspapers will now be 'players in the worlds they cover.' Perhaps this is a modest consolation prize for his purchasing of the WSJ, which has been regarded by the previous owners, who "now look like geniuses," as "one of the worst media deals in history" for News Corp. 

I think it is inexcusable to sully the once-respectable reputation for journalistic ethics and detachment that the Journal once had, especially when done subtly on an unaware audience. There is still and always will be a place for objectivity in major news organizations; that is what separates the BBC and FOX. 

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