Big Deal!
08.02.07 - 08:01am
The Wall Street Journal never met a war it didn’t like nor a social programme it didn’t loathe
You want to know what effect the sale of the Wall Street Journal to that nasty Rupert Murdoch will have? The answer is: not much.
Sure there were stories all over the television news and in the newspapers yesterday about the deal which saw the reviled tycoon get his slimy hands on the Journal at a cost of $5.6billion, with fears that it will damage the paper’s “editorial independence”.
It’s a big deal, at that price, but not really much of a big deal, if you see what I mean.
We all know that Murdoch’s grubby finger marks are all over the Times and the Sun here in the UK, that those newspapers endlessly plug his other media adventures such as Sky and that they basically parrot the party line of the Murdoch empire as a pair of Pravdas to his Stalin. But there is one simple factor which will dilute the impact of this new acquisition.
Broadly the Wall Street Journal already shares Murdoch’s own worldview. As Zbignew Zingh over at Dissident Voice points out, the Journal “unabashedly caters to the ruling elite, the moneyed class that owns, and, therefore, does not need to hold elected office”. The Journal never met a war it didn’t like nor a social programme it didn’t loathe. Anyone who thinks Murdoch is going to be sticking his nose into Journal editorial department telling them what to write? Wake up! Most of the time he won’t need to. This was why I was shaking my head in bemusement at news footage of Moveon.org wasting time protesting the sale outside the WSJ offices yesterday. Changes to the editorial line of the paper will be minimal. One right wing mouthpiece moving a little further to the right is not going to have much impact when the media is already dominated by corporate interests.
Whether Murdoch will mess around with the tone of the Journal too much, who knows and who cares? It is not going to become another Sun, that’s for sure, and it’s op ed pages already have a whiff of Fox News about them, albeit with a slightly anachronistic feel. Zbignew Zingh writes:
Fortunately, it is not all hard work studying the world of the moneyed class. The Wall Street Journal also has its funny pages. The funnies are its Editorial and Op Ed pages. WSJ editorials have a curmudgeonly 19th Century feel to them, as though they are penned by Bedford Fall’s black hatted banker, Henry Potter (of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life), or Scrooge of Dicken’s Christmas Tale. The Op Ed articles - most frequently written by “visiting scholars” or “fellows” resident at one of a half dozen or so oxymoronically named “think tanks” - ooze with the prerogatives of wealth and disdain for the uneducated, the poor, and the downtrodden. Here you can read rib-tickling columnists like Mary Anastasia O’Grady who, apparently, never met a Latin American plutocrat that she did not like; guest writers like Berkeley’s reactionary law professor, John Yoo, who preaches the constitutional apostasy of the President as King; former New York Times “reporter” Judith Miller who once proudly touted neocon lies about Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction; and Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve and champion of the “cognitive elite” (aka, aristocracy). If ever you find your faith in Enlightenment principles faltering, you need only read these opinion articles and guest editorials to reaffirm your left politics and remind yourself exactly what it is you are struggling against.
Moveon.org and the hand-wringing “liberal” press need to realise there are far more important battles to be fought.
Business first, it seems, for all of the US six Media conglomerates.
Yet, as both Robert Fisk and Chomsky have indicated, the funny thing about the Wall Street Journal is that they report the War Crimes of the Coalition rather bluntly and rather unknowingly.
Yes, there’s something refreshing about papers written for the elites; with no need to disguise imperialism for consumption by people who might, deep down, have something of a social conscience, they can be surprisingly honest. We get the FT at work, and its editorials have consistently been an order of magnitude more honest than the “liberal” press.
I have to agree with the two writers here in that the Wall St. Journal - like the Financial Times - tends to report more honestly and openly than any other capitalist newspapers. Obviously their editorial page is a joke and will most likely stay that way, but I’ll be interested to see whether the paper becomes more sensationalistic under the guise of RM or whether it continues to do the sort of reporting that enables more conscientious readers to unmask and demystify the machinations of the ruling class.
I seem to recall Chomsky discussing the Wall Street Journal and pointing out that newspapers such as the Journal have to maintain a tolerable version of reality in their news pages because they are there to allow the super wealthy to make decisions about their money.