Mr. Murdoch Goes to War

[Elidor]

JULY/AUGUST 2008 ATLANTIC MONTHLY
by Mark Bowden

Rupert Murdoch entered the ninth-floor newsroom in Lower Manhattan with a bouncy, rolling gait that seemed much too sprightly, given the seismic waves of dread it spread in all directions. It was late in the afternoon of December 13, 2007, a date that will live in infamy for a certain generation of American newsmen. Lawyers were still putting the final touches on the $5 billion deal that would make Dow Jones & Company and its crown jewel, The Wall Street Journal, the newest subsidiaries of Murdoch’s improbably vast News Corp-oration. The global-media buccaneer, the rapacious philistine from Down Under, had come to personally stake his claim to “the daily diary of the American dream.”

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In those fat and happy days, the glory days of “serious” American journalism, the concepts of objectivity and editorial independence grew into a kind of public religion. The old yellow era of Hearst and Pulitzer, publishers who threw their weight around vigorously and would even instigate a shooting war if it boosted circulation, had given way to a time of more-genteel ownership, often the Ivy League–educated sons and daughters of the press barons. Even the name Pulitzer was expropriated; it became an annual award given to the best examples of serious journalism, and in most newsrooms became a far more coveted goal than increased circulation. There was a high wall, we were assured, between the business side of the newspaper and its editorial staff, and newsrooms were increasingly peopled by a new generation of white-collar journalists, gentlemen (and ladies) of the Fourth Estate, arbiters of style, taste, and decency, who took upon themselves the tasks of keeping government honest and educating the public. (In my 20-plus years as a newspaper reporter, I was always amused when skeptics suggested that I wrote just what the newspaper’s owner told me to write. If only they knew how mightily the newsroom looked down its nose at the business side of the operation.)

This vision of a newspaper, one that prevailed at the highest levels of the craft for decades, ensured that the paper was not just a propaganda mill, the house organ of some rich man or political party, but a community of street-smart shoe-leather scholars who worked as the eyes, ears, and conscience of their city. This was the world of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, of David Halberstam’s and Neil Sheehan’s courageous reporting from Vietnam, and of countless other public-spirited examples of a responsible, serious journalism.

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In this elevated climate, The Wall Street Journal was held in unique regard. Its disdain for street sales was defining. In appearance, it was defiantly dull and predictable. Its uniform gray vertical columns suggested the pinstripes on a banker’s worsted suit. In its use of small line drawings instead of photographs, in its refusal to chase the same stories as everyone else, in its quirkiness and uncompromising complexity, The Journal broadcast its refusal to pander to readers. Every day the front page featured two “leders” and the incomparable “a-hed.” These were long, ambitious, exceedingly well-written stories. A leder took a business or trend story and dug deeply into personalities and issues, whether it was a probe of backdated stock options for business executives by James Bandler and three other Journal writers, or Geeta Anand’s moving narrative about the crisis at a biotech company that had been asked to provide an experimental drug for a dying child. The a-hed was a quirky profile or narrative, usually brilliantly reported, a master class in feature writing: Carrie Dolan on fainting goats, Barry Newman on a man who has a doctorate in bug gunk, or Tony Horwitz on going to work in a slaughterhouse. Breaking news, no matter how shocking, was relegated to a brisk summary in two regular columns. This was a serious newspaper for serious readers, and it became the favored daily of the financial and business classes, men and women too busy making money to worry about the more sensational stories of the day.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/murdoch

This is a great story, very long and well-written. I had some rather sardonic comments back when Murdoch bought the paper, about the irony of the free marketplace and yadda yadda, but it does sound like some very good journalism is inexorably being cheapened and diluted at the Journal. One of the staffers says he expects the paper to resemble USA Today soon.

The writer, Mark Bowden, also sees the internet as a great diluting force in journalism, with the rise of the dreaded masses, including every kind of troll and con man. He was reaching for the word 'blogs,' but never quite said it out loud.