Anybody who assumes Rupert Murdoch doesn't care about his legacy needs to simply soak in the three-page ad running in today's WSJ, NYT and other major newspapers around the world.

Here's the first page, and the accompanying two-page spreadspread.

But from a spin-world perspective, the ad is significant, and not because its rejection by the FT generated nice publicity. No, the truly meaningful thing about the ad was revealed when a "company insider" offered up a deceptively telling quote reported by Fortune's Richard Siklos.

"It's the first time we've given the company a narrative that expresses how we've gone against convention in providing greater choice and diversity in entertainment and information to consumers around the world."

Jack Flack's spin-senses tingle every times he hears or reads the word "narrative" in connection with any kind of business communications.

Why is that? Because the narrative construct drives at least 98% of human comprehension, as people are naturally wired to understand their world through stories. "Core messages" and other conceptual talking points, on the other hand, don't drive squat. In other words, as a form, the story rules.

And once a company becomes conscious that it actually has a narrative, it can then get much more clinical, and thus effective, at managing that narrative. "Clinical" means becoming objective enough to step back and consider what actions -- business, symbolic, or otherwise -- would be required to redirect the narrative to one that actually facilitates the business strategy.

And with today's ad, News Corp offers a fascinating example of a company working to do just that.

The News Corp narrative is inseparable from the personal narrative of Rupert Murdoch, and most Rupert-watchers assume Murdoch has never cared much about his or News Corp's image. The News Corp story currently boils down to something like this:

A wily, ambitious Australian newspaper man parlayed deal after often-risky deal into a global media empire, using his media outlets to further his political views, while lowering journalism standards with crass populism.

Unsurprisingly, Michael Wolff offered a more knowing assessment a couple of months ago in Vanity Fair, saying Murdoch had actually cultivated the predatory image to accelerate his business strategy.

It's all part of his badassness. His audacity. It's about having people frightened of you. That's the Murdoch narrative: I'm coming to get you. "A hint of menace," says a Murdoch confidant, "isn't necessarily a bad thing."

That very dynamic undoubtedly helped turn the dysfunctional House of Bancroft into a disintegrating house of cards, and put the launch of what would otherwise have been an insignificant new cable network on the cover of Fortune.

But yesterday's shareholder ratification of the Dow Jones deal may have brought on a new day in how Murdoch wants his company to be perceived, something Jack Flack could just smell coming when researching a now-ancient Rescue Memo for Murdoch back in September.

So, what's News Corp's newly desired story-line?

"Defying conventional wisdom for six decades."

Now Murdoch himself has been nibbling at the "conventional wisdom" idea for some time. But the scrutiny of the Dow Jones acquisition seems to have substantially elevated its importance, as reflected by the fact that Cavuto is now fully on-message.

And as ludicrous as it may seem that a $30 billion company is still trying to present itself as an outsider, News Corp's history actually makes that narrative theme fairly credible, particularly in comparison to, say, Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" artifice.

And the ad smartly brings that history to life. Against a two-page timeline calling out 21 deals since 1954, the body copy details the positioning:

Time and again, they said it couldn't be done. Time and again, we did it. In the process, we've given new choices to billions of people around the world. If we'd listened to conventional wisdom and hadn't stirred things up, we wouldn't be where we are today: a global media business made up of 53,000 passionate individuals with revenues of US$30 billion reaching and audience of nearly one billion people, every day.

Still not sure how he feels about News Corp itself, Jack Flack likes the execution of the ad a lot. It combines a clear, relatively distinctive theme with 21 plot points that pay off that theme.

All good flacks know that a theme without actions delivers only puffery. And actions without clear thematics deliver only loose anecdotes begging for random interpretation.

But the ad goes even further, discontented to simply attempt to redefine today's News Corp by bringing forward a new framing of the company's historical narrative. Instead, it also attempts to set the defining frame in which it wants News Corp to be understood in the years to come. It does that by providing a "desired future story," i.e. the story the company would like to see told by the rest of the world a year or two from now.

Today the greatest brand in financial journalism joins up with the world's most restless global media company. The tradition of editorial excellence of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal fuses with the agitating and visionary spirit of News Corporation. Together, we'll bring you the issue and themes that define our time and shape our future.

While that final sentence seems to be more of a threat than a promise, the rest of the paragraph reads like the voice-over of the trailer for a raucous buddy movie:

"The square Journal scribes team up with the audacious raconteurs from Down Under... and through a series of well-intended shenanigans end up ruling the world of news."

This may all seem like a big stretch for long-time Murdoch watchers. But consider yourself warned -- if told with conviction, discipline and in close connection to visible actions, the Desired Future Story can be quite effective, harnessing the formidable power of the dynamic best-known as the "self-fulfilling prophecy."

And keep in mind, the acquisition of the Journal gives Murdoch a big opportunity to generate a huge number of highly visible plot points designed to challenge the conventional wisdom that (a) newspapers are a losing investment and (b) Rupe takes everything down-market.

That seems a bit manipulative, and it may well be. But the end effect will be that the Wall Street Journal will get bigger and better.

And so will Rupert Murdoch's image.