The Murdoch Charm Offensive Peters Out

There are limits to the effectiveness of Rupert Murdoch's charm offensive, it would seem. Judging by today's news, indeed, the offensive seems to have worked only on the journalists who were physically in the room with him when he was putting his case.

On Sunday, the reporter who interviewed him, Andrew Ross Sorkin, gave him a follow-up wet kiss in the NYT, in which he explained that "Mr. Murdoch may be the perfect publisher of The Wall Street Journal." Among Rupert's attractions is that he'll increase spending, rather than cutting it, Sorkin says, along with the fact that he's "farsighted" and "creative". He even goes so far as to say that selling to Rupert is the best way of "preserving the Dow Jones legacy".

On Monday, however, Sorkin's colleague David Carr gets out the long knives. He doesn't believe for a minute Murdoch's protestations that he would ensure editorial independence for the Journal, and he also sees, contra Sorkin, "a tough scrubbing on costs" at a newspaper which has already suffered no little cost-cutting.

And the man who is possibly the single most influential shareholder in Dow Jones, James H Ottaway Jr, released a statement which was harsher still:

[Murdoch] has for a long time expressed his personal, political and business biases through his newspapers and television channels,” Mr. Ottaway said. The Post “regularly runs biased news stories and headlines supporting his friends, political candidates and public policies, and attacks people he personally opposes,” while at Fox News, “one man’s political opinions have become the editorial and news policy.”
He accused Mr. Murdoch of caving in to political pressure to advance his business interests, contrasting the actions of a News Corporation property, Star TV, in bowing to Chinese government censorship, with The Journal’s editorial page censure of Chinese human rights abuses. “I doubt its freedom to criticize the Chinese government would continue under Murdoch ownership,” he said.
The right answer to the News Corporation bid, Mr. Ottaway added, is that “Dow Jones is not for sale, at any price, to Rupert Murdoch.”

Of course, the only way of ensuring that Dow Jones never be sold to Rupert Murdoch is to ensure that Dow Jones never be sold. Anybody else could and quite possibly would simply flip the property.

Nevertheless, Dow Jones stock is still trading over $55 a share: the market still believes a deal will be done. As David Carr says, "brute-force capital, like flood waters, always finds a way to break through."