Rupert Murdoch Already Is a Global Statesman

In October, the New Yorker ran a detailed profile of Rupert Murdoch by John Cassidy. It begins 30 years ago, in 1977, with Murdoch singlehandedly electing Ed Koch as mayor of New York. It's worth quoting some of the rest of the profile at length:

In 1995, Blair travelled nine thousand miles to Hayman Island, on the Great Barrier Reef, to deliver a keynote address at a News Corp. retreat. In the speech, he described himself as a radical modernizer, and as the natural heir to Margaret Thatcher...
On July 28th, Blair flew to San Francisco on a trip that was described as an effort to promote British technology companies. Many of the British reporters who accompanied him knew better. “The real reason he is here now is because Rupert Murdoch invited him here to meet with all of his executives,” Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, told KCBS, a Bay Area radio station, referring to the News Corp. retreat that Murdoch was hosting in Pebble Beach that week....
Blair delivered the opening-night speech. “Rupert, it’s great to be back at the News Corp. Conference after all these years,” he began. “When I first met you, I wasn’t sure I liked you, but I feared you. Now that my days of fighting elections are over, I don’t actually fear you, but I do like you.”
On August 2nd, the second-to-last day of the conference, Bill Clinton arrived...
Hillary Clinton, who has been attacked by the left for her support of the Iraq war, has been reluctant to talk about her relationship with Murdoch, but her spokesman, Philippe Reines, said, “Senator Clinton respects him and thinks he’s smart and effective.”...
“He’s savvier, and he has far better understanding of how to influence government, than anybody else I’ve ever met in the media,” Reed Hundt, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the body that regulates the broadcasting industry, told me. “He’s just smarter about that than everybody else.”...
Tony Blair was pro-Europe when he came to office, but many British commentators, including some of his own former aides, believe that he modified his policies to satisfy Murdoch. “Blair was very keen to join the European monetary system,” Lance Price, a former media adviser at 10 Downing Street, said to me. “But at every stage of the way he stepped back. And one of the main reasons he pulled back was that Rupert Murdoch was vehemently opposed to closer links with Europe.” Price recently published a book, “The Spin Doctor’s Diary,” in which he writes about Murdoch’s influence on the Blair government. “It was never discussed in black-and-white terms,” Price told me. “Nobody ever said, ‘We have to do this because Murdoch supports it.’ But his views were always heard. And they were heard ahead of many Cabinet ministers’.”
Downing Street won’t say how many meetings Blair has had with Murdoch, but Murdoch has spent more time with him and Gordon Brown than he did with Margaret Thatcher. “She didn’t go out of her way to develop a personal relationship with me,” Murdoch said. “But Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, whenever I’m in town they say, ‘Can’t you come over for a cup of tea?’ When you’re invited by the Prime Minister to have a cup of tea, you have a cup of tea. It’s sometimes very inconvenient—if you’re only there two days and you have a month’s work to do.” Murdoch went on, “And you have to be careful to have a cup of tea with them both, or they are very suspicious that you are lining up with the other one.”

This is, without a doubt, a portrait of a global statesman. Murdoch might not receive a lot of respect in the Wall Street Journal's newsroom, but he has had prime access to the most powerful people in the world for decades. Which is why I'm puzzled that Brad DeLong can write this:

Can Murdoch make the financials work to make the Journal a good way for News Corp. to spend $6 billion? I doubt it. Can he find enough synergies to make the financials not be a total disaster? I think so. And in the meantime will it give him a platform on which he can play global statesman for a decade? Yes.

This is the "return on ego" argument for why Murdoch wants to buy the Wall Street Journal, and to some small degree it surely holds some truth. But the fact remains that Murdoch is already a global statesman, and he has been one for decades. In fact, he has been the most powerful press baron in the world for many years now. Owning the Journal would, at the margin, increase his influence. But Rupert is not some déclassé billionaire with more money than clout.

As for the Journal's newsroom, I think that Murdoch would certainly shake it up – but he wouldn't cut it back. I think he would significantly expand the number of journalists that the Journal has overseas, and that he would turn the Journal's anachronistic front page into a must-read destination for breaking news, rather than giving over vast amounts of hugely valuable real estate to quirky magazine-style feature articles of no real import. Those are "the long articles that bore Rupert Murdoch," in DeLong's words, and frankly the vast majority of them don't belong on the front page of a daily newspaper, if they belong in a daily newspaper at all. The front page of a newspaper should be a home for news – and if that happens at the Journal, there's a good chance that Murdoch is going to need more journalists, not fewer.