Breslin on Murdoch Buying 'Newsday': Who Cares?

You might think Jimmy Breslin -- crusading columnist, Iraq War critic, and pugnacious champion of the powerless -- would be dismayed to hear that carpetbagging mogul Rupert Murdoch might soon be adding his longtime newspaper, Newsday, to News Corp.'s vast holdings.

He's not.

"What's the difference?" Breslin asks when informed of the news. "What the hell do I care? The fucking days are gone when you can worry about who owns what. Are people going to get paid? That's all I care about. He's a great newspaper owner if he pays."

That's a surprising sentiment, perhaps, for someone who once wrote of Murdoch, "In a political campaign, his right-wing newspapers become campaign pamphlets and his television becomes a right-wing campaign film," and called him "one of the cheap yes-men" of the Iraq War.

"I've been critical of him. I've done a lot of stuff about him," he acknowledges. "But that doesn't mean my copyreader is supposed to go broke. You've got to be pragmatic on behalf of other people."

And it's not as if Newsday has such a great owner now. Asked what he thinks of Sam Zell, Breslin says, "I know he rides a motorcyle, don't he? Fucking bullshit. If he's starting to cut and it's the first time around, well -- the Chicago Tribune, you can't cut that. It's the most overrated newspaper in America."

"I'd like to have grand principles and espouse them and shout," he adds, "but it's a different world. Nobody's got any money."