"It's like a strong cup of caffeine in the morning," is how Rupert Murdoch once described the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal to me. "They confirm what I think and set me up for the rest of the day."

During my 11 years as editor of his Sunday Times of London (from 1983 to 1994), Murdoch would regularly cut out Wall Street Journal editorials and fax them to me for my attention. They were never accompanied with a command to toe their particular editorial line—Rupert is too subtle for that. But the implication was clear: This is what Sunday Times editorials should be saying too.

So at least for the opinion editors of the Journal, there is little to fear in a Murdoch takeover: Among those newspapers in the world Murdoch doesn't own (and there are still a few), the Journal's staunchly conservative, Republican editorial line most closely reflects the Australian-American media baron's own worldview. The editorial page is already on his ideological wavelength.

The other side of the newsroom, however, may still find itself on shaky ground. As part of his charm offensive to win the Journal and reassure those concerned about the independence and integrity of its news pages, Murdoch has been piously promising to keep the so-called Chinese wall between news and opinion intact. He might even mean it. But everything I know about the man and how he runs his newspapers makes me certain it will not survive for long.

Serious American journalists might regard the division between news and editorial pages in newspapers as sacred and holy, but Murdoch, as I remember, regards the Chinese wall as a peculiar conceit of American newspapers, especially of the East Coast establishment variety. Not one of Murdoch's newspapers in Australia or Great Britain that I know of—even the quality ones—has a Chinese wall.

The American way, he once told me, is a way of conning readers into thinking your news pages are objective and unbiased, when in fact they are subtly infused with values and opinion, and, he said, "invariably from the liberal left."

But don't expect the Journal's “Chinese wall” to be dismantled overnight. The transformation will be slow and insidious. It will begin with increased emphasis on editorial opinion and carry on through the appointment of reporters and editors who more closely hew to the Journal's (and therefore Murdoch's) op-ed worldview. One morning, the old Journal will simply be gone.

Editorial opinion will not necessarily dictate the news agenda, but it will surely influence it, determining what gets massive attention and what gets short shrift while shaping the tone and attitude of the news coverage so that it fits comfortably with what the paper believes. If you want to see this approach in action, look at his two London qualities, the Times and Sunday Times, whose news coverage doesn't reek of opinion but has clearly been influenced by the overall perspective of their editorial stances.

There's a second Chinese wall that will not survive a Murdoch takeover of the Journal: the barrier that ensures that what the paper writes is in no way influenced by the business interests of its owner. This seems not to exist in the Murdoch empire. Where there has been a conflict between honest journalism and Murdoch’s business interests, journalism has invariably lost. I have seen this firsthand—and even been on the receiving end.

In spring 1994, the Sunday Times of London, where I was editor at the time, published a series of investigations exposing corruption at the heart of the Malaysian government, involving payoffs from British construction companies. The Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohammed, an authoritarian leader with an anticolonial chip on his shoulder, was furious and made it clear that the chances of Star TV (a satellite-TV service in Asia) being allowed into Malaysia were less than zero. This made Murdoch even more furious, not with the Malaysian prime minister but with me.