The Journal Becomes Fox-ified

Op-Ed Columnist
The Journal Becomes Fox-ified
The New York Times
By JOE NOCERA

It took Rupert Murdoch only three and a half years to get there, starting with the moment he acquired the paper from the dysfunctional Bancroft family in December 2007, a purchase that was completed after he vowed to protect The Journal’s editorial integrity and agreed to a (toothless) board that was supposed to make sure he kept that promise.

Fat chance of that. Within five months, Murdoch had fired the editor and installed his close friend Robert Thomson, fresh from a stint Fox-ifying The Times of London. The new publisher was Leslie Hinton, former boss of the division that published Murdoch’s British newspapers, including The News of the World. (He resigned on Friday.) Soon came the changes, swift and sure: shorter articles, less depth, an increased emphasis on politics and, weirdly, sometimes surprisingly unsophisticated coverage of business.

Along with the transformation of a great paper into a mediocre one came a change that was both more subtle and more insidious. The political articles grew more and more slanted toward the Republican party line. The Journal sometimes took to using the word “Democrat” as an adjective instead of a noun, a usage favored by the right wing. In her book, “War at The Wall Street Journal,” Sarah Ellison recounts how editors inserted the phrase “assault on business” in an article about corporate taxes under President Obama. The Journal was turned into a propaganda vehicle for its owner’s conservative views. That’s half the definition of Fox-ification.

The other half is that Murdoch’s media outlets must shill for his business interests. With the News of the World scandal, The Journal has now shown itself willing to do that, too.

As a business story, the News of the World scandal isn’t just about phone hacking and police bribery. It is about Murdoch’s media empire, the News Corporation, being at risk — along with his family’s once unshakable hold on it. The old Wall Street Journal would have been leading the pack in pursuit of that story.

Now? At first, The Journal ignored the scandal, even though, as the Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff pointed out in Adweek, it was front-page news all across Britain. Then, when the scandal was no longer avoidable, The Journal did just enough to avoid being accused of looking the other way. Blogging for Columbia Journalism Review, Dean Starkman, the media critic, described The Journal’s coverage as “obviously hamstrung, and far, far below the paper’s true capacity.”

On Friday, however, the coverage went all the way to craven. The paper published an interview with Murdoch that might as well have been dictated by the News Corporation public relations department. He was going to testify before Parliament next week, he told the Journal reporter, because “it’s important to absolutely establish our integrity.” Some of the accusations made in Parliament were “total lies.” The News Corporation had handled the scandal “extremely well in every way possible.” So had his son James, a top company executive. “When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right,” he said. He was “getting annoyed” by the scandal. And “tired.” And so on.

In the article containing the interview, there was no pushback against any of these statements, even though several of them bordered on the delusional. The two most obvious questions — When did Murdoch first learn of the phone hacking at The News of the World? And when did he learn that reporters were bribing police officers for information? — went unasked. The Journal reporter had either been told not to ask those questions, or instinctively knew that he shouldn’t. It is hard to know which is worse. The dwindling handful of great journalists who remain at the paper — Mark Maremont, Alan Murray and Alix Freedman among them — must be hanging their heads in shame.

To tell you the truth, I’m hanging my head in shame too. Four years ago, when Murdoch was battling recalcitrant members of the Bancroft family to gain control of The Journal, which he had long lusted after and which he viewed as the vehicle that would finally allow him to go head-to-head against The New York Times, I wrote several columns saying that he would be a better owner than the Bancrofts.

The Bancrofts’ history of mismanagement had made The Journal vulnerable in the first place. I thought that Murdoch’s resources would stop the financial bleeding, and that his desire for a decent legacy would keep him from destroying a great newspaper.

After the family agreed to sell to him, Elisabeth Goth, the brave Bancroft heir who had long tried to get her family to fix the company, told me, “He has a tremendous opportunity, and I don’t think he’s going to blow it.” In that same column, I wrote, “The chances of Mr. Murdoch wrecking The Journal are lower than you’d think.”

Mea culpa.



A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 16, 2011, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: The Journal Becomes Fox-ified.

Downside of Chinese Wall between 'News' and 'Business'

"There is a Chinese Wall between 'News' and 'Business'", I was told when I started to work for The Wall Street Journal Europe. As a mantra I repeated the phrase to other people the past couple of years. Sometimes people with a certain interest asked me if I could help them get an article in the newspaper. It had always been very easy to answer this question, it was sufficient to talk about the 'Chinese Wall' and people understood I -or anybody else from the 'business' side- was not the right person to talk to.

News is also physically separated from 'the rest'. They occupy the second floor. 'The rest' occupies floor 1 and 3. The only reason we had to go to the second floor in the past was the 'big' meeting room situated on the second floor. But this meeting room has been remodeled. The biggest meeting room is now at the third floor, which will lead to even less visits to the island of news. (There is one exception, there is 1 guy from the opinion pages who has an office at the first floor, but that is being done deliberately as the op-ed people are not considered journalists, they are considered the 'soul' of the newspaper, they have nothing to do with the 'objective' side of the news, they won't even sign their articles with their names most of the time. Usually they occupy page 11 to 13 in the newspaper).

Anyway, today I was asked to host a group of students from The Missouri school of Journalism. I was suggested to ask 3 people from the news side to come up and talk to the students. I didn't know any of the journalists/reporters, although we probably work already for years in the same building for the same company. I introduced all 3 journalists clumsily because of my lack of knowledge about them. One of the reporters was Charles Forelle.

It was only after he spoke to the students that I understood from my boss that Forelle was actually a Pulitzer Price winner. How stupid can one be ? Forelle had been too modest to bring it up himself. And I was the badly prepared organizer who didn't know. To conclude, we failed to tell a class of journalism students they were interacting with a Pulitzer Price winner. I blame myself for my ignorance, I blame the Chinese Wall that prevent us from interacting with each other in a normal way.

Charles Forelle won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in journalism in 2007 for a piece which uncovered stock option scandals at some US corporations. It seemed that several business executives had rewarded themselves millions of dollars by backdating stock options. Forelle's articles for The Wall Street Journal, written and edited with James Bandler, Mark Maremont and Steve Stecklow, prompted the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate more than 140 companies, and at least 70 top executives have lost their jobs since then.

(Picture: Charles Forelle, right, seated, speaks to students of The Missouri School of Journalism at The Wall Street Journal Europe)