Murdoch and Dow Jones

From The Guardian:

Murdoch seeks $100m Dow Jones cuts
Chris Tryhorn and agencies
Tuesday September 18, 2007

"Rupert Murdoch is looking to make $100m (£50m) in savings at the Wall Street Journal's parent company, Dow Jones.

The chairman and chief executive of News Corporation told an investor conference today he intended to expand Dow Jones's revenue following the $5.6bn (£2.8bn) acquisition of the company, which was agreed in early August.

"We've already identified the low hanging fruit will be $100m in savings," Mr Murdoch told the conference in New York, in comments reported by Reuters. "But we're about expanding revenue." Mr Murdoch added that News Corp saw "nothing in sight" in terms of buying further assets."

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The Guardian reports Murdoch's complaints

From The Guardian:
"Rupert Murdoch has complained that his victorious three-month battle to buy the Wall Street Journal involved fending off criticism bearing a degree of vitriol usually reserved for "genocidal tyrants".

In his first detailed comments since securing a $5.6bn (£2.7bn) takeover of the Journal's publisher, Dow Jones, the media mogul revealed that he was seeking $50m in annual cost cuts - and was considering offering free access to the paper's website.

"The Wall Street Journal is the greatest newspaper in America and one of the greatest in the world," said Mr Murdoch, insisting that he would be hiring - rather than firing - staff. The paper had "tremendous" journalists and a valuable brand. "That's why we put such a premium on it and why I spent the better part of the last three months enduring criticism normally levelled at a genocidal tyrant."

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Blair, Murdoch and Alastair Campbell

Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair's Director of Communications and Strategy (press secretary) from 1997 to 2003. He was in charge of putting together the public case for the war in Iraq and clearly was aware that some of the information was of very dubious origins. A BBC reporter got hold of some inside information about the manufacturing of evidence and his source was later revealed by the government. The whistle-blower, Dr David Kelly committed suicide and an inquiry was later launched (the Hutton Report) which laid blame essentially on the BBC. Campbell resigned in 2003 and has recently published his diaries.

This week-end he published a guest editorial at The New York Times entitled "Don’t Be Afraid of Rupert Murdoch" in which he writes:

"That standards in British newspapers have fallen in recent years is in my view beyond dispute, and in that Mr. Murdoch has been so dominant in the marketplace, clearly he has to be somewhere in the mix when it comes to handing out the blame. But to pretend, as some seek to, that he is somehow single-handedly responsible for all that is bad in our news media is not just intellectually lazy — it also misses the point...

But in the advanced democracies, though power structures have changed, elected leaders continue to hold enormous power. Mr. Murdoch is a huge global media player. If politicians are intimidated by him, that is their problem. If they make the wrong calls out of fear of his editorial wrath, they shouldn’t have been elected in the first place. And if journalists don’t like working for him, there are more media jobs now than at any time in the history of humankind. He was involved in making that happen, too."

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The Guardian has published an interesting response to Campbell's editorial "Alas, Alastair, if only you'd heeded your own advice":
"The New York Times piece appears under the wondrous headline "Don't be afraid of Rupert Murdoch". Campbell's unique brand of unconscious irony has always been enjoyable. It might be a sports column in which he mentions in passing an exchange with Clinton, to whom Campbell said fawningly what a privilege it had been to work with "the greatest all-round political communicator of the late 20th century", eliciting the reply "that it had been a pleasure working with the best communications adviser in the world". What a pair of lads, to be sure!...
What Campbell says about Murdoch is again exquisite in its unconsciousness. Would Tony Blair have lost the 1997 election "if the Sun had stayed with the Tories?" he writes, and answers, "I don't think so". He is quite right, in my view, but he doesn't begin to see the implications of that. From the start, Blair was always the suitor, cap in hand as he begged Murdoch's favour in a manner both humiliating and quite unnecessary.

Their relationship became much more intimate than almost any of us realised, with Murdoch what Lance Price (a sometime spin paramedic in Campbell's Downing Street team) called the invisible 24th member of the Blair cabinet. We have only just learned about the series of telephone calls between Blair and Murdoch just before the invasion of Iraq, when Blair was much more concerned about the opinion, and support, of the media magnate than of any member of his own government."
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The Australian on Murdoch

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps is saying:

"This deal means more media consolidation and fewer independent voices, and it specifically affects the local market in New York City…What's good for shareholders of huge media conglomerates isn't always what's good for the public interest or our civic dialogue...We should immediately conduct a careful factual and legal analysis of the transaction to determine how it implicates specific FCC rules and our overarching statutory obligation to protect the public interest. I hope nobody views this as a slam dunk."

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Democracy Now on Murdoch's purchase of Dow Jones

From a broadcast of Democarcy Now:

"AMY GOODMAN: On this issue of media consolidation, I wanted to bring in Craig Aaron, spokesperson for Free Press in Chicago. Craig, can you talk about what this means in the media landscape right now, the number of holdings that Rupert Murdoch has?

CRAIG AARON: Well, you know, it’s an immense amount of holdings at this point. You know, several decades ago, there might have been fifty corporations that controlled what we see, hear, watch every day. Now we’re down to probably about five that really dominate the vast majority of information and news. And so, this gives one company and one man an immense amount of power.

You know, if this deal goes all the way, which all indications are that it will, Murdoch will control, you know, a national broadcast network, a cable news channel and one of the few remaining daily newspapers that really set the national news agenda. So among this small handful of outlets that really set the agenda every day across the country in all the papers and all the local television stations, suddenly Rupert Murdoch, who is very clear he’s always going to put his personal ideology and his personal business interests before the quality of news, he’s going to have an incredible amount of influence over that news agenda."

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Murdcoh buys Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal

From The New York Times:

"Mr. Murdoch has shown in the past that he is willing to experiment, even knock over some sacred cows. In an interview with The Times earlier this year, Mr. Murdoch mused aloud about The Journal, saying, for instance, that he did not have time to read longer articles during the week and might like to swap out the paper’s Pursuits section on Saturdays with a glossy magazine. More recently, he told Time magazine that he was not sure about the offbeat front-page stories known internally as “A-Heds” that are a plum for reporters to write."

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Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal

From The New York Times:

"Murdoch Seen to Win Control of Dow Jones
Rupert Murdoch appeared today to have gained enough support from the deeply divided Bancroft family to buy Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, for $5 billion...

For Mr. Murdoch, the prospect of acquiring The Journal represents the pinnacle of his long career building the News Corporation into a $28 billion global media empire that already includes more than 100 newspapers around the world, satellite broadcast operations, the Fox television network, the online social networking site MySpace and many other properties.

It also signals the end of an era for Dow Jones and the controlling Bancroft family, an intensely private clan that had allowed The Journal to operate independently and become one of the nation’s most prominent and trusted newspapers, even as its finances deteriorated.

The three dozen members of the Bancroft family had engaged in an intense debate about The Journal’s future. Some argued vociferously that Mr. Murdoch would damage the newspaper’s credibility, while others said that his offer was too good to pass up at a time when the newspaper industry has been struggling."

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And from the Wall Street Journal where journalists have been very skeptical about the deal.

Downfall of a media mogul

From the New York Times:

"The two engines of indignation and opportunism helped power Mr. Black’s rise to the heights of the media mogul life during the 1980s and 1990s. During that time, Mr. Black routinely sparred with regulators, denounced critics and sued journalists whom he claimed defamed him.

He also displayed his not inconsiderable charm — gathering the likes of Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher to sit on his corporate boards — and wrote conservative thought pieces and scholarly biographies of great men whose lives he felt had been inaccurately depicted elsewhere, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard M. Nixon and, well, himself.

His grandiose style, characterized by sweeping pronouncements and Latinate diction, served Mr. Black well while he was building a publicly traded company Hollinger International that, at one point, was the third-largest newspaper company in the world by circulation, owning The Daily Telegraph, The Jerusalem Post and The Chicago Sun-Times."

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And also here...