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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (59759)	6/8/2007 10:39:20 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 90947

Murdoch-Phobia By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Wednesday, June 06, 2007 4:20 PM PT Media Bias: A press baron who putatively leans right bids for the Wall Street Journal, and the media tut. A tycoon who has no experience in the industry but has a leftward bias gets involved, and the press sees a savior. Burkle: Getting a press pass? The media response to Rupert Murdoch's $5 billion offer for Dow Jones & Co. was leftist elitism at its best. Editor & Publisher explained last week that "much of organized journalism recoils in horror from Rupert Murdoch's latest business gamble." A reasonable person sees a successful media giant in Murdoch, but the press shudder that a right-winger might sully that grand business publication with his brand of journalism the way he has the London Times and New York Post. Columnist Norman Solomon summed up media fears when he worried that a Murdoch purchase following recent design changes at the newspaper "could provide a tidy framework for spreading the content of the editorial page to the rest of the newsprint pages." The content of the editorial page being, of course, a firm defense of free markets and capitalism, concepts that the bulk of the media feels it needs to tear down. Predictably, journalists have taken up the anti-Murdoch theme pushed by Steve Yount, head of the Independent Association of Publishers' Employees union that represents 2,000 Dow Jones employees: "We have to continue the fight to preserve the quality, integrity and independence of Dow Jones." Would that integrity be, we wonder, like that of CNN, which admitted that it watered down its Iraq coverage in the Saddam Hussein era? Or the integrity of the New York Times, which still refuses to disassociate itself from the long-dead Times reporter Walter Duranty, who wrote glowing tributes to a murderous Soviet Union, and which has been so blindly bent on proving its commitment to diversity that it promoted sham journalism from Jayson Blair? Or the integrity of Dan Rather, who hyped fake documents in his haste to influence the 2004 election? And let's not forget: Murdoch's a conservative union-buster, too. Contrast this coverage to that of Ron Burkle entering the fray. He's a white knight who's working with the union to, the AP says, "explore alternatives" to Murdoch's bid. We have yet to see the sort of bile directed toward him that was hurled at Murdoch. Could Burkle, a supermarket magnate who has no media background, be getting a pass since he's a heavy Democratic contributor and fundraiser who also happens to be a friend of the Clintons? Is Warren Buffett, another multibillionaire mentioned as a suitor, getting the same sweet treatment because he, too, is a Democrat and pal of the Clintons? The hypocrisy is sulfurous. Outside of its editorial page, the Wall Street Journal slants to the left harder than 19 other major media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post and CBS News, a 2005 UCLA study found. If Murdoch's media critics genuinely cared about balance and integrity, they would support his bid and encourage him to move the Journal toward the center. ibdeditorials.com