Murdoch Gets The Prize

YESTERDAY Rupert Murdoch finally overcame the finicky objections of the legacy Dow Jones owners and bought Dow Jones for about $5 billion, report Richard Perez-Pena and Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times.

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

Now who knows what will happen. Murdoch!

The truth, so resolutely ignored by our liberal friends, is that Rupert Murdoch is a businessman, first and last. He wants to make money. He has taken advantage of the fact that the introspective liberalism of the mainstream media has left gigantic market niches available for media titles occupying a center-right perspective.

But Rupert Murdoch is not the right-wing ideologue that our more fevered friends imagine. The proof of that is that in the mid 1990s he swung his British titles behind New Labour and Tony Blair.

Now he is reported to have established ties with Hillary Clinton and made contributions to her campaign. Of course he has. News media is not called the Fourth Estate for nothing. It is entangled with politics and always will be.

What Murdoch can do with his new Dow Jones properties is make the center-right media into a world-wide force that can seriously counter the center-left media that dominates the culture today.

For conservatives that is a cheery prospect, not least because it makes business sense.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Hugo on Genius

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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Postmodernism

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Faith and Politics

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Conservatism

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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