Rush And Rosett Riff On Rupert

In the Philadelphia Inquirer Claudia Rosett writes, “Free men and free markets have just combined to produce a buyout by Rupert Murdoch of the Wall Street Journal“:

We’re now seeing a lot of hand-wringing over what might happen to a newspaper that has been for decades an American icon. Will it change?

Sure. But the imperatives have less to do with Murdoch per se than with the ways of a fast-changing marketplace. What so often gets downplayed in discussions of the news trade is that even the fourth estate is a business, serving customers – and trying to discern what they want to buy. And both journalists and their readers inhabit a world in some ways quite different from what it was even 25 years ago.

This is a terrific anecdote about the slow old days:

This sale has stirred memories of the whopping changes I’ve witnessed since walking into the Journal’s Chicago bureau in 1980 to serve a brief stint as a lowly intern.

In those days, we banged out stories on manual typewriters, and revised them with scissors and tape (not paste). If you had an urge to communicate with people in Mali or Mongolia, you pretty much had to hope that someday you’d become a correspondent important enough that the paper would buy you a ticket. By the time I arrived at the Journal’s New York headquarters, in 1984, there were computers to write on, but if you wanted to look up old news stories, you went to the in-house library – once known in news jargon as the “morgue” – and paged through folders of yellowing clips.

In those days, whatever the scoops from Wall Street, global business news moved to a slower beat. There was no weekend edition, let alone online updates. I still prize the memory of a lunchtime conversation in 1986, when one of my colleagues leaned across the table to ask a Page One editor – it was a Friday – “So, what stories are you keeping cryogenically alive till Monday?”

Heh. On the day of his radio show’s 19th anniversary yesterday, I thought Rush Limbaugh made a surprisingly good observation about the MSM’s overblown reaction to the Journal’s future:

The New York Times are having a cow. The rest of the Drive-Bys are having a cow. I’ll give you some examples here as the program unfolds, some of the headlines, some of the stories. They’re all worried what he’s going to do to this venerable institution. Oh, no! How will he destroy it? And, of course, if these people were honest, if they really think he’s going to destroy the Journal, they’d be happy, wouldn’t they?

As Rush notes, “the New York Times set the agenda” for much of the rest of the legacy media:

in an interview in 2005, Rupert Murdoch was the asked about the New York Times, and he said, you know, the problem with the New York Times is not really the New York Times. It’s the rest of the media. The rest of the media adopts the New York Times agenda. Whatever is on the front page of the New York Times is what television cable news networks decide is news — at least the networks, CBS, NBC, CBS, the liberal networks. The New York Times always was called “the paper of record.” Stories on the front page throughout the front section ,determine what the agenda is in the press. In fact, when I moved to Sacramento is the first time I learned this. When I moved to Sacramento in 1984 to begin the program there that eventually became this program, the news director out there — consultant, actually, who had hired me, was also consulting the station. I remember my first day there, he went strolling through the newsroom one morning, and all he found was the Los Angeles Times, the Sacramento Bee, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He blew up. He started shouting, “Where’s the New York Times? You can’t do news anymore without the New York Times!”

The newsroom had to have the New York Times because the New York Times set the agenda. So Murdoch was making this point. He said that means that there is a whole market out there for a different way to do news and treat news, and he started talk in this interview in 2005 about the Wall Street Journal having the infrastructure in place to do that.

Sounds like a great way to reset the Parliament of Clocks.