The Financial Times says Rupert Murdoch has long "coveted" the Wall Street Journal. He may be about to get his chance. News reports breaking Tuesday morning are declaring that News Corp. has made an unsolicited $60-a-share offer for Dow Jones, the company that owns the Journal, among other properties.
There's little doubt that the loony-tunes editorial page of the Journal is a synergistic match with the politics that infuse, say, Fox News. Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News, would feel (and has been in the past) quite at home along with John Fund and company. But there has historically been decent separation between the politics of the owners and the journalism of the reporters.
Such separation is not something Murdoch has ever been good at. His various attempts to curry favor with China by squelching criticism in both his newspapers and book publishing enterprises have been well documented. Fox News is perhaps history's most profitable triumph in the merger of a particular political point of view with the profession of "news."
The Journal's own coverage of the buyout offer suggests that it might set in motion a bidding war including such "rival suitors" as "the Washington Post Co., the New York Times Co. and possibly even Bloomberg." One can only hope.
For the love of Democracy, Montressor. For the love of Democracy! Stop this man before he kills the culture, again.
UPDATE: I loved this line from reader "Free Proton" so much that I had to share it with everyone: "Oy, it's as if Shelob desired to acquire Barad-dur Industries, Inc."
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