WSJ Better Off With Murdoch Than Burkle

There is a neglected question surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the Dow Jones Company and the Wall Street Journal: why were critics of the purchase and Dow Jones and Wall Street employees themselves up in arms over the threat to journalistic independence posed by Murdoch but none of them seemed even slightly concerned over the potential danger to literary freedom that might have occurred under a different buyer? The media attention Murdoch’s purchase garnered revolved around the assumption that Murdoch might meddle with the Wall Street Journal and compromise its journalistic integrity while there seemed to be very little concern that an owner other than Murdoch might inject his or her own ideology into the paper’s news coverage.

Before Murdoch and the Bancroft family, owners of Dow Jones, entered into the latest intense round of purchase negotiations that ended with this morning’s announced final decision to sell to Murdoch, the names of other potential buyers made brief splashes on media pages, only to be obscured by the long shadow cast by Murdoch’s media empire. One billionaire who expressed significant interest in purchasing Dow Jones, parent company of the Wall Street Journal, was Ron Burkle, former grocery store magnate and unquestionably the closest influential and wealthy friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, both during Bill’s presidency and after.

Since leaving the White House, the Clinton’s have flown more mileage around the globe on Burkle’s private jet, an ostentatious Boeing 757, than on all other aircraft combined. Burkle’s Bel Air (Los Angeles) estate has hosted countless parties, fundraisers, rallies, and private retreats for the Clintons, as president and former president. Further cementing his position at the Clintons’ side, Burkle has consistently ranked as one of the top individual donors to the Democratic National Committee, Hillary’s election and reelection campaigns for the Senate, and currently to her presidential campaign.

I am not suggesting that there is anything improper about this cozy financial and political relationship. Wealthy and influential individuals in both parties have always ingratiated themselves with political figures for a variety of personal or business reasons. Likewise, I am not impugning Burkle’s motives for his desire to bankroll and provide free transportation to the Clintons to further their political ambitions. The significance of this relationship lies in the complete lack of attention given to it by the media and Dow Jones employees while Burkle was floating multi-billion dollar offers that many found more appealing than selling to Murdoch. While Murdoch was vilified for his personal involvement in making changes to previous news enterprises he had acquired, no one gave any serious consideration to how the Wall Street Journal might have covered news under Burkle’s ownership in light of his close ties to the Clintons.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), largely because of its foundations in American business, has usually been a reliably conservative publication, with a few exceptions such as its advocacy of open borders and amnesty for illegal immigrants. Even in taking that position, as flawed as it was, the WSJ was consistent with the views of many influential businesses that utilize cheap labor. Aside from that issue, though, the WSJ’s conservative news coverage and Op/Ed pieces are a welcome alternative to the brazenly liberal news coverage offered by the New York Times and most major dailies in America’s cities. As “meddling” as Murdoch’s takeovers and purchases of various media outlets may have been, few would argue that his influence has ideologically altered the news coverage of those outlets. It is certainly true that he has employed certain tactics such as shocking headlines and stories with some reference to sex to generate attention, particularly in some of his international publications. Yet he established Fox News as a more conservative alternative to liberal CNN and traditional network news offerings, and after more than a decade of broadcasting, Fox News remains dedicated to providing that conservative perspective. Dow Jones and WSJ employees should consider that aspect of Murdoch’s track record and breathe a little easier than they might have if Burkle had successfully purchased Dow Jones.

The Clintons already have an influential and widely read publication consistently doing their bidding: the New York Times. Their reach would have been enormously increased if Burkle had purchased the WSJ. It is extremely unlikely that an aggressive businessman like Burkle, who enjoys personal involvement in running his enterprises, would have been an absentee owner who would have kept his hands off of the WSJ’s journalistic ideology. Burkle is highly active in the DNC and his personal relationship with the Clintons would certainly have influenced what he would or would not want to read in his version of the WSJ. Why would he have paid billions of dollars to purchase Dow Jones and the WSJ only to allow it to undo his political activism through articles or Op/Ed pieces critical of his party and specifically the Clintons? That would not have been a wise return on his investment. Under Burkle’s ownership, the WSJ likely would have embarked on a slow but steady drift to the left, something neither its readers nor its employees would have appreciated.

It is easy to understand why Dow Jones and WSJ employees feared a Murdoch takeover, but they had much more to fear, including their jobs as conservative journalists, had a less controversial buyer like Burkle gotten his hands on the WSJ. Murdoch will be under enormous pressure to maintain the WSJ’s reputation and broad readership. He will surely tinker with the WSJ, attempting to make it more widely available, or perhaps bring it into more direct competition with the New York Times or even USA Today. Some of those efforts might achieve spectacular success, and some might prove to be dismal failures. The good news for WSJ employees is that his track record with Fox News indicates that he will not alter the generally conservative bent of the WSJ, which is the source of the paper’s journalistic independence in a news media world dominated by liberal lock-step ideology.

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Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch, Dow Jones, Takeovers, News Integrity, Ron Burkle, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton

Summer Intern Wilts ABC Poll Headline

ABC News can hardly be blamed for getting a headline backwards. After all, news is a serious business and with so many important events out there to cover it is easy to be distracted by other, more intriguing stories that arise. Apparently ABC News employees were focused so intently on one particular human interest story, that when it came time for them to frame a headline for a comparatively dry article reporting poll results on the public’s perceptions of the Supreme Court, they mistakenly concluded that thirty percent was a more significant number than seventy percent. What was the cause of the distraction?

When news spread through ABC News offices that a summer intern had posted nude pictures of herself on the Internet and may have even posed in college for Playboy, ABC News employees threw themselves into a feverish online search for the highly sought-after intern images. ABC News information management officials noticed a spike in employee visits to adult Internet sites and were forced to send an email to all employees reminding them that surfing adult sites during work time was discouraged. According to the New York Daily News which broke the story reported that ABC News had approximately seventy summer interns and ABC News employees were not sure which intern was the alleged Internet vixen. Thus, employees were captured in the web (no pun intended) of adult Internet sites and the natural human desire to solve a mystery.

So what resulted at ABC News from this nearly institution-wide loss of concentration? ABC headline writers apparently pulled themselves away from their surfing long enough to skim the results of an ABC-Washington Post poll that asked Americans whether they thought the Supreme Court was too liberal, too conservative, or balanced. In their clearly hasty review of the poll statistics, they crafted this misleading headline: “Three in 10 call SCOTUS ‘Too Conservative.’” The statistic itself was not misleading, but the choice to emphasize the thirty-one percent of Americans who felt the court was too conservative over the sixty-nine percent who did not, certainly was calculated to create the impression among readers that the court is too conservative. The ABC report also implied that the court had become too conservative since the additions of justices Roberts and Alito.

What the poll results actually revealed was that forty-seven percent believed the Supreme Court was balanced in its political ideology, with eighteen percent stating the court was still too liberal despite Roberts’ and Alito’s influence. When sixty-nine percent of Americans in a poll jointly constructed and conducted by two left-leaning news organizations state that the court is not too conservative, liberals should give close attention to what that statistic portends for their political futures, as it strongly implies that a significant majority of Americans would approve of the selection of additional conservative justices when further openings occur. If ABC News employees had given as much attention to selecting a headline that emphasized what the poll results actually indicated rather than how they wanted those statistics to be interpreted by readers, the headline would have been quite different.

Senator Chuck Schumer (NY-D) was so convinced of the court’s alleged conservative imbalance that he referred to the court as “dangerously imbalanced,” and called on fellow Democrats to block all future court nominees from President Bush because the current court is “ultraconservative.” Schumer’s inflammatory exaggeration of the court’s ideological makeup was based on his objection to the court’s reversals of decisions made by previously liberal-dominated courts. Schumer’s math is shoddy at best and disingenuous at worst. Conservatives on the Supreme Court hold a 5-4 majority, but even conservatives complain that the court did not move far enough to the right or center even with the additions of Alito and Roberts. When conservatives hold only a one vote majority on the court, use of the term “ultraconservative” is blatantly inaccurate. Apparently when a court votes to reverse unconstitutional decisions of prior courts, such as affirmative action programs that differentiate between races, colors, or other factors prohibited by the constitution, that is “ultraconservative” to Schumer. Perhaps that explains why sixty-nine percent of Americans still feel the court is not too conservative, leaving room for it to move even further to the right in restoring constitutionality to the court’s decisions.

If the adage is true that if you tell people something often enough it becomes truth, then ABC News and Senator Schumer are working diligently to create a fictional truth about the court. Both are attempting to convince Americans of an ideological imbalance on the Supreme Court when in fact no such imbalance actually exists. Then again, ABC News employees were also desperately searching for Internet intern photos that may or may not exist. Chasing desirable mirages, whether they be summer interns or poll statistics that don’t quite fit the liberal argument, appears to be the currently preferred activity for ABC News staffers. Along with emails warning employees about surfing adult Internet sites, ABC News should advise staff to match headlines with the actual content of their news stories.


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ABC News, Supreme Court, Summer Interns, Chuck Schumer, Conservative Court, Poll Results, Misleading Headlines

Times Surge of Truth Refreshing

Stop the presses! The New York Times, far and away the most virulent anti-Bush, anti-war news organization in America, today published an Op/Ed piece that actually debunked that paper’s own daily headlines of doom and gloom news from Iraq.

In a contribution co-authored by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, Brookings Institution fellows and no fans of the Bush administration, the pair presented a region by region analysis of the results so far of General Petraeus’ surge strategy, which finally reached full operational strength in June. Congressional Democrats and defecting (perhaps defective?) Republicans call for troop withdrawals and insist that defeat is inevitable, but O’Hanlon and Pollack, who spent eight days meeting with troops, military leaders, and Iraqi leaders, came to a far different conclusion about progress in Iraq than Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and presidential candidate Barack Obama.

I recommend reading the Op/Ed piece in its entirety, as it contains descriptions of progress that never garner any attention from major media outlets bent on reporting only suicide bombings or IED incidents that add to the death toll. The cynical nature of Iraq War news reporting offered by the traditional networks belies the truth of what is actually occurring in Iraq’s cities and villages: The country is becoming more secure, and the U.S. military has been infused with high morale. The following analysis of conditions in Iraq will surprise the “impeach Bush” crowd, much as it did the authors themselves:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done.

We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul…. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside.

The authors rightfully conclude from their observations in Iraq that while Iraq’s government must achieve solidarity and work with more urgency for its own survival, the undeniable fact is that General Petraeus’ surge strategy is working, and working impressively. They further credit Petraeus for ending the “whack-a-mole” security situation in many parts of Iraq that existed previously. The “Whack-a-mole” issue has been a complaint of U.S. soldiers through much of the war, because regions were formerly only temporarily secured by minimum force levels, and once American troops moved on to other more intense fighting, insurgents and al-Qaeda recruits would pop up again in the previously secure areas. This usually meant that our troops would be forced to return and re-secure those areas. Under Petraeus’ leadership, regions are held until they are actually secure before troops move on to clear other regions of insurgents and terrorists.

Bush administration critics should consider that the results observed by these two Brookings fellows have occurred in a relatively short period, and are increasing in momentum now that the surge force has reached full staffing levels. War opponents were looking with eager anticipation for Petraeus’ surge report due in September. They were certain there would be ample evidence in the report to justify their advocacy of troop withdrawals by April 2008, however this early report of surge success, coming as it did from two consistent critics of President Bush’s handling of the Iraq War, should throw some much needed water on the “impeach Bush” bonfire.

The Times deserves praise for providing its readers with O’Hanlon’s and Pollack’s Op/Ed report of the successes of the surge thus far. Although the pair included a mild disclaimer that “victory” may not be possible, they clearly saw potential for a “sustainable stability.” Such an achievement of stability would indeed constitute victory, as stability would permit the Iraqis to solidify their democratically elected government and develop the resources needed to defend themselves from foreign influences with ulterior motives for Iraq’s future. A “sustained stability” would further alleviate the need for full U.S. troop deployment in Iraq, as our soldiers could eventually assume an advisory/training role rather than performing actual regional security sweeps.

Surge critics will find it increasingly difficult to justify their opposition to Petraeus and the Bush administration when similar reports of success become available in the media. Americans are confident of our armed forces and know that good news is always just around the corner when our soldiers are committed to action. The surge strategy appears to have helped the Iraqis turn some important corners, and they are now more actively engaged in their own security and counterterrorism operations than ever before. That is good news for America, Iraq, and the free world. Hopefully the Times will continue to search for and publish the successes of the surge strategy with fervor equal to its reports of perceived Bush administration failures.

Technorati Tags:
David Petraeus, Surge Strategy, Iraq War, Brookings Institution, Anbar Province, Surge Progress