A Different Drummer

There'll be hogs on the fire and virgins in the cage tonight in the News Corp castle atop Mount Doom - The Murdoq has captured a fresh, supple young wife.

The Wall Street Journal, one of the world's best newspapers (with one of the world's craziest editorial pages) has been snapped up by The Murdoq. His track record suggests that this is the beginning of the end for the Journal - News Corp know how to make money and they know how to entertain, but their ability to publish a decent newspaper is still pretty questionable. They have the dubious honor of publishing possibly the worst English-language newspaper in the world, my hometown Adelaide Advertiser.

As a testament to how good the WSJ is, and how much Murdoq has available to fuck up right in front of him, check out how good their own coverage of the buyout has been.

This article in The New Yorker covers the story in typical New Yorker depth - plenty of juicyness in there...

"Whatever his commercial successes, he has never produced a great newspaper, and he seems to value even a trophy property like the Times of London less for its prestige than for its influence—its power to help sway elections, to promote his political ideas, and to protect his corporate interests. “I wonder how many even of his admirers would argue that Mr. Murdoch, for all his successes, has created even one serious, authoritative and truly independent newspaper,” the columnist Martin Wolf wrote recently in the Financial Times, alluding to Murdoch’s ownership of four national newspapers. “Mr. Murdoch can take substantial credit for the tide of vulgarity that now floods the U.K.”

Will there finally be Tits on page three of the Wall Street Journal? We can only wait, and hope...