The Bancrofts’ ‘stewardship’ never amounted to more than making cash, says alexander cockburn
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Was there ever a luckier clan than the Bancrofts, whose elders okayed the $5bn sale of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp on Tuesday?
There's been much solemn talk about the Bancrofts' 'stewardship of this national institution' since they acquired the Dow Jones company a century ago. In fact, the Journal was an undistinguished little sheet until a journalistic genius called Barney Kilgore decided in the years after World War II that a businessman in San Francisco should be able to read the same paper as one in Chicago or New York.
Kilgore devised the technology to do this, along with the paper's reportorial stance - serious but often humorous, in the style of the Midwest which is where Kilgore was from.
Kilgore made the Bancrofts really rich and they continued in that state for almost half a century, though their stewardship was either |
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| Murdoch may respect the Journal’s independence, because its views are even more rabid than his own |
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indifferent or inept, beyond the pleasant chore of raking in the money. Now they can trouser Murdoch's gold and trot off into the sunset, mumbling that they have extracted all the usual pledges from Rupert that he will respect the Journal's editorial independence.
Surely the 76-year-old mogul must quake with inner merriment as he goes through this oft-repeated rigmarole. I heard it almost 30 years ago when he bought a raffish New York weekly, the Village Voice. I worked for the Voice at the time and, so far as I can remember, we listened to Murdoch issuing a pledge not to fire the editor as he stepped into the elevator on the fifth floor of the Voice's offices on University Place and by the time he stepped out on the ground floor the editor had already been dismissed, as if by osmosis, and Murdoch's man was settling into the editorial chair.
The only reason why Murdoch might respect the Journal's independence, at least in the opinion pages, is that the views expressed there are even more rabid than his own; perhaps he savours the possibility that one  |
