Remember the promise made by Rupert Murdoch that the Wall Street Journal’s independence would be protected? Remember that special committee that was supposed to act as a firewall between News Corp. and the Journal’s newsroom?
Read this (thanks to Steve at The Opinion Mill for catching this):
Instead, questions were immediately raised about the Special Committee when Reuters reported that one appointed member was not only a personal friend of Murdoch’s, but he also ran a computer education foundation that had received $2.5 million from Murdoch’s News Corp. That represented a rather obvious conflict of interest for someone who was supposed to be independent from News Corp. (More on that later.)
Worse, the Special Committee is going to be chaired by a far-right GOP yes man who not only faithfully regurgitates Republican talking points in print for a living, but who in early 2003 predicted the fighting in Iraq would be “relatively inconsequential,” and who months later declared that America had won the Iraq war in “a cakewalk.”
That’s who Murdoch has tapped to protect the Journal’s editorial integrity? Good luck. I mean, was Sean Hannity not available?
What’s more:
And sure enough, as currently spelled out, the committee’s duties seem to be mostly toothless. The committee will have only a “say” in the hiring of top editors. And as Editor & Publisher’s Mark Fitzgerald pointed out last week, “it appears that the [committee’s] enforcement amounts to the power to write a report and publish it in the Journal.” Fitzgerald also “didn’t see any mechanism that would permit a lowly reporter to approach this august committee with a complaint — let alone any guarantee that the journalist would not suffer any reprisals for being a whistle blower.”
What this means for the Journal is unclear, but doesn’t appear good. Murdoch may be willing to dump cash into the franchise, but it remains unknown how he actually plans to use his new toy.
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Hank Kalet 