The Toronto Star's David Olive unravels the mystery. Actually, it's not so mysterious.
As Rupert Murdoch and the Bancroft family, which has controlled Journal parent Dow Jones & Co. since 1902, inch toward agreement on a $5 billion (U.S.) purchase of Dow Jones by Murdoch's News Corp. empire, it's telling that there has been no outcry about the fate of a publication that media insiders still routinely describe as one of the most influential in the English-speaking world. Except, that is, among distraught Journal employees who rightly fear the loss of their journalistic independence. Murdoch has ceaselessly meddled with every major paper he's laid his hands on. The question is whether anyone other than the Journal's editors and reporters still regard the paper as a national treasure – or, for that matter, should. ...
... The fate of the Journal appears to be a non-issue. The reason is that the Journal, like Murdoch's "fair and balanced" Fox News channel, has become so overtly partisan over the past decade or so that it has lost a great deal of its former influence with decision-makers in government, business, science and other realms. ...
Dow Jones already labours under self-inflicted wounds that pre-date Murdoch's arrival. One of the worst-run major media firms in America under the decades of absentee Bancroft ownership, Dow Jones has passed up lucrative early-stage investments in future cable giants Comcast and Cablevision; and opportunities to sell to kindred spirits New York Times Co. and Washington Post Co. The firm's risk-averse managers did commit to buying an also-ran financial data firm, Telerate, on which shareholders lost two-thirds of their investment.
More recently, an ill-advised cost-cutting drive has purged some of the Journal's best newshounds while reducing news space by about 10 per cent. And additional space has been freed up for fluff pieces about leisure travel and how to select an ace closet organizer. The two full broadsheet pages of distortion and outright mistruths that pass for editorials and op-ed commentary remain, of course – commanding no more authority with D.C. decision-makers than the Moonie-owned Washington Times.
Could Murdoch make matters worse? Actually, yes.
In recent interviews, Murdoch has said he plans to make the paper's entire contents free online, surrendering the lucrative subscription income from more than 700,000 paid-up online Journal readers. He wants the wacky mandate of the editorial page to migrate into the news pages, which could also do with some "brighter and lighter" stories. Murdoch would dispense with the paper's front-page "good read," a decades-old tradition that has featured some of the paper's – and America's – best reporting. A recent "good read" told the story of alienated Venezuelan oil-sands workers now coping with their new workplace, Fort McMurray, Alta., – a story that touched on geopolitics, oil technology and cultural acclimatization.
In explaining his motive for shoving that shard of ice into Journal veterans' hearts, Murdoch allowed that articles of more than 300 words weary him. But the Journal is already no longer a paper of record. Less often, now, does it run the in-depth pieces that have long drawn business and political decision-makers to its pages – articles that contrast the innovative health-care experiments of various states; explain how Caterpillar Inc. painstakingly repulsed a threat from Japan's Komatsu; or examine the inner workings of Procter & Gamble Co.'s remarkable marketing machine. Stories that take longer than 300 words to tell, but for decades have offered lively case histories in how American business works. ...
The Journal will become another club for Murdoch to use against political and personal foes. But it will be a paper that serious readers no longer take seriously.