Murdoch has bought the WSJ for 5 billion dollars.
Showing his usual grace and class he was quoted as saying,
“When the Journal gets its Page 3 girls, we’ll make sure they have MBAs.”
The News Corp. chief also tells Eric Pooley, relating to negotiations with the controlling Bancroft family: “They’re taking five billion dollars out of me and want to keep control … in an industry in crisis! They can’t sell their company and still control it — that’s not how it works. I’m sorry!”
He adds: “The price of the Journal is $60 plus vitriol.”
It would appear there may be a number of job losses in the near future;
On his plans for the Journal: “What if, at the Journal, we spent $100 million a year hiring all the best business journalists in the world? Say 200 of them. And spent some money on establishing the brand but go global … and then you make it free, online only. No printing plants, no paper, no trucks. How long would it take for the advertising to come? It would be successful, it would work and you’d make … a little bit of money.”
Bill Moyers’ of Bill Moyers’ Journal on PBS, let his views on Murdoch be known in no uncertain terms.
“If Rupert Murdoch were the Angel Gabriel, you still wouldn’t want him owning the sun, the moon and the stars,” Moyers starts his video essay. “That’s too much prime real estate for even the pure in heart.
“But Rupert Murdoch is no saint, he is to propriety what the Marquis de Sade was to chastity. When it comes to money and power, he is carnivorous, all appetite, no taste. He’ll eat anything in his path,” Moyers adds. “Politicians become little clay pigeons to be picked off with flattering headlines, generous air time, a book contract, or the old-fashioned blackjack that never misses, campaign cash.
“He hires lobbyists the way Imelda Marcos bought shoes. And stacks them in is cavernous closet along with his conscience. This is the man, you remember, who famously kowtowed to the communist overlords of China, oppressors of their own people, to protect his investments there.”
Union issue also here
I just finished watching Bill Moyers’ show. His Murdoch comments came at the very end of the show, ending with (something like): “well, that’s it for this week. I’ll see you next week with another edition, unless of course, we get bought out too.”
Let’s hope not, eh?
Moyers also aired his interview with Vic Gold, one of the latest paleocons to publicly dump on the “Holy Rollers and the Neocons.” He used to work for Barry Goldwater, back when Moyers was working for Kennedy & Johnson.