Murdoch Says He Thought About Buying Times
Since Rupert Murdoch closed the deal to acquire Dow Jones, and with it The Wall Street Journal, he's had no shortage of things to say about the weaknesses of The Journal's biggest competitor, The New York Times. So it's perhaps surprising to learn that he told an Australian paper he'd "thought about" buying The Times. In typical Murdochian fashion, the revelation appears as a kind of casual, off-the-cuff remark in the course of a longer interview.
Newsweek sees the comment as a move by Mr. Murdoch to rattle Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger. The magazine, citing a source at The Times, reports that after winning control of the Journal, Mr. Murdoch sent Mr. Sulzberger a note that read "Let the war begin."
Was this the first shot? Guess we'll find out.
Oh puleeeease! Murdoch & Sulzberger's competing media organizations may or may not engage in a proverbial war of the printed word, but to imply Murdoch sent written challenge to Sulzberger saying "let the war begin," is pathetic.
If this is the best Newsweek has to offer their customers, then its no wonder their circulation is diving, just as the circulation at the New York Times is diving. Although the NYT readership may be diving at a significantly greater pace.
These types of articles or reports, are not journalism, they are rumors or attempts by reporters to create story where there is none, in an effort to generate some sort of circulation fact. This is over the back yard fence gossiping and it is beneath any good journalist!
In addition, Murdoch's interest in the NYT must have not been truly serious, or he would have made a real offer. And why should he when the NYT really does not have a marketable product to compare with the Wall Street Journal franchise.
All Murdoch needs to do is be slightly patient with his new venture. Eventually quality product will simply overwhelm its competition. The NYT has held onto its incredibly undeserved moniker "America's newspaper" for way too long. It is totally undeserved at this time. It has been for perhaps three to five decades.
The NYT now represents only the supposedly superior cultural & academic elite. Just ask their primary readership and they will tell you how very much more superior than average Americans they are. They surely feel they deserve their own publication that reflects the world according to their convoluted concepts of global socialism where they and they alone run the world according to their perverted ideal's of wealth redistribution, so long as its everyone else's wealth!
Americans need publications like Newsweek to improve their content and seriously address facts so we can make informed decisions. When Newsweek pushes crap like this, they demonstrate why we cannot count on almost any of the stories they push. How many more vacuous stories have they pushed as real journalism and enticed gullible readers to believe? Is their reporting on Global Warming as factual and evidence based as they want all to believe, or is it based on push polls, and developed data that was created to support the theory that numerous scientists are now disputing. The seas will NOT rise twenty feet as Al Gore asserts & qualified scientists who participated in the UN reports already have discredited such incredible exaggerations as irrational and irresponsible alarmist false panic.
The media is focused and perpetuates the personal rivalry of Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Murdoch mainly for the pleasure of the media industry folks. The general public is uninterested in all this in fact; sadly, they are barely interested in reading a newspaper any more. The real story is that both the NYT and Newscorp’s respected properties are scrambling to where today’s readers are: the internet and portable devices. Print is not dead; it’s just not capturing or maintaining the same number of readers it did years ago for reasons other than content. Surely journalism is on the decline everywhere and that Publishers have long seen the advantages in being on one side of the aisle or the other politically, but it is a business foremost and not a bleeding heart enterprise, as both individuals lead public shareholder Corporations to earn profits.
The dangerous aspects of reporting washwomen talk of these titan’s personal rivalries in so-called respected National magazines such as Newsweek is that these publications showcase their journalistic decline and desperation to fix their own free fall in reader circulation. That is the real story my friends.