Pat Nolan's Comparative Journalism Hour: News Corp. Edition

This week saw News Corp split itself in two. Rupert Murdoch’s publishing arm, the one with paper and ink, will be disassociated from the much more profitable film and television counterpart (20^th Century Fox and Fox News, to name a few). When this development became public, the journalism world automatically turned towards the recent British phone hacking scandal. This was a fair move, but there’s reason to be cautious of correlation without causation—News Corp is allowed to be a big story twice in one year without the two stories being related.

There are three news-qua-news stories at hand in this deal. The first, as mentioned, has to do with phone hacking and bias. The second involves locality: Murdoch’s empire has evolved according to its owner’s geographic sentiments. Australia, the home, reports in ways that London, the base, and New York, the money, do not. The third involves money. Was this the right decision for all parties involved?

The phone hacking scandal at the UK’s News of the World tabloid didn’t create any new enemies for Murdoch. There were plenty of those to begin with. Instead, it gave his enemies a new line of attack. The Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch paper, was one of the few in his empire to even entertain the idea that the phone hacking had anything to do with the split. Still soft on the subject, the WSJ suggests that such a split will aid the benefitting film and television arm by providing it with new “acquisition” opportunities. Bloomberg’s Businessweek sees things differently. They allege that, if the split was motivated by the scandal, then it was because of the film side’s exposure to investigation. This is more conspiratorial, for sure, but still goes to show that the perhaps bitter Wall Street Journal still has an editorial board.

Unlike the Journal, other affected News Corp publications have a different take. The most supportive reside in his homeland of Australia where his companies run two-thirds of the print-news market. The Australian, his flagship on the continent, framed the story as one of savvy business tactics while disclosing that they stand to gain a greater share of influence in the new conglomerate. In the UK, where Murdoch may have more vocal enemies than anywhere else, the situation is subdued. British newspapers know he has a bad reputation and are afraid that further vilification may overdo their recent victory. The Guardian (lefty) and Telegraph (rightie) offer classy, dry reports. In New York, where the empire now resides, we have David Carr of the New York Times writing about a recent sense of mutiny among Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones managers.

The decision to split (shoutout to SCOTUS’ split decision!) probably had less to do with phone-hacking and Murdoch’s personal narrative, and more to do with simple economics. It’s not that the other two aren’t news-worthy—it’s likely that they’re most newsworthy. Here’s the thing: media outlets shouldn’t sneak their own speculation into stories. They should report the speculation (in news or editorial form) as speculation. It’s too confusing otherwise.

If you want to talk about cause, even anti-Murdoch NPR admits it’s about making more money. Are the scorned papers doomed to fail? Nope. Just compare them to the New York Times Company.