Consolidation threatens America's newsrooms

Rupert Murdoch's unsolicited offer to buy Dow Jones & Co. for $5 billion is not encouraging for American journalism.

The dot-com-like offer puts Dow Jones' jewel, The Wall Street Journal, into Murdoch's overflowing media trough called News Corporation.

The Bancrofts — the family that has owned Dow Jones for more than 100 years — has so far rebuffed Murdoch's offer. The refusal may not last long. A deal will happen. The financial fragility of the newspaper industry, and Murdoch's mogul-mound-of-money are a powerful coupling.

So far, 52 percent of the Bancroft voting stockholders have said no. Another 12 percent have not spoken. Not reassuring numbers.

It is a safe bet that Murdoch views the newspaper as a natural partner to a new Fox cable business channel he is launching to compete against CNBC.

To do this, Murdoch will have to overcome serious differences in newsroom culture. The Journal is a respected institution that won two Pulitzer Prizes this year, one of which was for a series on working conditions in China, the other for its reporting on stock-option backdating.

Murdoch's News Corporation newspapers and cable news are notable for flamboyant headlines, and for talking heads such as Bill O'Reilly, who prefer volume to substance.

The prospect of a News Corporation/Dow Jones marriage would be such a media dreadnought it should be enough to raise the government's limp regulatory hackles. The Federal Communications Commission probably has no role in the deal, but should try to make noise, considering News Corporation already owns a New York paper, the New York Post, and a television station in the same market.

The Federal Trade Commission should be extremely worried that News Corporation could own Fox News Channel, with its dominance of cable TV, a new financial cable channel, and The Wall Street Journal, with its national circulation of 2.06 million and nearly another million people who pay for its online edition.

The FCC has rolled over for Murdoch before, as was pointed out by David Carr of The New York Times in a column on Monday.

"When the News Corporation came under scrutiny by the Federal Communications Commission for foreign ownership of television stations, Harper-Collins, another Murdoch baby, gave then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich a $4.5 million book advance."

Ah, the beauties of consolidation.

The agencies and elected officials that are supposed to protect our democracy have instead given away one of the democracy's crucial supports: the press.

The once-robust and diverse press has been transformed into mere properties lumped in with other disparate industries in a bookkeeper's ledger. This has all happened with the help of the FCC, which the media biggies are again pushing to relax rules that ban one company from owning a newspaper and radio and television stations in the same market.

Murdoch's play for Dow Jones should not be treated differently. He is essentially doing on a national level what is banned on the local.

Take, for example, what News Corporation President Peter Chernin told a group of cable-industry executives Tuesday.

"This is a world in which the big get bigger," Chernin said, according to the Associated Press. "You have a Comcast platform, that's an incredibly valuable platform to bolt things onto, to monetize. I believe that you will see continued consolidation and I think you will see big companies continue to get bigger."

Platform, bolt, monetize. Spoken like a true avaricious capitalist backed by $5 billion. These shortsighted corporate ideas of journalism are what consolidation has brought to America's newsrooms.

The Wall Street Journal will not be the last newspaper to fall if Congress, and the nation's regulatory agencies, do not get serious about this very real threat to democracy, and create laws that foster an independent press.

Ryan Blethen's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is rblethen@seattletimes.com