Eenheidsworst smaakt niet

Ah yes, Rupert Murdoch buys Dow Jones. Now, I don't really care about that, I don't trade stock (certainly not at Wall Street) and I don't read the Wall Street Journal. But reading the news items, 2 things struck me:
1. Giving up a family business that existed for over 100 years is quite a step to take.
2. The independence of another newspaper is lost. Old Rupert says an independent committee will look after the assignment of new people (i.e. journalists), but we've seen that one before.

The first point got me thinking how do you give up on 100 years of family history? Then I realized, actually, me and my brothers are doing the same thing with the family business that exists for 60 years. One big difference though: they already own it and get the money from it, we would still have to take it over. But they've gone public with Dow Jones a long time ago, so I guess that's when they already gave it up. All of a sudden, the step doesn't seem so big anymore. But still, I wouldn't feel comfortable giving it up, just like it's not easy to make the decision I made regarding our little family shop.

A good part of that feeling would come from knowing the business will be run in a different way. In terms of Dow Jones, this means knowing how News Corp (Rupert Murdoch's organization) treats media as a money-making machine. Rather than conserving the integrity and a critical mind, they turn all their efforts into popular, lowkey output. The majority wants pulp, so the minority (still 2 million people in the case of WSJ) doesn’t get anything. The majority wants rightwing conservative BS, the minority has to fight opinions formed by Fox. It’s not objective news that counts, but advertising income. This is why Times journalists couldn’t do their job anymore without interference by Rupert himself. Even though they had a committee to preserve the integrity and objectiveness. This turned out a farce. The Bancroft family fell for the money and a promise similar to this one. Let’s see how long it stands.

I won’t be around to watch the downfall of the journal, as I’m not extremely interested in business news like that. However, creating what we call ‘eenheidsworst’ is not what we need. *)


*) I started typing in English, but wanted to use the word 'eenheidsworst'. Not sure if there is a similar term in English (if there is, let me know). Anyway, it means something like "all the same shit", in this case all major media create similar sort of output.