Murdoch's World (33 page)

The Special Committee also included the former CEO of the Associated Press, the former editor in chief of the
Chicago Tribune
, and a
former Republican congresswoman. News Corp expressed confidence that Negroponte had enough independence to act independently. Given that News Corp and Murdoch were functionally the same, reporters and editors put little stock in the statement. But managing editor Marcus Brauchli vouched for Negroponte and the entire Rube Goldberg arrangement.
We can work under Murdoch's system
, he told his staff.
We can work with Murdoch. We need his riches to weather the storms slamming the economy and the industry
.

A similar board established a generation earlier to protect the
Times of London
and the
Sunday Times
proved an occasional bureaucratic irritant to Murdoch and not much more. Questions over the Special Committee's composition passed almost as soon as they surfaced, unnoticed except in journalism circles.

The acquisition of the
Wall Street Journal
went through in late 2007. Murdoch named Les Hinton CEO of Dow Jones. Less than five months later, Hinton told Brauchli that he and Thomson felt he should leave. Brauchli yielded in the face of insurmountable logic: Murdoch, the paper's real editor in chief, wanted him gone. Brauchli consoled himself with a departing payment worth more than $6 million and became executive editor of the
Washington Post
.

The Special Committee had authority to approve the hiring and firing of managing editors. Formally Brauchli's departure was voluntary and did not involve clashes over journalistic integrity, so the switch did not automatically trigger the Special Committee's mandate to act. The members expressed vexation that they were told after the fact. But they approved the appointment of Thomson as managing editor of the paper. Les Hinton slid smoothly into the publisher's seat and, with an apology, publicly defanged the panel charged with defending the paper.

“It was the end of any doubt over who was in charge, and of what Murdoch thought of the old paper,” one former
Journal
reporter recalled. To staffers, he said, “the whole special committee just
felt like a cynical joke.”

By early 2008 the
Wall Street Journal
was under Murdoch's full control. Literate yet accessible, the
Journal
set the standard for reporting business and finance. It was not written to impress the friends of its reporters, as Murdoch believed of the
New York Times
, but for entrepreneurs, Rotarians, investors, ranchers, innovators, and school-teachers west of the Hudson and east of the Rockies. Yet Murdoch
wanted to run the nation's leading general interest newspaper, not its most respected financial publication or “second read” of the morning.

Under Murdoch and Thomson, the
Journal
took a heightened interest in domestic politics and foreign news without explicitly financial components. The paper's daily news metabolism quickened and its tone lightened. Thomson pushed for attention-getting headlines that stretched across the page, for big photographs, for shorter stories, and for reimagined lifestyle sections. The paper reflected that day's news, not waiting until a day or two later to write a lyric assessment. An Associated Press article about mass shootings at Virginia Tech was
the top-read story on the paper's website in 2007. The paper had not assigned anyone to cover the story as it broke. Thomson thought that was madness.

The digital age, not just the new owner, dictated major shifts in how the paper operated, concluded Rebecca Blumenstein, a veteran senior editor who flourished under Thomson.
“The pace of news changed,” she told me. “You have to have a front page now that people feel compelled to read every morning. If people don't feel they have to pay for the
Wall Street Journal
, then they're not going to pay.”

Some old hands took these shifts as deliberate steps to unravel Kilgore's legacy and feared, taken together, they would undermine the paper's distinctiveness. One former executive argued that the paper's coverage
the day after the Fort Hood shootings in 2009 offered the same kind of breaking news coverage available on any other news site.

“What [the reenvisioned
Journal
] does is
reflect Murdoch's intentions, which I think he was clear about from the beginning,” said
William Grueskin, who served as the paper's page-one editor, managing editor of
WSJ.com
, and deputy managing editor for news but left in 2008. “Whether that was a good strategy is, I think, still being sussed out.”

Another former editor said the ambition of the place simultaneously weakened.
“They don't try to take you inside boardrooms,” he claimed. “They simply tell you what happened.” Added a former
Journal
executive, “Thomson made the
Journal
more good and less excellent.”

Once Thomson was in place as managing editor, however, things
began to ease up a bit. Murdoch had already authorized more money to add pages to the front section. Mass layoffs, widely feared, never occurred. Instead, Murdoch repeatedly demonstrated interest in the trade of journalism.

In 2008 Murdoch dropped by the Beijing bureau with little warning, alarming reporters. They were wary of his reputation of appeasing the country's regime. But he had by then largely abandoned his dreams of new fortunes in China. When Murdoch sat in on an interview with a Chinese finance official, his interest was noted by both the Chinese and the Americans. But his interest proved journalistic and political rather than in furthering his own business interests.

And Murdoch charmed staffers, especially researchers and the news clerks on the lowest rungs. The China bureau included many of Murdoch's most lacerating critics. He never mentioned the letter of protest that Johnson and others had signed. Nor did he or Thomson ever punish a single one of them. Murdoch had personally intervened to ensure that Johnson was issued a visa by the authorities to allow him to work there after they had barred him from the country. And during that visit, Murdoch urged the bureau to think big. The year had seen epic stories, such as the deadly Sichuan earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people and a series of protests and riots in Tibet.
The biggest mistake one can make when news breaks is to sit back
, Murdoch said as he addressed the entire bureau. Go check it
out. The worst thing that happens is you end up finding a good feature story. It was a rare explicit directive to the
Journal
's China staff—but also an encouraging one: go find the story.

EVENTUALLY THOMSON decided not to kill Barney Kilgore's beloved A-hed, the front-page lagniappe, though he discarded the
Journal
's practice of reserving space for a second front-page story that had no particular news peg.
So, too, did Murdoch abandon plans to scrap the paywall. The paper tweaked its hybrid “freemium” system, in which some articles were posted outside the paywall, but the general concept survived.

Thomson seemed more dedicated to in-depth, painstaking reporting than his new staff had given him credit for. He didn't like it when reporters devoted a year to a project. That sounded too much like a play for a Pulitzer Prize. But he backed a multiyear project on corporate invasion of online privacy and consistently supported reporting that proved embarrassing to the ruling classes in China.

Among the
Journal
's proudest traditions was a studied distance from any whiff of partisanship. Staffers for the news pages anxiously monitored headlines, story selection, and placement for signs that the new regime would fulfill their darkest fears—that Murdoch would pull and throw punches to aid favored politicians and causes.

In the minds of several senior editors who privately admitted reservations among themselves, a certain note had been struck by Thomson back on election night 2008. Thomson wanted the headline across the top of the front page to carry the full name of the next president:
“Barack Hussein Obama.” The
New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post
, and
Los Angeles Times
did not include the full name in their headlines. And top news editors at the
Journal
beseeched Thomson not to do it. Such a headline would appear to be emphasizing
the unlikelihood of the name for a president, its very
otherness
. The conservative controversialist Ann Coulter had uttered the name as frequently as possible in her columns and television appearances to underscore the point: the guy doesn't just have an African father, but he has a Muslim middle name as well! Thomson let it go; the headline did not run.

But within weeks, Thomson named Gerard Baker as his deputy. An alumnus of the
Financial Times
and the
Times of London
, Baker had been the editor of the paper's US operations and a conservative political columnist.
Baker was British, charming, literate, and well aware of the repercussions of
his praise for Sarah Palin as a serious figure in the fall of 2008 in one of his final columns for the
Times of London
. Baker shared a core conviction with Thomson and Murdoch that most of the news media could be found on the political left. Many current and former reporters and editors for the paper privately agreed.

Baker arrived just as Obama took office, with a firm Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. Thomson and Baker believed newspapers should serve as an oppositional force to the nation's chief executive and wanted to cast the
Journal
more in that image. The paper's new owner and two top editors further
believed the
Journal
was populated by liberals and leftists who were blinded to their own bias. Baker told people that Thomson and he wanted to balance that reflexive liberalism. That didn't mean he wanted to replicate Fox News in print. Baker promised instead to guide the paper's coverage right down the middle. The
Journal
's news side had for years been protected by the asperity of its conservative editorial pages, so its reporters were not subjected to the same ideological scrutiny as those at the
New York Times
or the
Washington Post
. Yet they were proud of their record, saying they believed they provided a fair report each day. Most journalists were prepared to accept or at least accommodate such corrective tweaking. But they were not always sure what to make of the editorial nudges when they occurred.

In the spring of 2009, shortly after Obama's controversial stimulus bill passed Congress, the paper's new top editors ordered up a story reporting that the bill was creating so much uncertainty among companies that it threatened the economic recovery. A command to gather material for the story went out to writers across the paper. The stimulus bill included some $19 billion to encourage adopting the use of electronic medical records. A reporter working on the story told me his sources at big health IT companies said the stimulus had led to an uptick in business for their firms. But
that didn't make it into the article. Was that a journalistic choice, an ideological one, or both?

Reporters and editors were surprised by the new senior editors' obsession with the competition. Much of how Thomson and Baker envisioned the
Journal
appeared to be defined in opposition to practices elsewhere, especially the despised
New York Times
. Thomson thought that
Times
chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger exemplified passivity. When a December 2009 column by
Times
media critic David Carr cited concerns about the
Journal
editors' conservatism, Thomson called the piece
“yet more evidence that the
New York Times
is uncomfortable about the rise of an increasingly successful rival while its own circulation and credibility are in retreat.” He revealed that
Times
executive editor Bill Keller had written a letter to a national awards committee (later confirmed as the prestigious Polk Awards) questioning the basis on which
Journal
had won a prize for reporting from China. Thomson added, “Whether it be in the quest for prizes or in the disparagement of competitors, principle is but a bystander at the
New York Times
.”

In April 2010 Thomson exacted a minor measure of revenge. The
Journal
's weekend sections had improved under Thomson, with expanded space for cultural coverage and witty columns on sports. He was within three weeks of the debut of a “Greater New York” section too, competing on local stories for the first time.

The
Journal
published a lifestyle piece that claimed women were attracted to men with
sexually ambiguous facial features. The piece was illustrated by a series of photographs of the bottom half of men's faces. One of the “feminine” faces was immediately recognizable, at least in media circles. It belonged to Sulzberger.