All Eyes on Media Glutton Murdoch

[Joanne98]

Rupert Murdoch, the compulsive buyer of all things media, has a handshake deal with Tribune Co. to buy Newsday for a reported $580 million.

The potential purchase of the nation’s 10th-largest newspaper, located on Long Island, could happen even though The Wall Street Journal is still visible within the serpentine body of Murdoch’s News Corporation. The digestion should not last much longer. The same day the Newsday agreement hit the press, Marcus Brauchli, the holdover managing editor of the Journal, resigned.

The Newsday-to-News Corporation deal rightly has media reformers upset. The consternation need not stop there. The newspaper’s readers, advertisers and anybody concerned with the fragile health of our democracy should be worried. The deal whacks away at one of democracy’s pillars, that of an independent press.

Newsday has long been in the hands of large corporations. What makes this deal so unsavory is that it puts an enormous amount of power under the control of arguably the nation’s, if not the world’s, most powerful media company. Newsday’s sale to News Corporation not only cripples an important media market, it will further squeeze the American press into the grip of far too few corporations - corporations with a hunger for profits, not journalism.

Even though the Newsday deal casts a long shadow over the media-reform movement, there is hope. On paper, the deal is dead. Not only does News Corporation’s potential purchase of Newsday not hold up under federal cross-ownership rules that limit a company from owning a newspaper and a television station in the same market, but there could be antitrust violations because of Murdoch’s other newspapers in New York.

That has not stopped Murdoch before.

“He has been very successful with regulatory gamesmanship,” said Andrew Schwartzman, president and CEO of Media Access Project.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/25/8510/