The home-page headline for a fine Richard Siklos story wondering what kind of proprietor Rupert Murdoch would be over the Wall Street Journal doesn’t reflect the article underneath but does reflect the Times’ attitude toward Murdoch:
Wall Street Journal Weighs Life Under Rupert Murdoch
The media baron is known to take a hands-on approach to his politically barbed and sometimes racy properties.
Yes, I can’t wait to see how he makes the Journal racy. Something to do with glass ceilings, I’ll bet.
: By the way, I’ve shocked a few reporters this week when I told them that I got far more editorial interference due to business interests while at Time Inc., as a critic for People and the founder of Entertainment Weekly, than I ever got as TV critic for TV Guide in News Corp. At People, the head of HBO would regularly trying to behead me, back in the early days before HBO became the best network in TV, when it reveled in cable’s freedom to show bare breasts. A business exec also made a point of telling me that my bad review for a treacly Hallmark Hall of Fame show cost the magazine its advertising. My editor, Pat Ryan, protected me from that corporate pressure; other executives did not. At Entertainment Weekly, as I’ve recounted here before, top editors at Time Inc. — all gone now — complained, just as the company was merging with Warner Brothers to become an entertainment conglomerate, that we were being too mean to entertainment; they actually sat down and calculated the grade point average of our reviews. But as the TV critic at TV Guide, I never received pressure to be nice to any Fox shows.
(Disclosure: I’m headed to Monterey to run a panel at a Murdoch meeting of newspaper execs.)
