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The Bancrofts and the Benjamins

Barring a miracle, Rupert Murdoch will take over the Wall Street Journal later this week, when his latest offer is presented to the Bancroft family. (Journal coverage here; New York Times coverage here.)

For all the disingenuous talk about the Bancrofts’ holding out because of their deep, deep concern for journalistic integrity, it all comes down, as usual, to the Benjamins. The Washington Post’s Frank Ahrens reports:

Dow Jones had pushed for Murdoch to raise his $60-per-share bid by $2 to $3 per share, an amount that had come to be known as a “tip” to help placate the Bancrofts, the family that controls Dow Jones. The majority of them instantly rejected Murdoch’s bid when it became public.

A tip. Well, here’s another tip — the editorial independence agreement that has been worked out over the past few weeks will prove not to be worth the paper it’s written on.

The Journal will probably continue to be an excellent newspaper, although it may cease to be great. This isn’t about ideology — its nutty editorial page may actually move slightly to the left, as Murdoch is far more interested in power than in politics. Rather, this is about a profit-crazed, meddling shark smelling blood in the water and moving in for the kill.

Here’s a roundup of commentaries by Jack Shafer of Slate, who’s been particularly good on this subject. I especially like “Murdoch: The Filth and the Fury,” an overview of how he destroyed the New York Post despite making explicit promises not to.

Murdoch is a good steward only in the sense that he’s not overly concerned with cost-cutting — he’s far more likely to subsidize the Journal so that it will remain a suitable adjunct to his Fox Business Channel, set to debut on Oct. 15.

I don’t mean to be too nostalgic. Obviously the news business is falling apart, and we’re going to witness all kinds of unimaginable events before someone figures out how to put together a new, very different model.

But this is a sad day for journalism. At the very least, if managing editor Marcus Brauchli has any tough stories on China in the can, he’d better run them in the next day or two.

Photo (cc) by Paolo! Some rights reserved.

Jacoby’s botched analogy

Someone needs to tell Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby about zoning. In arguing against the Fairness Doctrine for over-the-air broadcasters, Jacoby writes:

Better than a debate over the Fairness Doctrine, though, would be a debate over whether radio and television should be regulated by government in the first place. The standard justification for such regulation is that the airwaves are public property. There are only a finite number of broadcast frequencies, the statists say. If the government didn’t own and license them, the result would be chaos.

Well, the supply of land is finite, too. Yet no one argues that real estate should be nationalized and licensed by the feds. It is obvious that land can be bought and sold in a free market without resulting in anarchy. Why should the broadcast spectrum be any different?

In fact, land is bought and sold in a semi-free market. You’re free to buy a piece of property in a residential zone, but you’re not free to develop it as a Wal-Mart or a toxic-waste pit. The rules governing how you use your land are actually pretty strict. So Jacoby’s analogy isn’t just off a little bit — it’s off 180 degrees.

That said, I agree with Jacoby. We don’t need the Fairness Doctrine. What we do need are real, enforceable limits on ownership of the sort that existed before the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Ensuring diverse, local licensing of those — yes — finite broadcast frequencies would do more to improve what we see and hear than any amount of content-based government regulation.

That’s what Mark Lloyd of the Center for American Progress recently tried to tell Tom Ashbrook of WBUR Radio’s “On Point.” It took Lloyd several tries to convince Ashbrook that he doesn’t want to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, but I think Ashcroft finally got it.

“I need weed”

The Globe’s Bryan Marquard pens a deft sendoff to Mr. Butch, a homeless guy who died yesterday in a motorscooter crash. I remember Mr. Butch lurching around Kenmore Square in the mid-1990s, but I hadn’t thought about him for years. It turns out he’d moved his base of operations to Allston.

Here’s the best part of the obit:

[Toni] Fanning’s favorite encounter with Mr. Butch was on Easter a few years ago. When she left home to visit a friend who was in bad straits, she was depressed about her friend, the day — just everything.

“And I walked outside and there was Butch standing on the corner of Harvard and Comm. Ave. with a big sandwich board that said, ‘I need weed,’ ” Fanning said. “I started laughing so hard that it got me through that entire day.”

I looked up videos of Mr. Butch on YouTube and found three. Two of them struck me as pretty exploitative, but this one captures him at his best:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4wysLpwNuI]
Mr. Butch is also the subject of a nice obit in the Allston-Brighton Tab by Richard Cherecwich, which is reprinted in the Herald.

A weird twist in the Whole Foods saga

As if Whole Foods’ proposed acquisition of Wild Oats weren’t already in enough trouble, the Wall Street Journal reports today that Whole Foods chief executive John Mackey pseudonymously posted messages on Yahoo discussion groups about the wonderfulness of Whole Foods, the lagging fortunes of Wild Oats and his own all-around genius.

Using the name “Rahodeb” (“Deborah,” his wife’s name, backwards jumbled up), Mackey apparently tried to drive down Wild Oats’ stock price in 2005 when it was $8 a share. Journal reporters David Kesmodel and John R. Wilke write:

“Would Whole Foods buy OATS?” Rahodeb asked, using Wild Oats’ stock symbol. “Almost surely not at current prices. What would they gain? OATS locations are too small.” Rahodeb speculated that Wild Oats eventually would be sold after sliding into bankruptcy or when its stock fell below $5. A month later, Rahodeb wrote that Wild Oats management “clearly doesn’t know what it is doing …. OATS has no value and no future.”

No wonder the Federal Trade Commission is all over this — there’s no way the agency could ignore such behavior. And Mackey’s contention that he was engaging in meaningless “macho posturing” is ridiculous.

Update: The New York Times account is worth a read, too.

Will Howie take the mic?

The Herald’s Jessica Heslam says that Howie Carr, back from vacation, will resume his show on WRKO Radio (AM 680) today at 3 p.m. We’ll see. It’s almost unheard-of for a radio station to allow a disgruntled host who says he’s leaving to remain on the air. I’d guess that it’s equally likely Carr will be kept on ice until his contract situation is resolved.

The subhead on Adam Reilly’s column in the Phoenix today is “Why WRKO should cut Howie loose.” But based on Reilly’s conclusions, it might as well have been “Why cutting Howie loose will be a big honking disaster for WRKO.”

“Dan-Haters” hit a new low

Either Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy’s daughter did something she’ll regret, or he’s being done in by some Internet fakery.

According to the sports blog Deadspin, Shaughnessy’s daughter Kate recently sent an e-mail to family and friends asking them to pump up Dad’s Amazon.com ratings for his most recent book, “Senior Year: A Father, A Son, and High School Baseball.” The idea, she writes (if she did), is to counter the “Dan-Haters.”

The result — and do you really have to ask? — is that “Senior Year” is now getting absolutely hammered on Amazon.

I considered not writing this item. Deadspin offers zero evidence that the e-mail is genuine, and, thus, its scooplet doesn’t meet even minimal journalistic standards. (If Deadspin has vetted its information in some credible way, it should say so — and I’ll be happy to make that clear.) But Deadspin is part of the well-known Gawker gossip network (Wonkette, Gawker, Defamer, et al.), and, according to Technorati, is ranked 81st in the top 100. It would be ridiculous to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

So, regardless of the e-mail’s authenticity, think of this as a bit of online cultural anthropology: “Dan-Haters” are using Shaughnessy’s daughter in an attempt to run down his book, whether she actually wrote the e-mail or not.

I’m inclined to think the e-mail is genuine. Besides, it’s the sort of thing I’d like to think one of my kids would write if I were in the same situation.

I count myself neither as a “Dan-Hater” nor as a Shaughnessy fan (shouldn’t the Globe’s lead sports columnist, you know, like sports?). But this is just vicious — and, sadly, characteristic of some of Shaughnessy’s more unhinged online detractors. (Via Universal Hub.)

A bad day for Judge Murphy

It looks like Superior Court Judge Ernest Murphy could be a big loser despite winning a $2 million-plus libel judgment against the Herald — a judgment that was reaffirmed this spring by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court.

The Associated Press reports that the state’s Commission on Judicial Conduct has filed charges with the SJC alleging that Murphy’s very odd and threatening post-verdict letters to Herald publisher Pat Purcell — written on Superior Court letterhead — amounted to “willful misconduct” that brought his office into “disrepute.”

Murphy, in his response, denies the misconduct charge.

It’s all online here (PDF).