Media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s, and his family’s, adventures and victories in the field of journalism have won him admirers and critics. His detractors claim that he has trashed serious/traditional journalism. But journalism is neither static, nor a charitable activity. It has become a highly competitive business.

It would be unfair to single out media owners for blame. The editors too must be held accountable for the present mess. Murdoch recently “tore into the ‘doom and gloomers’ predicting the demise of newspapers, but admitted this involved ‘moving beyond dead trees’,” reports The Independent.

“This comes at a time when media groups have come under severe pressure, closing titles and slashing jobs, in the wake of the global credit crunch.

“Mr Murdoch, whose global media empire owns titles including The Wall Street Journal as well as The Times and The Sun, conceded that it was a ‘challenging’ time for the sector, as traditional sources of revenue dry up and competition increases.

“Mr Murdoch issued a rallying cry to the industry, saying: ‘I believe that newspapers will reach new heights. In the 21st century, people are hungrier for information than ever before. And they have more sources of information than ever before’. As readers become swamped by the fierce competition, they ‘want what they’ve always wanted: a source they can trust. This has always been the role of great newspapers in the past.”

Murdock took a potshot at the editors when he said that the future of newspapers “has a relevance far beyond the feverish, sometimes insecure collections of egos and energy that is the journalistic profession”. More here…

I have always believed that real/best journalism thrives only when there is intrinsic trust between the media owners and the journalists. The ego/power struggle between the two has created a sort of crisis.

Editors need to be sensitive to the needs of the owners without sacrificing basic journalistic values. And the media owners should stop treating their editors as mere domestic help or handmaidens. Apart from trust the two must also respect the other’s professional status/needs.

An AP file photograph of the legendary media baron Rupert Murdoch and his wife, Wendi Deng.

As the McCain campaign concentrates on holding the red states, Rupert Murdoch’s house organ for the super-rich sounds the alarm on what could happen if Barack Obama’s coattails are long enough to give Democrats filibuster-proof majorities in Congress.

“Though we doubt most Americans realize it,” a WSJ editorial warns, “this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven’t since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s.”

A sidebar lists Republican nightmares that passed the House this year but were blocked in the Senate–prescription-drug price controls, renegotiating mortgage contracts in bankruptcy, withdrawal timetables for funding the Iraq war and, horror of horrors, a windfall profits tax on oil companies.

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One of Fox News’ top brass has stepped in and essentially condemned and apologized for the networking characterizing Democratic presumptive Presidential nominee Barack Obama’s wife Michelle Obama as “Obama’s Baby Mama.”

The swiftness of the response shows that at the network’s top levels, at least, there are limits and corporate standards. The Politico reports:

“A producer on the program exercised poor judgment in using this chyron during the segment,” Fox’s Senior Vice President of Programming Bill Shine said in a statement to Politico.

In addition to being insulting, the phrase “baby mama” is also inaccurate. The Urban Dictionary defines “baby mama” as”the mother of your child(ren), whom you did not marry and with whom you are not currently involved.”

Although Shine doesn’t name anyone responsible, the show’s producer is Jessica Herzberg. A Fox staffer said that others internally were bothered by describing the potential first lady and very accomplished women — as the senator’s “baby mama.”

Unfortunately for the network, this comes just days after Fox’s E.D. Hill addressed her use of the phrase “terrorist fist jab” on-air in reference to the famous Michelle-Barack fist bump (or pound) made just before his celebratory speech in St. Paul.

See our earlier report and roundup on the controversy here.

There is an irony in all of this: Fox News’ owner Rupert Murdoch recently indicated he’s fascinated with Obama and would like to meet him.

News Corp maven and Fox News boss Rupert Murdoch, the man Democrats love to hate, has made a surprising prediction: he says Democrats will win the 2008 Presidential election in a landslide. And he has notably nice things to say about Democratic Senator Barack Obama.

His comments can’t be good news for GOP presumptive nominee Senator John McCain, or for Senator Hillary Clinton who in the past 12 months was featured in news stories about how she was burying the hatchet with the owner of Fox News, New York’s potent New York Post, the nationally respected Wall Street Journal and a host of other worldwide media properties:

News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch on Wednesday predicted a Democratic landslide in the U.S. presidential election against a gloomy economic backdrop over the next 18 months.

Murdoch has yet to endorse a U.S. presidential candidate but considers Barack Obama very promising, the media magnate said in an interview by two Wall Street Journal reporters at an annual conference for high-tech industry insiders.

…”You have got the Obama phenomenon. You have got, undoubtedly, a recession … The average American is really getting hurt financially and that all bodes well for him (Obama), Murdoch said.

“You have probably the making of a complete phenomenon in this country,” Murdoch said in describing what he predicted will be a sweeping victory for Democrats in November.

Murdoch pointed to the loss of a Republican Congressional seat in Mississippi as to how powerless the GOP may be as economic and political forces converge to work against it.

And he said what many bloggers and pundits have said: McCain’s ties to Bush won’t help the Arizona Senator.

Murdoch said Obama and John McCain, the expected nominee of the Republican Party, both have a lot of problems, but McCain will be hurt by his party and his close ties to Washington. Race will be an issue for Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president, but “it looks like he overcomes that, overcomes that totally.”

Some critics have said Obama’s efforts on that score have not been helped by some of the official and unofficial comments coming from the Clinton camp. The Reuters story also points out an important fact about Murdoch:

Murdoch is associated with conservative political views but has a reputation for a pragmatic streak in major national races where he has shown a willingness to switch sides when he detects major political changes afoot.

“I think it (a recession) is one we will be coming out of for quite some time,” Murdoch said. “In the next 18 months, this country is going to be in for a very hard time.”

He said he isn’t backing anyone — but made a VERY significant statement that should cause Clinton and McCain to reach for their pack of Tums:

In the 2008 U.S. Presidential race, Murdoch said he is not yet backing anyone, but then quickly added: “I want to meet Obama. I want to know if he going to walk the walk.”

Murdoch said he had played a role in the endorsement by the New York Post, one of his global stable of papers, in endorsing Obama during the Democratic primary with Hillary Clinton in New York.

And Fox News? If Murdoch winds up preferring Obama, or basically deciding Obama is the wave of the future and he needs to live with him, don’t expect to see Fox News become anti-Obama.

Fox News is an exceptionally efficient product, appealing to what was once a vacuum in the media market. It’ll likely continue its skewered-to-the-right coverage with the conservative assumptions providing the context for comments.

Reuters:

News Corp’s decision to walk away from Newsday is an unexpected twist in the three-way bidding war for the paper. Murdoch and Tribune Co Chief Executive Sam Zell had an agreement in principle to sell the paper to News Corp, with Tribune retaining a small stake to create a way to defer large capital gains taxes that a total sale would incur.

As recently as three days ago, Murdoch said on a conference call with investors to discuss News Corp’s quarterly financial results that the deal with Zell was nearly done.

“I don’t think Cablevision will prevail,” Murdoch said, responding to a question about why he has not raised his bid, which he characterized as “competitively priced.”

I find newspapers interesting; Rupert Murdoch, very interesting:

Murdoch is not prone to the whining and woe-is-meism that so many other newspapermen practice. He’s willing to invest in his properties. He’s willing to lose money. For a 77-year-old man, it’s almost as if he has begun the first year of a 20-year plan to modernize his media portfolio, so he’s a real optimist.

Remember when he started the Fox Television Network? Everybody in the country said, oh, there are room for three conventional networks. And when he started Fox News Channel, people said, oh, there’s really only room for CNN. There can’t possibly be room for another.

And time and again, he goes in and he defies the so-called experts because he’s a force of creative destruction.

He will go in and he will steal anybody’s bacon. And he generally steals it honestly by competing, and for that you really have to admire him.

That’s Slate’s Jack Shafer talking. Here he speaks to Murdoch’s conservative reputation:

I think you’re making a mistake when you call Rupert Murdoch a conservative. He is a political opportunist. If you take a look and see who he supported in the most recent Australian election, it was not the conservative. It was the liberal.

Likewise, in the United Kingdom, Murdoch eventually put all the support of his daily newspapers there behind Tony Blair. […]

He likes to back a winner. He likes to have access. He threw a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s reelection bid for the Senate in 2006. This is a mistake people make all the time about Rupert Murdoch, the idea that he is some sort of conservative ideologue who has come to the United States to, I don’t know, guarantee the Reagan restoration, when all he really is, is a political pragmatist.

RELATED: Rupert’s launching an old-fashioned newspaper war against The New York Times.

When I came into the newspaper business in 1967 at the tender age of 20, most reporters and editors drank like fish and smoked like chimneys (on the job), lived and died for the news scoop, type was set on massive linotype machines using molten lead, and when the presses of morning and evening newspapers rolled it was like printing money.

Today newsrooms are like vegetarian cafeterias, the scoop is most often the purview of cable news channels, or Internet sites, the entire typesetting and printing process is electronic, and when the presses roll for the remaining morning papers (there are no evening papers as such anymore), one can only wonder how many years it will be before they are silenced.

The reasons for the long downward spiral of the industry are complex and multi-layered, but basically boil down to something that I was saying well before I wrote my last story and quit a few weeks before the 9/11 attacks:

Newspapers will not survive if they don’t change and change damned quickly by embracing the Internet and hugging it to their collective bosom.

I take no satisfaction in being right. (And yes, it was weird to feel like a fireman without a ladder when the first aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center on that beautiful September morning.)

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Sometimes marriages are made in heaven. And then there are the political marriages that are seemingly made further south, in hotter climes. Now there’s a report that the honeymoon may be over between Democratic Presidential nomination aspirant Senator Hillary Clinton and conservative mega-media-giant News Corp maven Rupert Murdoch.

For political and media junkies, its timing could not be more fascinating.

These are the days when Clinton, eager to pull out all stops to win the Pennsylvania primary, met with right-wing Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife – the guy who basically went after her husband for years, funded op-research on Bill Clinton and ran pieces accusing the Clintons of dirty work in the death of Vince Foster — and won if not his heart than his personally-written endorsement.

So perhaps it’s exchanging one Democratic party nemesis for another — after all Clinton already WON the New York primary — but the New York Times notes that breaking up is hard to do:

A popular parlor game in political circles in recent years has been dissecting the shifting relationship between Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media mogul, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Two years ago, there were signs of a thaw, with Mr. Murdoch, who owns The New York Post, not only endorsing Mrs. Clinton’s bid for a second Senate term in his paper, but also organizing a fund-raiser for her.

Recently, though, the relationship appears to have taken a turn for the worse. Mrs. Clinton has been skewered in The Post throughout her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, and recently taken to task over her claim that she had encountered sniper fire in a visit to Bosnia as first lady (though she later said she had “misspoken”). The newspaper even ran an article, datelined Sarajevo, to debunk what one of its headlines labeled a “ ‘low blow’ lie.”

Now another sign has emerged offering possible clues to Mrs. Clinton’s Murdoch status: Mr. Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth is holding a fund-raiser at her London home this month for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

On the other hand, there are enough variables to suggest that this may be more of an inching away from a closer relationship than any kind of a divorce. For one thing, for several years the apparent Clinton-Murdoch alliance benefited both sides.

For another, the new NY Times article notes that:

…analysis of campaign contributions from employees of the News Corporation and its affiliates, including 20th Century Fox, Fox Sports and the like, reveals they skew heavily Democratic and toward Mrs. Clinton, who collected more than $100,000 in donations compared with about $80,000 for Mr. Obama.

The records show that the employees gave less than $20,000 to Republicans seeking their party’s presidential nomination.

Last year, even Mr. Murdoch contributed $2,300 to Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. His son James contributed $3,450 to Mrs. Clinton. This followed The Post’s endorsement of her re-election in 2006, as well as Mr. Murdoch’s highly publicized fund-raiser for her.

So Murdoch’s employees are more prone towards Hillaryland versus Obamaland or even McCainland.

And then there are statements from the Clinton campaign about how unbiased Fox News is.

In reality, wooing the people who control the press is not new in American politics. What is new and surprising to some is Clinton’s desire (for those who considered her a polarizer) and ability (she wins them over) to in-effect court rich publishers who have demonized her and her husband and even in one case suggested they were involved with murder.

Yes, politics does make strange bedfellows. And Mrs. Clinton is hoping that 8 months from now the elections will give birth to a new title before her name (President-elect Hillary Clinton).

But is all of this this negative? Not necessarily.

To many Democrats, it’s jaw-dropping. But it shows that Clinton (a) can win over her most bitter foes, and, (b) is willing to take a deep breath and make peace with those who were out for her husband’s and her political scalps…if the peace treaty can advance the Clintons’ main goal.

It does raise a question: what next, a meeting and endorsement from Rush Limbaugh?

Howell Raines, who was executive editor of The New York Times from 2001-2003, is credited with bringing a healthy dose of advocacy journalism to the Gray Lady but was brought down by the Jason Blair scandal. He warns in his new column in Condé Nast’s Portfolio.com that there is no greater threat to American journalism than the possibility that media mogul Rupert Murdoch or some other unwelcome suitor would force its sale.

Money quote:

“He will spend whatever it takes to undermine the Times‘ standing as America’s leading general-interest newspaper. But my real fear is that Murdoch or some other unsuitable purchaser will then buy the Times through a combination of financial and psychological pressures on the strong, but hardly ironclad, Sulzberger family trust that controls the vast majority of the company’s voting stock. There is no more important question in American journalism than the future of the Times, and I don’t think the newspaper or the journalistic profession is taking Murdoch in particular or the takeover issue in general seriously enough.”

It is hard to argue with Raines about the threat, but it is no one’s fault but its own that The Times is not the newspaper that it once was — much improved in some respects but so troubled in many others — and it should be no more immune to the ongoing shakeout in the newspaper biz than any other publication.

More here.

Alberto Gonzales, Monica Goodling and others of the Bush Brigade who worked so hard to subvert American freedoms are gone, but their mission is moving forward. After chipping away at our legal rights, next on the agenda is control of our minds through mass media.

A House Committee will turn the spotlight today on FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin, who has been busy trying to concentrate ownership more than ever before into the hands of Rupert Murdoch and a few other corporate chieftains.

Like all loyal Bushies, Martin has not let legal niceties get in his way.

Citing “complaints from the public and professionals within the communications industry,” Rep. Bart Stupak, who heads the Energy and Commerce subcommittee that is investigating the FCC head, says, “It is one thing to be an aggressive leader, but many of the allegations indicate possible abuse of power and an attempt to intentionally keep fellow commissioners in the dark.”

Martin and other FCC members will testify about his efforts to bulldoze through the easing of rules limiting cross-ownership of newspapers and TV stations in the same city as well as “cooking the books” to push through regulations to crack down on cable TV which, outside of Fix News, has not been as servile as the Administration would like.

Read more here.

According to The Sunday Times a couple of days ago, the war with Iran has already begun:

BRITISH special forces have crossed into Iran several times in recent months as part of a secret border war against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Al-Quds special forces, defence sources have disclosed.

There have been at least half a dozen intense firefights between the SAS and arms smugglers, a mixture of Iranians and Shi’ite militiamen.

*****

An SAS squadron is carrying out operations along the Iranian border in Maysan and Basra provinces with other special forces, the Australian SAS and American special-operations troops.

The fighting comes amid an increase in US and British intelligence operations against Iran. Britain’s forces have more than 70 Farsi experts monitoring Iranian communications, and the intelligence is shared with the United States.

Seven American U2 spy planes have passed through RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire this year on their way to Akrotiri in Cyprus or Al-Dhafra in Abu Dhabi, the bases for flights over Iran.

Interesting. Al-Quds may very well be supplying arms to Iraqi militias, as well as to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and, if so, it is possible, if not likely, that the Iranian government not only knows what’s going on but approves as well. If so — that is, if arms are being supplied, and especially if Iran is directly behind that supply — the case for some sort of military response is strong. And I say that as a persistent critic of the Cheney-led escalation of warmongering words that seems to be driving the U.S. and her allies, whatever allies may be left, in the direction of a significant military confrontation with Iran, specifically, a large-scale attack on key Iranian targets. But is the story credible? And, even if it is, are we getting the whole truth? Likely not.

The question remains, is Iran directly behind the smuggling of arms into Iraq? This question needs to be answered before this war goes any further. Even if Iran is behind the smuggling, is the goal to stop the smuggling or to go to war with Iran? The two can be separated. Stopping the smuggling does not mean going to war with Iran, does not require going to war with Iran. War is what Cheney and his fellow warmongers want, but what would be the consequences of going to war with Iran? They would be dire, I predict — and many others, too. So, then, a war, of sorts, has begin, but to what end?

As Cernig has pointed out, U2 spy planes “aren’t all that good for spotting transient stuff like smugglers — but great for targeting fixed targets for airstrikes.” This may not be entirely true. Spy planes may indeed be able to be used effectively to track arms smuggling into Iraq. Still, he makes a good point. Furthermore, as Larisa Alexandrovna has remarked, the use of U2 spy planes may mean that the U.S. has, is, or will soon be “invad[ing] Iranian air space,” this in addition to special-forces operations over the border in Iran. Whatever Iran has done, or is doing, what this means is that the U.S. has committed acts of war against Iran. It may be argued whether or not war is justified, and to what degree it ought to be waged, if at all, but there seems to be little or no doubt that war has already begun. If so, I ask with Larisa, where is Congress?

Congress may have approved intelligence and special-forces operations, or perhaps the U.S. is acting without congressional approval. Either way, what we need is a public debate, not congressional rubber-stamping, and certainly not Bush initiating a war without any outside approval at all. There is the Iraq debacle to consider, after all, not to mention an American public that may not be so eager to go to war with Iran, yet another war in the Middle East, possibly a bloodier and even more disastrous war than the one ongoing in Iraq.

Finally, what is true and what is spin? The warmongers have long been trying to make the case that Iran is directly behind the smuggling of arms to Iraqi militias, an act of war that would allow them to make the childish playground case for war with Iran: “They started it.” And although the Times article was written by a credible reporter, Mick Smith, who broke The Downing Street Memo story, the newspaper itself is owned by none other than Rupert Murdoch, the media giant behind Fox News and The Weekly Standard, that is, the man who funds neocon and other right-wing propaganda in the U.S. and around the world, a man who may have an interest in fomenting war with Iran and who certainly has an interest in supporting those who do. There is good reason, it seems to me, to be skeptical.

(Cross-posted at The Reaction.)

The idea: get the administration’s message out on the “surge” in Iraq and recent reports say Dick Cheney’s position on Iran (that the military option is looking more and more preferable). Is there a journalistic conflict of interest (one quite glaring (apparently not noted by a news outlet?)?

First read THIS and then THIS.