Systemic degradation
by digby
Many people’s alarm bells went off when Murdoch bought Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. You had to be skeptical that he wouldn’t degrade the paper (the reporting anyway, the editorial page had long been a cesspool.)But I wondered how the world would fare when one of its most important sources of financial news became corrupted by a player with both a political and financial interest in slanting the news. Joe Nocera has a good column today about what happened:
Along with the transformation of a great paper into a mediocre one came a change that was both more subtle and more insidious. The political articles grew more and more slanted toward the Republican party line. The Journal sometimes took to using the word “Democrat” as an adjective instead of a noun, a usage favored by the right wing. In her book, “War at The Wall Street Journal,” Sarah Ellison recounts how editors inserted the phrase “assault on business” in an article about corporate taxes under President Obama. The Journal was turned into a propaganda vehicle for its owner’s conservative views. That’s half the definition of Fox-ification.
The other half is that Murdoch’s media outlets must shill for his business interests. With the News of the World scandal, The Journal has now shown itself willing to do that, too.
I think this may be the best sign yet of just how crippled our institutions have become. If there is one group in the world who should demand unadulterated facts and data it is the financial community. Sure, they’ll play it to their advantage, and care not a whit about how it affects our democracy. That’s not their job (although it is their duty as citizens.) But they simply cannot function properly if their information is tainted.
On the other hand, the system will work fine for a while if they all buy into the same delusions. (See: Enron, CDS’s) But at some point, reality bites and then the whole thing falls apart. I guess that fully illuminates the logic of Too Big To Fail, doesn’t it?
Update: This piece by Carl Bernstein on the Murdoch scandal is also worth reading.
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