Towel Talk: Paris Hilton is an alien! Long live China!

Posted Jun 26th 2007 11:27AM by Peter Cohan
Filed under: Newspapers, News Corp'B' (NWS), Dow Jones and Co (DJ)

Dow Jones & Company's (NYSE: DJ) Wall Street Journal (a.k.a., The Towel) occupies a unique spot in the media firmament. As I pointed out earlier in the year, it changed its format and now looks to me like a Holiday Inn bath towel. Towel Talk offers a perspective on its news and views.

Paris Hilton is an Alien! Long live China! -- That's what today's Towel would trumpet on its front page if Rupert Murdoch owned it. According to The Towel [subscription required] that could very well happen today. That's because The Towel's board has reportedly come to an agreement with Murdoch on how to preserve its editorial integrity.

Meanwhile, The New York Times [registration required] paints a compelling argument, warning that award winning reporting, such as The Towel's report on the Falun Gong, a religious sect, will not happen once Murdoch owns it. That's because Murdoch has towed the Chinese government party line in its reporting in order to gain a bigger share of China's $50 billion advertising market.

Murdoch's son, James Murdoch, who ran Star TV from 2000 to 2003, said in a speech in Los Angeles in 2001 that Western reporters in China supported "destabilizing forces" that are "very, very dangerous for the Chinese government." He lashed out at the Falun Gong spiritual sect, which had just endured brutal repression in China, calling it "dangerous and apocalyptic."

The Towel won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the suppression of the Falun Gong movement in 2001. Last month, seven China-based reporters for The Towel wrote a letter to Dow Jones's current controlling shareholders arguing that the articles on Falun Gong "may never have seen the light of day" if The Towel had been owned by Murdoch.

If Murdoch wins control of The Towel, it will be even harder to find out what's going on in China -- and any other country or company in which Murdoch has a business interest.

But since there are no competing bids on the table, we will be living in a world that is even more saturated with his propaganda.

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has consulted to News Corp's CEO and has no financial interest in the other securities mentioned in this post

Tags: china, dj, dow jones, DowJones, falun gong, FalunGong, James Murdoch, JamesMurdoch, news corp, NewsCorp, nws, rupert murdoch, RupertMurdoch