Murdoch's World (34 page)

Staffers said the idea originated with Thomson. The maneuver would serve as a mind-fuck to Sulzberger, a prank to staffers. But old-timers who cared about the paper's traditions found the stunt contemptible, unworthy of the
Journal
. So did the
Times
.
Sulzberger complained about it directly to Thomson a few days later at a dinner honoring foreign correspondents; Thomson deflected the complaint.

“We've been vilified, unjustly so, and often factually incorrectly—most often factually incorrectly, by Fox News,” Scott Heekin-Canedy, then president and general manager of the New York Times Company, told me. “This is just another flavor of that.”

Not for Thomson the hand-wringing and pants-wetting that he thought afflicted so much of the news business, with the endless whining (“whinging” in Australian and British usage) about the need for transparency and ombudsmen and the two-way conversation with the public. Thomson and Baker would put out a newspaper for Mr. Murdoch that reflected their interests and, they hoped, intrigued readers and impressed advertisers. The tone was set at the top. At an event the next month at the National Press Club, Murdoch called the
Times
“a paper willing to do President Obama's bidding.”

Some
Journal
reporters thought some of their peers at the
Times
got away with a degree of voice in their writing that veered into personal views. But skepticism among many
Journal
reporters and many editors toward their own news executives
heightened rather than abated. Thomson and Baker took a keen interest in domestic partisan politics, fights with unions specifically, and teacher unions in particular. “Those are stories that both of them knew were important to Mr. Murdoch,” a former editor who worked under them said.

A fight in Wisconsin featured all three topics. In early 2011, the newly elected governor, Scott Walker, worked with a Republican-controlled legislature to force greater contributions from union-represented state employees toward their health care and pension costs. It was vital, Walker argued, for the state to close a growing deficit.

Walker contended that the state's fiscal stability also depended on stripping those unions of some decades-old prerogatives: the right to compel state payrolls to deduct and reroute membership dues to union coffers and the right to conduct collective bargaining on behalf of their members for anything other than pay. Showing political finesse in a way that undermined his declaration that his moves were driven by financial need, Walker had exempted unions for police and firefighters, which had supported his campaign.

That proposed shift in the unions' ability to negotiate and compel payments threatened the financial pillars of both organized labor and their Democratic allies. Thomson and Baker watched carefully for pro-labor sympathies to surface in copy from their reporters. When Thomson didn't like the tone of a story, he would Google every person cited in it to learn more about each. If a professor had given money to Democratic candidates, Thomson said, she cannot be cited as a non-partisan source.
“Robert just wants people to be identified for who they are and what they believe,” a senior
Journal
editor told me.

“The
Journal
was nudged rightward, partly because Thomson or Murdoch, or both, rightly felt too many journalists are on the left. Lots of us are,” another editor involved in some of that coverage said. “On certain stories [the nudge] was more aggressive than others.” The question, he said, was whether the remedy for the perceived bias itself weakened or compromised coverage.

In a front-page story on February 23, 2011, by the Washington bureau's Neil King Jr., the first three people quoted directly (other than an allusion to Governor Walker's antiunion sentiments) were all Republicans supportive of Walker's challenge to the unions: Ohio
governor John Kasich, new US senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and a state representative from Indiana.

King followed the quotations with this context: “Government figures show that inflation-adjusted per capita income in six right-to-work states increased at a 6.9 percent annual rate over the past 10 years. In contrast, incomes contracted at a 0.5 percent rate in six unionized upper-Midwest states over the same period, as many high-paying automotive and other manufacturing jobs disappeared and foreign automakers concentrated nearly all of their new investment in right-to-work states.”

Several colleagues steeped in the details of the story questioned what happened to snarl King's usually straightforward reporting. One reporter asked,
“Six right-to-work states? There were twenty-two at the time. Which ones? Why were
they
chosen?”

From another piece, a day later: “The Indiana legislation would have allowed workers at unionized companies to refrain from being part of the union and paying union dues. In the view of many corporations and the Republicans in the Indiana legislature, the bill was a matter of personal freedom and a chance to boost jobs in the state. But Democrats and many union leaders viewed it as an attack on the existence of unions.”

That characterization of corporate motivation seemed disingenuous to several reporters at the paper: companies may well have looked at the proposal through the prism of personal freedom or as a means to boost jobs, but they equally wanted to strike at the economic underpinning and resulting political strength of the unions.

“It was often difficult to read between the lines or to know if you were overreacting to requests an editor would make,” another reporter said. “Is this a bias an editor is displaying, or is this making the story better?”

To some, the pattern of such nudges evolved into a Rorschach test. “Late at night,” a third reporter who often covered politics recalled,
“you'd get an email or call saying,
‘Gerry would want to rework the story like
this
.'

“Lo and behold, all the quotes from Democratic candidates were gone,” this reporter said. “You had two minutes to say, ‘It's ok' and make sure they hadn't misspelled a name when they had rewritten it.”

Current
Journal
reporters and editors I spoke to said they would not talk publicly by name because they feared for their jobs. Some who had left signed nondisclosure agreements or feared they would need to return, hat in hand, to the
Journal
or News Corp. This was the Faustian bargain described by Ian Johnson: reporters and editors were so thankful their newsroom was spared the waves of layoffs and buyouts affecting their colleagues at places like the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Washington Post
, and even, to a lesser extent, the
New York Times
, that they found it hard to argue on anything but a day-to-day, story-to-story basis. There was a cohort that could not accept working for Murdoch. They decamped for Reuters, Bloomberg News, and the
Times
.

Thomson hated face-to-face confrontation and typically guided coverage through other senior editors, though he could be bullying in emails and conference calls; Baker could be quite charming and subtler but appeared to enjoy the occasional dust-up.

On more than one occasion, Baker told editors that an article could not cite public opinion polls showing that the views of American Catholics on abortion largely mirrored those of the general US population. Polls had consistently shown the same dynamic for years, the editor objected. A reporter involved thought,
It was as though he had simply willed the beliefs of Catholics away
.

Baker was convinced his colleagues were not listening closely enough to what he was trying to say.
Those polls aren't reliably reflecting what Catholics believe
, Baker, himself Catholic, informed his colleague.
By definition, anyone who supports abortion rights cannot receive Communion, which puts you in a specially disadvantaged
position as a Catholic. It's different than for most Protestants or Jews
.

In another instance, late at night,
Thomson took exception to a story built around a study questioning the viability of the Colorado River because the research had been commissioned by an environmental group.
We have to kill it
, editors were told. The story endured only because Thomson weighed in so late, which meant the paper lacked any other story to fill the hole in the paper's print edition.

Republicans had to be quoted at least as often as Democrats, even if officials in both parties were making the same points. But the reverse was never enforced. When Democratic lawmakers fled Wisconsin and Indiana to deny Republicans a quorum in the two state legislatures, no edicts came down to find other liberals to fill the void of the missing left-of-center voices.

For teachers' unions, the pattern was the same. The editors' antipathy for labor unions, strengthened, for Murdoch, by his fights to open his Wapping plant without union involvement in the 1980s in London, was additionally deepened by their belief that the problem with US education could largely be found in the intransigence of unionized teachers.

Thomson's eye was once caught by an article on the trend of public school districts charging parents extra for honors courses and music classes. Thomson emailed several editors with a scathing note:
This completely leaves out the part where the greedy teachers' unions are driving up the costs of everything
. After some back-and-forth, an editor deftly added a passage about the burden that teacher pensions placed on school districts, which strengthened the story. Thomson had inadvertently emailed the reporter on the story, Stephanie Simon, too. His blast raised her hackles, and she later told colleagues she didn't feel comfortable writing about education issues anymore. Simon left for Reuters in 2012.

As Murdoch spoke about his belief in the need to reform the educational system, in the UK as well as the US, he sided with those who
would confront teachers' unions. Some Democrats endorsed that view as well, including Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. Murdoch believed in testing students and teachers, in charter schools, in innovative approaches that might rattle some educators.

Teach for America, Michelle Rhee's Students First, homeschooling, and charter school activists—these were considered to be players driven by noble aspirations, arrayed against the greedy teachers' unions. Murdoch had a financial interest in the education field. He was not the first entrepreneur to do so, nor the first media magnate. The Washington Post Company had acquired the Stanley Kaplan educational firm, and in more recent years its profits compensated for the
Post
's slumping print revenues.

Murdoch had given Joel Klein the assignment to establish News Corp as a player in digital textbooks. He quickly proved that he could make his presence count. The New York school district had two major contracts with Wireless Generation, a for-profit business offering digital curriculums, student assessment, and teacher training. Less than two weeks after News Corp hired Klein, the company acquired Wireless Generation.

There was a lot of money at stake. In June 2011 New York State's Education Department granted a $27 million no-bid contract to Klein and Wireless Generation. But that contract was just to be News Corp's first big dip into far deeper waters.
Murdoch had pegged the possible marketplace at nearly $700 billion. The
Journal
trod warily as it reported on this new venture of News Corp. But it soon had another story to cover much closer to home.

18

WSJ:
LONDON VERSUS NEW YORK

THE ALLEGATIONS SPILLING FORTH IN almost every broadcast and newspaper in Britain in the summer of 2011 unnerved many reporters and editors at the
Wall Street Journal
. They recognized the story as a test of their journalistic independence from their newspaper's corporate owners and interests, not just their reportorial mettle. The paper reported on all the twists and turns—the accusations, the arrests, the apologies, the demands, the debates. But initially the
Journal
demonstrated little enterprise.

By Thursday, July 14, 2011, the House of Commons Culture, Media, and Sport Committee summoned Rupert and James Murdoch back to London to testify. Reporters at his
Journal
were also calling to pose inconvenient questions about James Murdoch's leadership of the company's British operations.
The patriarch telephoned the paper's London
bureau chief, Bruce Orwall, to urge reporters to refute “some of the things that have been said in Parliament, some of which are total lies.”

News International, Murdoch said, had handled the crisis “extremely well in every way possible,” save for some “minor mistakes.” James, its executive chairman, had acted “as fast as he could, the moment he could.” The
Journal
published the piece, which folded in other developments—including the opening of a federal investigation into whether any phones were hacked on US soil.