A bit of background on the local angle to the recent Murdoch/Dow Jones deal (below)
http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070802/BIZ/708020307/...
Lost in the major news story about News Corporation's Purchase of Dow Jones & Company from the Bancroft Family is the fact that Rupert Murdoch's media holdings will now include a New York based chain that owns both local newspapers here, The Medford Mail Tribune and Ashland Daily Tidings.
The Ottaway Chain, which held about seven percent of Dow Jones stock and opposed the sale to News Corp, has owned the Trib and other small/medium sized news papers for decades . Ashland's Paper was owned by CapCities/ABC as its smallest daily news holding until selling to Ottoway a few years ago. What Murdoch's purchase will probably mean is that the papers will both be sold to another media outlet as, according to the LA Times, Murdoch doesn't go in much for "small community" papers.
That may be just as well since local Jefferson Public Radio host James Adams this morning described Murdoch as, and I paraphrase, "a much too-caricatured owner who I worked with on many stories in my years at the London Sun Times. He is not what his enemies believe he is...however he is none the less a brute." (Adams was a former Managing Editor at The Sun Times and UPI before coming to the Rogue Valley.)
I'll be relieved if said "brute" leaves The Mail Tribune to other Fourth Estate Ownership like the McClatchy Group as I'd rather not see topless young women on page three of Section A of a family newspaper, nor some snarky "Page 6" New York Post style gossip.
The Trib is an oasis in this area, with voices from both left and right given about equal space on the Op-ed pages. The editorial board seems to be split along the lines that the local community is--about 5/4 GOP. Hope the new buyers keep it that balance because I like a bit of counterpoint with my morning breakfast and a surprise now and then when I read a local editorial.
It's pretty clear now that AM talk radio, mainly right but also left, have a large impact on the body politic in the USA (President Bush yesterday met with quite a few of them in the White House, those who support his goals at least, such as Rush, Neil Boortz and Lars Larson, et al). Perhaps the hosts of these transnational shows should stop talking about "what the mainstream media doesn't want you to know" and recognize that they are part of the mainstream media. An informal media component perhaps, but a part none the less.
Without sounding too anti-demotic, I feel turned off from the crusades of news channel pundits, radio guys who fill air time with same-old, same-old vitriol and even bloggers--how ironic, you say.
All this "new media" with its colossal tentacles of web zines, pod casters and traditional media holdings like Clear Channel, create boring multi-media "synergies" of homogeneous opinions and repetitive talking points. It has given me a new respect for independent local news-gathering, what's left of it at least.
If you want more learned background on this matter, Russell Baker offers an interesting essay here at the NY Review of Books on the decline of traditional newspapers:
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