Media slaves like yours truly hang on every twist of the Dow Jones/Rupert Murdoch tale, but many folks out there don’t have a clue who Murdoch is. Most have never heard of the Bancroft family that controls Dow Jones and is engaged in a long dark night of the soul as it tries to decide whether $60 a share is enough money to part with their company.

So what better way to explain the saga — and attract readers — than to make as many Harry Potter references as you can?

First, there are these excerpts from Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson’s recent piece on Dow Jones:

- Rupert Murdoch tries to buy the Wall Street Journal, and the reaction is as if Lord Voldemort had made an above-market offer for Hogwarts.

- And it’s natural that they would be especially reluctant to sell to Voldemort, I mean Murdoch, who is a very different breed of newspaper owner.

And then there was Huffington Post contributor Trevor Butterworth, who headlined his column “The Wall Street Journal and the Deathly Hallows:”

- The endless worrying over whether Murdamort will kill the Wall Street Journal misses the salient point that will really determine the future of the paper: the Journal *is* being killed on Wall Street by the Financial Times.

All this leaves me wondering how they would have written these stories had the Dow Jones tale broken while Spice World ruled the box office.