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from Jack Shafer:

Shameless paper in mindless fog

If our culture allowed diseased newspapers to be quarantined, I'd have the New York Post kenneled right now.

I express that sentiment after reading the Post's Boston Marathon bombing coverage, in which it erroneously reported that 12 were dead, mistakenly stated that a Saudi national was "a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing" and, this morning identified two Boston Marathon bystanders in a Page One photo as "Bag Men."

Of course, every news outlet botches a breaking news story from time to time, and many have erred in their Boston reporting, as BuzzFeed, Chart Girl, Poynter, Salon and others have tabulated. But what distinguishes the New York Post from other stumbling outlets is the cavalier manner about its errors. When other outlets make monumental mistakes, they may take their time printing corrections. They may avoid acknowledging their errors if they can get away with it. Or if they acknowledge their errors promptly — as CNN's John King did this week — they may blame "confusion" or "misinformation" rather than accept the blame directly. But by and large, the press takes its lumps.

The Post, in contrast, appears not to care whether it gets a memorable story right or wrong. It only hopes to produce a memorable story, damn the truth value.

from Breakingviews:

Liberty pushes envelope for post-crisis M&A debt

By Christopher Hughes
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. 

Liberty Global’s $23 billion offer for Virgin Media marks a turning point in post-crisis deal finance. This cable-TV mega-merger has most of the hallmarks of the pre-crisis boom. The target’s shareholders are being paid partly in their own cash, which will be extracted from Virgin Media through some ambitious financing operations. Leverage may not be pushed up to pre-crisis highs, but this is still a big moment.

from Nicholas Wapshott:

The crumbling of the Murdoch dynasty

Rupert Murdoch has had a rough few weeks. He had to race to Melbourne, Australia, to visit his 103-year-old mother, Dame Elisabeth, who has died in Australia.* There is nothing like the death of your mother to remind you of your own mortality.

Then last month the political party he supports and largely owns lost the election. When you have Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, John Bolton, Liz Cheney, William Kristol, Dick Morris, Oliver North, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich on the books and have all your media properties conduct a virulent, ad hominem campaign against the president, then watch the Republicans lose so convincingly, it must be hard to know where you went wrong.

Then on Monday Murdoch announced his reluctant splitting of News Corp. in two, dividing the company between News Corp.--containing the mostly hard-copy waning press properties he dabbles in as an expensive hobby--and Fox Group, made up of the money-making media properties, like the Fox movie studio, the Fox TV network, and Fox News, that the company’s non-family and therefore non-voting shareholders prefer. The restructuring was forced upon Murdoch in the wake of the revelation that phone hacking had become quotidian at his British newspapers, a crime of which, despite his addiction to editorial micromanagement, he has always denied all knowledge. Had he not taken the initiative and divided his company, the report by Lord Justice Leveson on corruption in the British press might have demanded a more painful remedy.

from Jack Shafer:

The Daily didn’t fail–Rupert gave up

When you're as wealthy as Rupert Murdoch ($9.4 billion) and you control a company as resource-rich as News Corp (market cap $58.1 billion), shuttering a 22-month-old business like The Daily doesn't signify failure as much as it does surrender.

Murdoch knew what he was getting into when he launched the iPad-only (and then smartphone, Android tablet, and Kindle Fire) publication in February 2011. At a press conference, the mogul claimed to have invested $30 million pre-launch and assumed running costs of about $500,000 a week. According to a report in the New York Observer, attributed to a "source," the operation was amassing annual losses of $30 million. But again, for someone like Murdoch, $30 million is chump change. His New York Post loses up to $70 million a year, according to some accounts, and you don't see him closing it. Such losses are rounding errors in the company's entertainment budget.

from Jack Shafer:

Britain’s press needs more freedom, not more regulation

The Leveson inquiry completed its 17-month official investigation into the filth and the fury of the British press today, pulling into the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center opposite Westminster Abbey. There, its leader, Lord Justice (Brian) Leveson, delivered the inquiry's 1,987-page report on the London newspaper phone-hacking scandals, wild invasions of privacy by the press and covert surveillance by newspapers, and recommended new regulations of the press.

The regime proposed by Leveson would replace the current -- and toothless -- self-regulation by the Press Complaints Commission with a body that would possess investigatory powers and authority to levy fines of up to £1 million for transgressors. The new body would be "voluntary," funded by newspaper membership fees, as the 56-page executive summary explains, and "independent" of the press and government, though governed by statute. The advantage of submitting to the invitation to volunteer would be an "arbitration" service that would reduce the legal awards newspapers would have to pay when complainants brought their libel and invasion of privacy charges to the new body rather than to the courts.

from Breakingviews:

Disney chief’s unlikely fairy godfather: Murdoch

By Jeffrey Goldfarb
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Rupert Murdoch makes an unlikely fairy godfather. The News Corp boss is more often portrayed as a cartoonish evil villain, especially inside rivals like Disney. But by paying a punchy price for a big piece of the Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network, Murdoch is implying an even richer valuation for ESPN than is already attached to the coveted Disney sports brand. That in turn makes the whole Magic Kingdom look worth more.

from Anatole Kaletsky:

Does Murdoch’s paywall reversal signal a sale of The Times?

Rupert Murdoch conceded defeat this week in his battle with Google and the Internet, an adversary even more powerful than the British government. Murdoch, uniquely among the world’s media magnates, decided two years ago to create a “paywall” for the London Times that could not be penetrated by Google and other “parasitic” search engines. In effect, the paper was cut off completely from the public Internet. As one of Murdoch’s newspaper managers later described this strategy: “Rupert didn’t just build a paywall; he circled it with barbed wire, dug a moat around it and put crocodiles in the moat.”

On Monday Murdoch relented. Times articles started reappearing in Google searches, although anyone wanting to read them still has to pay £1 for one day’s paper or £2 per week. Coincidentally, News Corp, Murdoch’s holding company, announced the departure of its chief digital officer, Jonathan Miller. And Murdoch himself stood down as chairman of Times Newspapers, the News Corp subsidiary that controls his upmarket British papers.

from The Great Debate:

Punch Sulzberger and the trouble with media dynasties

It is easy to imagine the look on the faces of Rupert Murdoch’s children when they read the obituaries of New York Times owner Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, whose father thought him too stupid to run the company. Particularly when they came to the line: “It’s impossible to be an assistant to your father.”

Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son, Lachlan, is exiled to Australia after complaining his father wouldn’t let him do his job at News Corp. His daughter Elisabeth’s movie company, Shine, may be owned by News Corp, but she lives in London and keeps her interfering father at arm’s length. And after disappointing his old man by failing to smother the phone-hacking scandal at his British papers, James is scrabbling around at corporate headquarters on Sixth Avenue in New York, trying to make it work at his new job leading the company’s television interests – everything, that is, except his father’s “fair and balanced” baby, Fox News.

from MediaFile:

Rupert Murdoch’s traffic jam

It hasn't been a great year for Rupert Murdoch. There was the phone-hacking scandal; the Parliamentary committee declaration that he was "not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company"; The Daily, his iPad publication, laying off a third of its staff over the summer; and a confession that, when it came to MySpace, “we screwed up in every possible way.”

To his credit, Murdoch started making bold bets on the Internet back when other media barons were timid – starting with his purchase of MySpace. The Daily was, at least in theory, an effort to "completely re-imagine our craft,” as Murdoch claimed.

from The Great Debate:

Romney is powerless against Murdoch’s lash

Mitt Romney must be wondering where it all went wrong. With the president presiding over a jobless, barely perceptible recovery, with most Americans thinking Obama is on the wrong track, and with his healthcare legislation widely derided, the Republican champion should be coasting by now. Yet Romney has been languishing in the head-to-head polls for almost a year, and prominent conservative commentators are complaining.

It is rare to hear such a concerted chorus of disapproval, not least with the election just six weeks away. Rupert Murdoch, at least, can say to Romney, “I told you so!” In July, he warned on Twitter: “Tough O Chicago pros will be hard to beat unless he drops old friends from team and hires some real pros. Doubtful.” It was advice Romney could afford neither to accept nor refuse. To fire his staff at the behest of the media boss who controls the nation’s most unforgiving conservative news outlets would be to follow successive weak British leaders who bent to  Murdoch’s will, with tragic results. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, to name just three prime ministers, are still trying to rid themselves of the taint.