NYT’s David Carr Warns of Murdoch’s ‘Soft Power’ With No Hard Evidence
A few weeks ago, New York Times media columnist David Carr was mocking the Rupert Murdoch media empire on The Colbert Report as a “40 billion dollar big blob of media.” He kept up the anti-Fox News line in his Monday column titled “News Corp.’s Soft Power In the U.S.” Carr began by arguing many saw “in horror or amusement” that “the News Corporation regarded Britain’s legal and political institutions as its own private club. That could never happen in the United States, right?” Carr was implying heavily that it already has, insinuating that Rupert Murdoch has been soft-power-kissed by even the Clinton Justice Department, as in a 1997 acquisition of Heritage Media, a competitor in the in-store advertising business with Murdoch’s News America Marketing. The man in charge of antitrust enforcement then was Joel Klein, now a Murdoch adviser. In a passage with all the evidentiary value of a detective novel, Carr spins a mystery tale of a shocking merger approval (shocking even to participants). Clearly, Rupert was pulling strings like a puppet-master, even if the proof is more than a little bit lacking: None of this suggests that Mr. Klein cut some sort of a deal that resulted in a job 14 years later. But the speed of the antitrust decision surprised even the people involved in the takeover. One of the participants, who declined to be identified discussing private negotiations, said he thought the sale was effectively blocked before the surprising turnaround. “After that meeting with the San Francisco office, we all looked at each other and said, `This deal is not going to happen,' ” he said. My colleague Eric Lipton and I spent a few days trying to tease apart who made the actual decision to give the purchase the go-ahead – “It was as if a magic button had been pushed somewhere. We were all in shock,” said one of the same participants in the deal – but there is no paper trail. People who worked at the Justice Department back then either could not recollect how the decision was made or declined to share information if they knew. A spokeswoman for the News Corporation released this statement: “Joel didn't know Mr. Murdoch at the time of the Heritage Media transaction 14 years ago. A year later, the D.O.J. under his leadership challenged the PrimeStar transaction in which News Corporation had a major interest. Any suggested inference is ludicrous.” But when it comes to Murdoch, the Times is too partisan to avoid the ludicrous-inference story. Joel Klein’s approval was a disaster, Carr reported. Murdoch's ruthless thugs would descend on competitors with threats:
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on August 9, 2011. Filed under