The Wall Street Journal and public goods
June 12th, 2007
Martin Wolf is devastating about Rupert Murdoch in the Financial Times (subscription required):
Down-market is the direction Mr Murdoch knows. That has been the direction in all of his publications with which I am familiar. Mr Murdoch can take substantial credit for the tide of vulgarity that now floods the UK. For good or ill, he has helped transform my country.
But it’s Wolf’s peroration that is important:
A cynical employee of the FT might argue that any faltering of the Journal can only be to its benefit. I am not that cynical. The world needs at least two respected, editorially independent and authoritative English-language business papers. One is too few. None would be a catastrophe. Great newspapers are more than just businesses. They provide the public good of reliable information on which our knowledge-intensive society depends. Competitive markets do not provide public goods well. We may discover quite soon just how bad at it markets can be.
June 23rd, 2007 at 7:29 am
[…] signandsight.com June 23rd, 2007 Unlike the UK, Germany has a serious cultural press. Much of it is in the cultural sections, called feuilletons, of the seven dailies and one weekly, (Die Zeit, a newspaper, not magazine). There is also the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung; Austria doesn’t have a great newspaper. […]
February 18th, 2008 at 4:19 am
[…] Wolf in the FT, quoted by Lance Knobel: “Down-market is the direction Mr Murdoch knows. That has been the direction in all of his […]