Wall St. Journal reporters protest Murdoch deal (and reporters aren't bias! /s)

MSNBC ^ | 6/28/2007 | ap

[tobyhill]

NEW YORK - Unionized Wall Street Journal reporters didn’t show up for work Thursday morning to protest Rupert Murdoch’s bid for the Journal’s parent company, as well as Dow Jones & Co.’s proposals for a new labor contract.

The Independent Association of Publishers’ Employees said in a statement that the reporters would return to work in the afternoon. Steve Yount, president of the union, said it wasn’t yet clear how many Journal staff participated in the protest.

Yount said the employees were concerned both about the pending $5 billion offer from Murdoch’s media conglomerate News Corp. as well as the latest contract proposals from Dow Jones, which include higher health care premiums.

The union and a former board member at Dow Jones say the Journal’s independence and quality would suffer under Murdoch’s ownership, something Murdoch denies. Murdoch has said he plans to invest in the paper’s online operations, Washington coverage and expand overseas. He also hopes to tap Dow Jones resources to launch a Fox-branded business news cable channel later this year.

[TopQuark]

i am worried about Murdoch’s takeover, but this walkout is about the labor contract.

[Ouderkirk]

I’m not worried at all about Murdoch owning Dow Jones. Why should I care...

[tobyhill]

The labor issue is the excuse but in reality they don’t want to be told to drop their liberal crapola by the owner of FOX News. Murdoch will compensate them generously but they will have to write the way he wants them to write.

[DesScorp]

“Unionized Wall Street Journal reporters didn’t show up for work Thursday morning to protest Rupert Murdoch’s bid for the Journal’s parent company, as well as Dow Jones & Co.’s proposals for a new labor contract.

Fire them. Get new reporters. Problem solved. Go Rupert, Go. Buy ‘em up, and clean ‘em out.

[mware]

I am not surprised by the WSJ news reporters protesting. They were rated the most liberal news paper in the country. It is only the editorial page that is conservative.

[tobyhill]

Exactly! The editorial staff should have a field day with their own reporting staff over this one.

[TopQuark]

You must not be very familiar with The WSJ. It is not liberal at all, and the last remnant of truly factual, honest journalism.

[mware]

Oh yes it is liberal. I recall Brit's Grapevine that showed a study where the WSJ was more liberal than the NYTime or The Washington Post.

It is only the editorial page that is conservative.

[tobyhill]

The editorial dept is not liberal but the reporting dept is and that has been pointed out many times on talk radio.

[TopQuark]

Really? And what else is there? Opinions, such as those of Milton Friedman or other free-market thinkers. What liberal bias did you detect on the front page or in reporting that xOM is up 1/4 of a point?

[TopQuark]

I hope you are not a Rush-ditto-head. If you find so many instances of misreporting that they cannot be attributed to anything but bias, why don’t you give us some.

[Proud_USA_Republican]

what in the hell do reporters need a union for?

[tobyhill]

I don’t read the WSJ but since a recent study showed that 97% of journalist are left leaning I must come to the conclusion the reporters at the WSJ are leftist. It wasn’t Rush, it was Rusty Humphries and Michael Savage.

[tobyhill]

I don’t know but according to TopQuark it must be a Conservative Union.

[Bernard Marx]

You must not be very familiar with The WSJ. It is not liberal at all, and the last remnant of truly factual, honest journalism.

Excuse me...you're the one with a totally skewed notion of "factual, honest journalism" -- unless you're a liberal. I canceled my subscription to WSJ years ago. You demanded facts: here's a recent study:

"A Measure of Media Bias," a December 2004 study conducted by Tim Groseclose of the University of California, Los Angeles and Jeff Milyo of the University of Missouri, stated that:

"One surprise is the Wall Street Journal, which we find as the most liberal of all 20 news outlets [studied]. We should first remind readers that this estimate (as well as all other newspaper estimates) refers only to the news of the Wall Street Journal; we omitted all data that came from its editorial page. If we included data from the editorial page, surely it would appear more conservative.

Second, some anecdotal evidence agrees with our result. For instance, Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid (2001) note that "The Journal has had a long-standing separation between its conservative editorial pages and its liberal news pages." Paul Sperry, in an article titled the "Myth of the Conservative Wall Street Journal," notes that the news division of the Journal sometimes calls the editorial division "Nazis." "Fact is," Sperry writes, "the Journal's news and editorial departments are as politically polarized as North and South Korea."

[TopQuark]

That's the silliest remark I've heard in a long time: you should care about culture because you consume it every day, and your children will be subjected to it beyond your control.

If anything we learned from the Nazi phenomenon is that you should confront evil even if it does no affect you today --- it will tomorrow. Even if you are an egotist, therefore, it is in your self-interest.

The wsj is the last bastion of the core American values in the press. If you don't care, I don't know what you are doing on this forum.

[TopQuark]

You manipulation of statistics is erroneous: you tacitly assume that wsj is average and therefore representably by averages. It is actually what in statistics is called an outlier -— an exception to the rule.

[TopQuark]

Now need to become childish, really...

[tobyhill]

They are not an exception to the rule, the reporting dept is liberal. Journalist overwhelmingly donate to liberal democrats by a 9 to 1 margin and when this MSNBC report came out they were making a effort to point out Journalist donations to Republicans but only found a hand full out of hundreds. As for the union, I’m not sure they would allow a Conservative Journalist in their union.