NEW YORK - Marcus Brauchli is stepping down as managing editor of The Wall Street Journal just four months after Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought the paper, the company announced Tuesday.
Brauchli, who had been in the post for just under a year, will stay on as a consultant to News Corp. A search for his replacement will begin immediately.
Brauchli didn’t go into detail about his decision to leave, telling the Journal’s staff in an e-mail that with the ownership change to News Corp. complete, “I have come to believe the new owners should have a managing editor of their choosing.”
Through a spokesman, Brauchli declined to be interviewed for this story.
Murdoch has been moving quickly to reposition the Journal as a competitor to the New York Times, adding more political coverage and reorganizing the paper.
On Monday the Journal added a third page to its opinion section, moved a daily column feature off the front of the Marketplace section and added an extra column to Marketplace’s front page.
Nearly all corporate news is now moving to the Marketplace section, with the front section focusing on breaking news, the economy, politics and opinion.
I once had a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, and I will admit that I loved the way the Journal covered business and economic news. The WSJ's writing style was the best, business information reported was top-notch--you knew what was going on within the business world that day when you read the WSJ. The WSJ editorial page was total crap, pushing the standard corporate hype of more tax cuts, less business deregulation, and vote Republican. You didn't order the Wall Street Journal to read the editorial pages--you ordered the Wall Street Journal to read about the business news!
But that is all slowly changing as Murdoch takes control of the WSJ. Murdoch has a tendency to push his extremist conservative ideology through his media empire--and I'm not talking about just through the editorial pages and segments of his newspaper and TV shows. Murdoch has shown just how you can shape the news to fit your own propaganda--look at how the Fox News Channel "editorialize" its news content to support the conservative ideology, and even the Republican Party. And with the WSJ, Murdoch wants to place all the corporate news reports off the front page, and use the Journals front page for breaking news and opinion--in other words, politicize the Wall Street Journal's front page to push Murdoch's extremist, conservative ideology. To bring Fox News propaganda to the Wall Street Journal.
And don't think it is not going to happen because the Bancroft family is demanding that the Journal remain independent from the rest of Murdoch's media empire. Whoever is hired to become the next WSJ's next managing editor will have News Corp. experience and loyalties to Murdoch. This next managing editor will continue to incorporate the Journal deeper into the News Corp. empire, giving Murdoch even greater control in deciding what goes on the Journal's front pages, and how the news will be slanted to Murdoch's ideological views. It is only a matter of time, as Murdoch places his own News Corp. people within the WSJ's staff. We are watching the slow demise of a premier business newspaper to be replaced by another "yellow journalism," GOP propaganda machine.
I no longer subscribe to the Wall Street Journal.
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