I have wondered whether the suspendered folks who subscribe to the Wall Street Journal for it excellent reportage cared for its rightwing editorial page. The folks I know who subscribe to the WSJ are too busy leaving home before the sun comes up and coming home after it's gone down to waste time getting their sphincters clenched Gigot-style.But now Rupert is unveiling his Fox Business Channel, which he billed to BusinessWeek as alternative to the Trotskyite reporting over at CNBC:
[Murdoch] implicitly whacked the editorial tilt at General Electric's CNBC as somehow antagonistic to business, a conclusion almost any observer of the channel will find difficult to support, by promising a Fox channel would be "more business-friendly than CNBC." That channel "leap[s] on every scandal, or what they think is a scandal," he said.(Emphasis mine. I don't watch CNBC, so I have no idea of the veracity of the statement. But double kudos to BusinessWeek for inserting this into an interview with RM. Just because it's his interview doesn't mean he gets to dictate all aspects of reality.)
The centerpiece of the new channel will apparently be the applecheeked Mr. Neil Cavuto. Now, maybe people really do want Cavuto to stretch his unthreatening brand of self-satisfaction out across a languid 24 hours. Murdoch must have some researchers who think so.
But even if that's so, a business news channel without business scandals is just a news channel without scandals. Unless you blame John Murtha for everything. But is that really helpful or interesting to the average businesslady?
