The War At The Wall Street Journal by Sarah Ellison

From The Week of September 24, 2012 The ego is a powerful and complicated force. That inimitable sense of self that convinces all of us, to some degree, that we stand at the center of events, ego can propel us to extraordinary achievements by deceiving us into thinking, particularly in times of stress and turmoil, that we are immortal, that we are invincible, and that we are special. These attributes enable us to survive the unsurvivable, to weather the unimaginable, to never surrender before the undefeatable. And yet these same virtues that so empower the ego, and by extension us, are equally capable of driving us into ruin by narrowing our mental focus, by blinding us to sobering realities, and by placing us above the petty concern of others. We are in control. We are in command, not those around us. Power at the expense of justice, ambition at the expense of community... This is ego's tangled legacy, a truth demonstrated superbly in Ms. Ellison's compact history of the sale of one of the world's most influential newspapers.

Having earned its reputation as one of the most respected business papers in the world, The Wall Street Journal, for most of its life, relied upon its legendary independence to pursue the stories it considered important in the manner it deemed proper. For the better part of a century, this marriage of family ownership and unorthodox reportage helped elevate the newspaper to the top of the world of journalism. Its unwillingness to sell any part of its soul to an ever-more sensationalist public, much less to kowtow to the whims of the powers of the day, were values it held dear.

But as time advanced, the Journal's fragmented ownership began to jeopardize its future. For by the millennium, it had been at least twenty years since the family that owned both the paper and its publisher had taken a deep interest in its workings. In fact, the decades since the deaths of the Journal's creators had seen its ownership stakes increasingly divided up amongst an ever-more quarrelsome clan of men and women, most of whom were accustomed to lives of privilege. Thus, when the arrival of the Internet put at risk the entire financial model upon which the newspaper business had been based for more than a hundred years, the desire, perhaps even the need, to sell became increasingly appealing. Enter Rupert Murdoch, the largely self-made media titan who had, many times, expressed a powerful desire to own the paper and the stage was set for an epic confrontation between competing interests. Sell or hold? Independence and unimpeachability or mogul ownership and compromised ethics? And at the heart of the question one of the brightest diamonds in the crown of journalism...

The War at The Wall Street Journal is a swift and consequential examination of the sale of this venerable paper. Drawing upon both interviews and her own personal experience working at the Journal, Ms. Ellison narrates events with admirable objectivity, removing herself and her opinions from her chronicle and, thus, allowing her readers to draw their own conclusions about the eccentric players in this particularly high-stakes game. As the drama unfolds, we watch as people who care deeply about the paper try their best to steer both it and them to a best-case outcome. And yet this is precisely what does the most damage. For these individuals have competing visions of what's best for the Journal, a reality that places the paper at the heart of a monumental game of tug-of-war, a game it cannot escape without being sundered.

But while Ms. Ellison wonderfully captures both the major events and the personalities of the men and women who participated in them, The War at The Wall Street Journal is hobbled by a deeper truth only hinted at in its 250 pages. The newspaper industry is in the midst of an existential crisis. Not only is its business model broken, readership of most papers is at an all-time low, facts which sap at the power and the influence of the papers in question. As a result, while Ms. Ellison and her players appear to consider the sale of this ornament of American journalism to be an event of significance, it smacks to a reader unaffiliated with the paper as navel-gazing, as an extension of precisely the same self-importance that compels men like Rupert Murdoch to buy papers in the first place.

Newspapers were never designed to be bastions of truth and justice. and yet, at some point, this became the ethical standard journalists were meant to aspire to. This has caused them to imbue their media pulpits with more consequence than they possess in a 21st century world dominated by the Internet and its various channels of information distribution.

This is fascinating reading. Readers are given a first-class look at the quirkiness of wealthy families while watching a formerly monumental institution struggle to come to grips with the modern world. But its own self-regard causes it to stumble now and again. (3/5 Stars)