Lol... Do you know anything about Murdoch? The Wall Street Journal will probably be less conservative now, and more...tacky. Murdoch is not some hero of right wing causes...he just wants money and power. He is a businessman. Nothing more... Go look at the candidates he's giving money to over the past ten years or so. Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Chuck Schumer, Ed Markey, etc. He gave like $50,000 to the DNC a while back.
It's basically impossible for the editorial page of the WSJ to get any more wacko and insane. WHy do you think when wing nuts post from the WSJ they are always posting from the joke of an editorial page, which has been a play ground of right wing crazies for years, rahter than the hard news pages. The real impact that Murdoch will have will be to degrade the hard news pages by cost cutting and killing certain stories. The WSJ's reporting on int'l affairs and business has always been top notch and first rate, and entirely divorced from the nutjobs and hard right ideologues who run the flat earth editorial page. This will be a bane to the WSJ's journalistic reputation, but a boon to its competitors in the financial news sector like Bloomberg, Thomson-Reuters, Finanical Times, the Economist, and Nikkei as the NY POstification of the WSJ can only help these guys.
I don't think Rupert will kill the golden goose that soon. He'll slowly change it to his style, but he's deft at keeping what works for him and not removing vital elements he disagrees with. He has several other prints to unleash the hounds with, so I'm guessing they'll use WSJ reporting every now and then to bolster their case rather than making it a blatant mouthpiece.
According to wikipedia: "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." The Journal has won the Pulitzer Prize 33 times (in comparison, the NYT has won 95 and the Washington Post 22). That is the type of reporting that will go away.
