Why I Admire Rupert Murdoch

Everyone seems to be piling on Rupert Murdoch thanks to the News of the World scandal, but not Roger Cohen. “I admire the guy,” he writes in the New York Times. Sure, the hacking is indefensible, and yes, Fox News has been polarizing and contributed to the “debunking of reason itself.” But “if you add everything up, he’s been good for newspapers over the past several decades, keeping them alive and vigorous and noisy and relevant.”

Murdoch has an endearing hatred of the elites, the establishment, “in fact for anything standing in the way of gutsy endeavor and churn,” Cohen argues. “He loves a scoop, a scrap, and both the Wall Street Journal and the Times (of London) show serious journalists can thrive under him.” He’s taken bold risks in the media business, and though some have failed (*cough* Myspace *cough*), others have proven visionary. “Without him, the British newspaper industry might have disappeared entirely.” (More Rupert Murdoch stories.)