By David Paul Kuhn

Commentary Dec. 27, 2009 - 06:36AM JST ( 10 )

Over the years, newsrooms have come to view Rupert Murdoch as the embodiment of what’s wrong with modern media. Tabloidization. Growth of ideological news. Blurring lines between business and editorial interests. The prostitution of news, thy name is Murdoch.

“If Murdoch was bad for journalism,” the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta wrote in a 2007 profile, “he was clearly good for business.”

But today, increasingly, what is good for the journalism business is good for journalism.

Existential fears have taken hold of publishing. The high-minded debates — what should be news, the profit motive’s influence over news — have been sidelined by the hunt for profit itself. The news business is in survival mode. And Murdoch appears to be the only media titan in the fight.

The media’s super villain has ironically become journalism’s most prominent champion.

Families like the Sulzbergers and Grahams, companies from Gannett to Knight Ridder to Newhouse, all appear passive by comparison. The leaders of this industry of words are disturbingly quiet. The panic is omnipresent. Yet only Murdoch’s tone befits the sense of crisis.

This year may be the year, in fact, that it was no longer an exaggeration to write of a media in “crisis.” Recall Warren Buffet’s remarks in spring. “For most newspapers in the United States, we would not buy them at any price,” said a man who reportedly reads five newspapers daily. “They have the possibility of nearly unending losses.”

The editorial side is hardly more optimistic. Recently, The New York Times media reporter, David Carr, wrote longingly of the old publishing world that once seemed “as solid as the skyline itself.” He reached for Manhattan’s decimated skyline in September 2001 to capture his industry’s trauma. “Those of us who covered media were told for years that the sky was falling, and nothing happened,” he wrote. “And then it did.”

Enter Murdoch, the billionaire news baron who first made his name stateside with tabloids and eventually, the creation of the Fox News Channel. Now the man depicted as the media’s evil emperor has gradually become publishing’s odd protagonist. Murdoch’s motive may not be to save the fourth estate, but high-minded writers are now awkwardly allied with the very man they long lamented.

“It is ironic. Murdoch was always a vulgarian. Still is for his tabloid sensibility. He was in it for money and power but you kind of need a guy like that at a moment like this,” Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum said. “He’s become a crusader.”

But, as Chittum added, “it’s unclear whether what he’s doing has any prayer in hell. I think that it’s more saber rattling than anything.”

Murdoch has been dueling all year. In April, Murdoch asked, “Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?”

Recently, Murdoch escalated the conflict. He is reportedly considering removing his newspaper proprieties — most prominently the Wall Street Journal, Times of London and New York Post — from Google’s search engine and entering into a deal to, for a cost, give Microsoft’s Bing rights to the content.

Websites like Google run newspaper content for free, but glean the advertising dollars for that content. Newspapers pay the news production costs. But revenue goes to websites like Google.

Murdoch has struck against other online giants as well. He was the most prominent media figure to challenge Amazon’s effort to bully newspapers into making their content available to its electronic reader Kindle. The chief executive of the Dallas Morning News complained in a Senate hearing that Amazon wanted 70% of any subscription revenue.

Murdoch has taken the larger fight to the Federal Trade Commission. “There are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purpose without contributing a penny to its production,” he said. “Content creators bear all the costs, while aggregators enjoy many of the benefits. In the long term, this is untenable.”

Meanwhile, at the recent World Newspaper Congress in India, one of Murdoch’s top executives put the issue plainly: “Free costs too much.”

The Dow Jones newswire executive urged newspapers to cease the business of free content. “Good content is valuable. That hasn’t changed. It never will. The question is who will provide the content and who will be compensated fairly for the value delivered.”

That same week, Google made a small but notable concession. Among other steps, it pledged to limit users to five free page views a day for publishers that charge for content. Murdoch’s brinksmanship, the Times’ Carr wrote, earns “at least some of the credit.”

As Columbia’s Chittum acknowledged: “It is definitely good to have someone who has the balls to not fritter away in their conference room, like the Times is doing, and deciding whether they can charge for their content or not.”

It’s unclear, in Chittum’s words, whether Murdoch’s war will “somehow stave off the hordes and help preserve not just Page Six but really substantive journalism across the country.”

But at least Murdoch is fighting back.

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