Everyone and his brother has opinions on Rupert Murdoch's WSJ takeover/Bancroft sell-out/awesome boondoggle for Richard Zannino/you pick! Today on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Daily News/U.S. News-owning media-and-real-estate mogul Mort Zuckerman added his voice to the chorus, expressing some pretty forceful opinions via the magic of Alexander Graham Bell's machine.

As per the hed, Zuckerman seems to think that Murdoch has, if not an agenda, then a very real opportunity to transform the WSJ into an explicitly conservative national outlet:

Let's just take the WSJ as a national newspaper. It is a national newspaper. It has an extraordinary following within the business community... It's not by accident it's called the Wall Street Journal and not the National Journal and it's not called the US Journal. Nevertheless, Rupert Murdoch can make this into what also does not exist: A conservative national newspaper. The New York Times is a very liberal newspaper, the newsmagazines, the New Yorker is ultra liberal...Time and Newsweek frankly are centrist or left-wing liberal in their viewpoints...I think there is a chance here that he can establish this as a conservative national newspaper.

It should be noted that between the WSJ's online presence , content-sharing deals and natural synergies with the Fox Business Channel, the potential for dissemination of such WSJ content greatly exceeds mere circulation. Unless, says Mort, Murdoch gets greedy:

The only way he can screw up that opportunity is to use the Wall Street Journal as he has his other print media for his own sort of personal and business agendas. He's got to be very careful. He's done it in the past, and therefore it makes you worry that he's going to do it in the future. When the Wall Street Journal itself did a survey, and they wrote this as a front page story in the Wall Street Journal, they said he has a long record of crossing the boundary between his business interests and his personal interests into the way he covers news stories. My hope is that he doesn't do this again, but this is a real and a legitimate concern.

As it happens, Zuckerman comes armed with an example, and it just so happens to be about Daily News arch-rival the New York Post:

I mean, somebody at the New York Post took money from one of the people he was covering and gave him favorable coverage as a result of it. This was Richard Johnson in Page Six, so there's no point in being unspecific about it. (Ed. The New York Post has denied that it was an exchange for favorable coverage, and stated that there "was no quid pro quo.") Now can you imagine someone at the Wall Street Journal taking money from a company that he's covering and giving him favorite [sic] coverage? Is he going to keep him on the paper as he did? No other newspaper in America would have kept Richard Johnson, but he did. So the question is, what is he going to now? Is he going to extrapolate the same standards in one place as he did in the other?

Zuckerman is certainly not the first to raise those concerns (see Shafer, Jack; Ottaway, James; Employees, WSJ), though according to our tipster/transcriber (thank you!!) he was no less, er, exercised. Probably all that tennis.

Related:
Jack Shafer's "Rupert Murdoch Is Evil" Archive [Slate]
Burying the $1000 Lede: Richard Johnson and the Latest Page Six Allegations [ETP]
Abstract: "The Tycoon" by Nick Paumgarten: "The writer describes playing tennis with Zuckerman at his East Hampton estate" [New Yorker]

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