Jack Shafer, Slate, July 13, 2007
When the Brancroft family said “no” to Rupert Murdoch’s $5 billion offer to buy their Dow Jones & Co. property in the spring, they actually meant “yes.” After Murdoch opened his wallet, the Bancrofts started negotiating guarantees of “editorial independence” for company flagship the Wall Street Journal as a precondition for a sale. Rightly, the rotten old bastard has chaffed at the Bancrofts dictating the future operation of a property for which he’s willing to pay an above-market rate.
Editorial independence may be rare in Murdoch’s News Corp. empire, but it’s not unheard-of. For example, if News Corp. employees toe the shifting Murdoch line, they’re granted all the editorial independence they can carry on their stooped backs. Or, if they’re the inventors and proprietors of a phenomenally successful News Corp. property—such as The Simpsons—Murdoch and his minions know well enough to keep hands off.
In an oral history of the show published in the August Vanity Fair, cartoonist Art Spiegelman remembers that he begged show creator Matt Groening not to work for Murdoch’s Fox network. “They’re gangsters!” Spiegelman told Groening.
But protected by the “titanium shield” of writer-producer-director James L. Brooks (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, Terms of Endearment), The Simpsons was exempted from Fox control. “The studio might get upset and they might make notes, but we didn’t have to take them unless Brooks said we had to take them,” says Brad Bird, an early supervising director of the show and director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille.
The show quickly became a hit, and the staff flexed its power. “Why do we have to change it? We’re The Simpsons,” an Uber alles-esque motto attributed by interviewee Colin Lewis to David Mirkin, who ran the show in seasons five and six. “We’re in control because they want their hit show, and I will get to Saturday night and I won’t deliver them a show, and then they will have to air what I give them,” Mirkin is credited with saying.
If only the Wall Street Journal could retool itself as a successful animated sitcom before Murdoch takes over.