You can say that Murdoch has been cozy with western governments and corporations, but he's also been pretty successful with his media properties.
If News Corp thinks that there's profit to be made in a Wikileaks style operation, more power to them. I have no doubt Murdoch can flip whenever he feels the winds are in his favor for making future profits- he did in Britain when Labour started became dominant.
I think that's the point — if opportunistic financial success is his only goal, there's no good reason to believe he won't sell you out. It's the same reason we don't offer incentive bonuses to gravediggers.
As for his media companies, again, they're great if you're just measuring money, but they're not all necessarily well-respected by their peers. Fox News is tremendously successful from a financial standpoint, but it doesn't have a great reputation as an actual news source among people who don't agree with Murdoch's politics.
Wouldn't distrust and lack of credibility be a check for this moral hazard?
Surely someone at News Corp understands the value of keeping sources confidential and the the value of a scoop? People might not agree with their prevailing ideology, but there's no evidence that News Corp double crosses sources.
Distrust and widely perceived lack of credibility does not appear to have swayed Fox News very much — only when advertisers started pulling out did Fox can Glenn Beck. And they haven't really been in any situation where revealing their sources would have been advantageous as far as I can recall, so that's neither here nor there.
>"If News Corp thinks that there's profit to be made in a Wikileaks style operation"
I believe that this totally misses the point of whistle-blowing / disclosure. The mere fact that they're doing it for-profit is, at least to me, a pretty good indication that it won't be unbiased or uncensored.
Journalistic virtue is a rare thing. Everyone has an agenda, either ideological or commercial. The only thing we can do is take what we can get and consider the source.
If News Corp thinks that there's profit to be made in a Wikileaks style operation, more power to them. I have no doubt Murdoch can flip whenever he feels the winds are in his favor for making future profits- he did in Britain when Labour started became dominant.