Why shouldn’t Rupert Murdoch own the Wall Street Journal? Why should we be worried by the idea?

Now, before I go further I have to state that I occupy a tiny bit of territory in one of Rupert’s more minor satrapies. But long before News Limited started topping up my pay packet, it seemed to me as if much of the opposition to Murdoch was motivated by snobbery.

Snobbery still seems to dominate debate about his offerings and dealings. In Britain, he’s still the Dirty Digger. Not only is he a colonial chappie. Worse, he’s a successful colonial chappie.

Along with Larry Lamb, he invented the formula that made The Sun shine, then dared to buy The Times – and save it. We tend to forget nowadays that union trouble stopped The Times from publishing for most of 1979. We tend to forget what censorship by print unions did for all British newspapers.

Murdoch’s move to Wapping might have been messy, but it gave new hope to the industry. Without Wapping, there would probably be no Independent – a very different paper to any of Murdoch’s offerings.

More than 20 years on from then, we live in an age when the internet has given us a bigger, freer market for information than ever. Murdoch knows this. It’s why he has successfully chased one of information’s few global brands – a global, niche brand that matters to a specialist readership prepared to pay a premium price for the product.

Murdoch saved The Times, just as Conrad Black probably saved the Daily Telegraph.

If newspapers have a future, mastheads like the Wall Street Journal seem set to have the longest lifespans, across many mediums. And by buying the papers and providing the other platforms, Rupert Murdoch has as good as guaranteed this.

Not that you get any thanks for saying so.

Indeed, WSJ journalists have been some of the loudest voices in opposition to the purchase

Ironically though, in crying out for white knights to come and save them, they have effectively demanded to be made another rich man’s plaything, a status symbol, a capricious impulse buy.

They have failed to realised just what deep pockets an owner would need to support a masthead and journalists with a ridiculously inflated sense of their own importance – and how quickly impulse buys can be regretted and discarded.