It’s not just that Rupert Murdoch doesn’t like Arthur Sulzberger, or doesn’t think he’s a serious newspaper publisher. It’s that he thinks he’s weak—girly. Sulzberger—“young Arthur”—was a frequent subject during the many hours I talked to Murdoch when I was writing his biography. Sulzberger was always, for Murdoch, a punch line. Murdoch even mimicked him in a way to suggest … well … a certain lack of manhood. 
 
 It is a joke that is shared by Murdoch and Robert Thomson, the former Australian-rules football player who is now the editor of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal: Arthur is a sort of poofter. 
 
 Well, on the front page of the Journal’s Weekend section this morning is a feature on how women from healthier populations prefer feminine-looking men. The piece is illustrated with a grid showing facial features of such feminine-looking men.. 
 
 There is, in the bottom image of the lower quadrant of a male face, an unmistakable—if you pay attention to such things—dimple and odd right ear. 
 
 Without a doubt, the Wall Street Journal has selected Arthur Sulzberger as a prime example of its idea of a feminine-looking man. ||||| Media Matters 
 
 After weeks of unfolding scandal, Rupert gives his first substantive interview–to his own paper. Tunku Varadarajan on the mogul’s usual hollow promises. 
 
 Just when we were beginning to wonder when The Wall Street Journal would actually start to cover the meltdown at its proprietor’s company with all the zest that the world’s best business newspaper ought to muster for the world’s biggest business story, Rupert Murdoch picked up the phone to his own paper and gave it an exclusive interview. 
 
 In the interview with the Journal’s London bureau chief, Murdoch made the revelation that he would establish an independent committee, to be led by a “distinguished nonemployee” to “investigate every charge of improper conduct” that has been swirling around News Corp. in recent weeks. These charges include hacking by his reporters into the phones of celebrities, politicians, 9/11 victims, and a murdered English child, as well as bribes to British policemen for scoops and information. 
 
 Although Murdoch said that his company had handled the crisis “extremely well in every possible way” (conceding only that “minor mistakes” were made), the setting up of the independent committee makes all previous assertions by Murdoch managers look ludicrous. Both Les Hinton, CEO of Dow Jones & Co., and Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, have insisted that satisfactory (and comprehensive) internal inquiries into reportorial criminality have been conducted at Murdoch’s tabloid titles. In setting up a new committee, Murdoch has made it clear that those previous exercises were b.s. 
 
 In any case, those with knowledge of Murdoch methods will react to the latest announcement with a full-throated, cynical guffaw: “Murdoch” and “independent committee” sit together rather oxymoronically in the same sentence. One has only to look at his past promises of independence to know that this latest one is “not worth the paper it is written on.” 
 
 Clockwise from left: Getty Images, AP Photo (2) 
 
 Those, in fact, were the very words he uttered in 1982 to Fred Emery, the home editor of The Times of London, when he resolved to breach a series of undertakings to Parliament and the board of Times newspapers guaranteeing the independence of the Times of London. He made five promises, including one that guaranteed editors full control of political policy of the newspaper, and he broke every one of them. (When Emery drew to his attention once that he was violating his promise not to give instructions to an editor, he answered—according to Emery—“I give instructions to my editors all around the world, why shouldn’t I in London?” 
 
 More recently, in order to smooth the way for his acquisition of The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch agreed in 2007 to the establishment of an independent editorial committee to regulate relations between News Corp. management and Journal editors. Within four months of setting up the committee, however, Murdoch violated its operating protocols by engineering the departure of Marcus Brauchli, the paper's editor, behind the committee’s back. 
 
 Now we are faced with Murdoch’s latest flirtation with an independent committee, with a “distinguished nonemployee” at its helm. Who will that person be: a retired judge; a globe-trotting former British prime minister; an archbishop; a worthy Scandinavian type, of the sort who brokers peace in Sri Lanka or Puntland? It cannot, surely, be a person with whom Mr. Murdoch has done business before, or been at odds with, or competed against: so that rules out virtually every journalist or editor. (That may not, on reflection, be such a bad thing.)
– Rupert Murdoch uses his Wall Street Journal today to tweak rival publisher Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times. In a collage of photos illustrating a story on feminine-looking men, a familiar image shows up. "There is, in the bottom image of the lower quadrant of a male face, an unmistakable—if you pay attention to such things—dimple and odd right ear," writes Newser founder Michael Wolff at Vanity Fair. "Without a doubt," the Journal picked Sulzberger "as a prime example of its idea of a feminine-looking man." Murdoch has long thought of Sulzberger as "weak" and "girly," writes Wolff, and he likes to use "the editorial power of his paper to pursue his business goals." He wants to "maul" the Times, and he wants to get under Sulzberger's skin. "This is a psychological warfare side of what’s going to be a very nasty newspaper war."