ABSTRACT
North Carolina's Senator Jesse Helms, the most obstinate right-winger on the Hill, was fed up with what he called CBS News' 'liberal bias'. At a time when corporate raiding and takeovers of big businesses had become almost daily billion-dollar events, Helms backed an organization called Fairness in Media. General Motors and Exxon were bigger than the whole media bunch put together. Newspapers sold for ten to fifteen times their operating cash flow. Foreigners are banned by law from owning more than 20 percent of American broadcast properties. Murdoch simply changed his citizenship and became a naturalized American. The buying of profitable stations, the full ownership of 20th Century-Fox and the abandonment of the shaky dailies was not only a net gain for Murdoch. It could also be for American journalism. It was less likely he could ply his brand of journalism on the news programs of Murdoch's Fox Broadcasting Company stations than in the newspapers he had owned.
