Well, it didn't take long. Less than a week after taking over The Wall Street Journal, Austrailian media mogul Rupert Murdoch has shrunk the paper's page size in an effort to cut costs. The move also has the side effect of reducing the amount of space available for quality journalism.

Of course, I may have read that wrong.

I haven't commented a whole lot on the sale of the Wall Street Journal. Suffice it to say that I'm not as horrified at the news as most in the journalistic establishment appear to be. The concern among the left-wing journalistic establishment seems to be that Murdoch will bring the leans-right coverage of Fox News and The New York Post to the Journal.

Murdoch quipped that : "I won't meddle any more than Arthur Sulzberger does."

Look for an upcoming New York Times analysis of what exactly that means as they report on how meddlesome their publisher is.

This isn't really a bad move journalistically. The worst thing that American journalism does nowadays is continue to operate on the mistaken belief that they can continue as though the Internet and 24-hour news cable channels do not exist. Murdoch knows better.

The criticism of the deal has all along been about Murdoch's politics -- even though it's not like the Journal's editorial page can move a whole lot further to the riight. No, the major media is just one big hostile work environment when it comes to conservatives and you can bet that if some rich left-of-center buyer had managed to purchase the paper, there would've been little criticism.

Of course, there might've been gnashing of teeth later if the "savior" turned out to be Wendy McCaw.