Connecting The Dots On Murdoch

This image, published by the NYT yesterday, is as fateful as it is clever.

In an update on the stalking of the Wall Street Journal (… you have seen the Moyers video, right?), the Times brilliantly serves up the Rupert by way of the Journal’s signature HeadCut portrait illustration technique.  (And, they use the Journal’s creator of the method to pen it.)

If you are familiar at all with this WSJ portrait style, you understand what it stands for, which is the free license to paint out any kind of editorial sketch, especially of the high and mighty.  If and when the Journal is devoured, however, that license will be hopelessly compromised, mediated by Murdoch’s political exploitation of the journalistic product, and his extra-media relationships with a wide confederacy of power brokers.

(illustration by Kevin Sprouls.  July 24, 2007.  nytimes.com)