New Murdoch-WSJ book 'mother of all tick-tocks'

That's New York Times media columnist David Carr's assessment of the soon-to-be published War at The Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire. The book, by the former Journal media writer Sarah Ellison, is set for publication May 12. Carr got an advance copy.

Posting on the NYT's Media Decoder blog today, he calls it "the mother of all tick-tock, an intimate look at how the Bancroft family fumbled away an asset they never really demonstrated much interest in as Murdoch pounced. When it comes to taking a measure of Murdoch, there is little of the moralistic keening that characterized the coverage at the time, with Ellison instead adopting a tone of an ichthyologist studying the feeding habits of a large, hungry shark."