The Book on Murdoch's takeover

I recently finished Sarah Ellison's fine recounting of Rupert Murdoch's takeover of my only employer ""War at the Wall Street Journal." The first two-thirds of the book, up to the handover of the company at the end of 2008, largely repeats what Ellison wrote as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in the heat of the takeover.
The last third gets into what Thomson, Hinton and Baker have done since then.
The battle was largely preordained due to Murdoch's willingness to spend over $5 billion to buy something nobody else wanted that would decline in value by about $2 billion within a year of the takeover. The dithering by the Bancroft family and the opposition formulated by some reporters turned out to be interesting but irrelevant. Perhaps if the family had been more involved in the paper in the past, they would have hung together in opposition. But if they'd been more involved, the paper might not have ascended to the national stature it achieved.
Ellison's book is really short on heroes. The talented and cerebral Journal managing editor Marcus Brauchli, now editor of the Washington Post, seems overmatched, naive and feckless as he attempts to hold on to his job. CEO Rich Zannino seems small-minded as he tells the family he has no plan to achieve more than modest growth over five years. As a takeover baron Murdoch seems single-minded and wily. But once he wins the prize, his actions are puzzling as he tries to change the publication he schemed so hard to acquire.
Ellison's book is especially worrisome for documenting cases where editors Thomson and Baker alter or eliminate stories that seem supportive of the Obama administration. In one case, she writes, Baker ordered up a story based on some health care statistics from a think tank. When the reporter questioned the numbers, the think tank said it was revising them, and the reporter discovered it was owned by United Healthcare. The reporter proposed a story on United's efforts to game the debate, but Baker decreed the subject no longer interesting.
In my 30-plus years at the Journal before the takeover I never saw or heard of a story being pulled because it didn't support a political agenda. If reporters and editors now think that's happening, the Journal has a problem. As time goes on, readers will notice.