In his Saturday op-ed column, New York Times chinstroker Joe Nocera punched into the News Corp(se) beatdown:

The Journal Becomes Fox-ified

It’s official. The Wall Street Journal has been Fox-ified.

It took Rupert Murdoch only three and a half years to get there, starting with the moment he acquired the paper from the dysfunctional Bancroft family in December 2007, a purchase that was completed after he vowed to protect The Journal’s editorial integrity and agreed to a (toothless) board that was supposed to make sure he kept that promise.

Fat chance of that . . .

Nocera proceeds to call the roll of the Journal’s transgressions:

• political articles growing “more and more slanted to the Republican party line”

• “using the word ‘Democrat’ as an adjective instead of a noun, a usage favored by the right wing”

• “editors [inserting] the phrase ‘assault on business’ in an article about corporate taxes under President Obama”

And all of it culminating in the Journal’s coverage of the News of the World scandal.

As a business story, the News of the World scandal isn’t just about phone hacking and police bribery. It is about Murdoch’s media empire, the News Corporation, being at risk — along with his family’s once unshakable hold on it. The old Wall Street Journal would have been leading the pack in pursuit of that story.

Now? At first, The Journal ignored the scandal, even though, as the Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff pointed out in Adweek, it was front-page news all across Britain. Then, when the scandal was no longer avoidable, The Journal did just enough to avoid being accused of looking the other way. Blogging for Columbia Journalism Review, Dean Starkman, the media critic, described The Journal’s coverage as “obviously hamstrung, and far, far below the paper’s true capacity.”

But, Nocera says, the Journal’s coverage “went all the way to craven” in this puffball interview with Murdoch “that might as well have been dictated by the News Corporation public relations department.”

The Wall Street Steno, in other words.

Before issuing his own mea culpa for ever writing that “the chances of Mr. Murdoch wrecking The Journal are lower than you’d think,” Nocera channels some of the paper’s journalistic stalwarts:

The dwindling handful of great journalists who remain at the paper — Mark Maremont, Alan Murray and Alix Freedman among them — must be hanging their heads in shame.

Except . . . from a Saturday Times news story on the Murdoch Meltdown:

Employees at The Journal had mixed reactions to [publisher Les] Hinton’s departure. Alan Murray, a deputy managing editor, wrote on Twitter: “Les Hinton was a great leader, and did much to support the advancement of WSJ in print and digital platforms. He will be much missed.”

Wait – is that the same Alan Murray who’s hanging his head in shame?

Maybe it’s time for another Joe Nocera media culpa.