a revolutionary seems to afford them comfort. However, it should not. In the Wall Street Journal matter this was just peripheral horseplay. But in the Sunday Times' shameful AIDS-denial campaign, it was very far from being a bit of fun. And mainly they should free themselves from the myth of Murdoch the journalistic master-mind. In editorial history his role is chief wrecker of the 'commercial-professional' newspaper. That concept took shape in the early years of the 20th century, as one in which a newspaper's gathering of advertisement revenue was operationally distinct from news-gathering -- though both were supposed to create value for each other. The 18th and early 19th centuries, with some important -- developing -- exceptions, expected there to be payment for 'insertions' in newspapers, without thinking much about whether advertisements and articles should become distinct products and care taken to exclude anything in the nature of bribery. The 'commercial-professional' term was invented fairly recently in America by the sociologist Michael Schudson, but titles like the Guardian , the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Sydney Morning Herald were giving it practical expression well before the First World War. There is a complex literature about whether an ideal form really existed and how closely actual papers stuck to the practice of reporting the news without paying attention to whether or not it might improve the joint bottom-line. There is no space here to settle the grand arguments raging around it: broadly, the left says the model cannot work, and the right