Question: Is The Wall Street Journal - acquired by Murdoch in 2007, and since meticulously scrubbed of its prestige and preferences - the best newspaper in the world? Murdoch thinks it might be, and for reasons that bear consideration, if not acceptance, because it might just be the boldest frontline in the culture wars. First, here's what he's done to the WSJ. As its masthead makes obvious, the WSJ was principally a journal of business. Despite carrying other news the Journal's editorial mission was a sophisticated focus on corporate America. It was distinctively branded in its design and content and developed a heady prestige, not solely owing to being read by millionaires. Murdoch changed that. In a study of the WSJ's front pages between 2007 and 2011, business stories were down roughly a third. That figure would have dropped some more in the past year. Why? Because - and here's the rub - Murdoch believes that there's nothing moribund about the business model of newspapers, rather there's something rotten with newspapers themselves. Murdoch accepts that ''disruptive technologies'' have cruelled newspapers' golden rivers of advertising, but with enough ingenuity and investment in digitalising, past glories can be restored. (Part of this optimism is twinned to Murdoch's estimates of ''billions'' of tablet users, and ''many more'' smart phone consumers, in the near future. Who's to say he's wrong?)

No, says Murdoch, the problem lies with news content and how papers have conceived themselves. Newspapers have become unmoored from regular readers' lives, hopelessly adrift in smugness, pretension and elitism. Newspapers have become too niche and too clever. This is why The Wall Street Journal reads the way it does, and this is the cultural battleline Murdoch is so expensively and expansively manning. Our tycoon has a dream of newspapers knowing and providing precisely what its readers demand. But when Murdoch waxes philosophical, his ''reader'' becomes purely notional, and it would be a brave, stupid or ego-sodden man that might determine what we all want from this public good. Ignoring readers is folly, but follow the logic of an imagined consumer as the sole driver of news and you become entangled in speciousness. The Journal is providing less and less investigative journalism, precisely the kind that exposed the industrialised criminality of Britain's tabloids. Our tycoon has a dream of newspapers knowing and providing precisely what its readers demand. There is another fracture-line, inevitable when private goals embrace a public good. Murdoch has a dream of cleansing newspapers of their pretensions - and in so doing re-establishing financial solvency - but the brutal calculus remains: he that owns newspapers will determine what pretension is. And as to the matter of pretension and aloofness, I see more evidence of its opposite - a dreary and desperate slide into gossip and link bait.

Another fracture appears when Murdoch argues, as he did last year, that there is no diversity on the web. There is. Of varying quality, but it's there, and growing. Another fracture: that Murdoch is swimming against a tide of thought which suggests news providers put out specific, but indispensable, content to select markets. In this, Murdoch is almost alone and it might be his chance, in his twilight, to prove he is still a shrewd remaker of worlds. All of which takes me to Murdoch's deepest contradiction. In his Leveson testimony, Murdoch gave us this motherhood statement: ''A varied press guarantees democracy, and we want democracy rather than autocracy.'' If Murdoch's dream, as I suspect it to be, is an anodyne reimagining of newspapers - a braiding of profit and cultural protest - then I struggle to reconcile it with that quote. It may be that Murdoch's critics too glibly argue for media diversity as integral to democracy - because they fail to see how often tribalism replaces broad conversation - but Murdoch's vision strikes me as poorer still. So what if Murdoch is contradictory? Isn't it enough to say he contains multitudes and move on? Isn't the viability of his vision best left pondered by his shareholders? Yes … and no. If we accept journalism as both a private and a public good, we are all shareholders, and we all have an interest in examining the soundness and contradictions of Murdoch's vision. I'm broadly in agreement with Murdoch regarding regulation - tread carefully. But for a man whose confidence has bent history, Murdoch's current vision threatens the richness of the media landscape. Newspapers have their own distinctive character, each with its own past, prerogatives, and glories and failures. By homogenising newspaper content and making it more anodyne, Murdoch threatens to erase the diversity of voices and hence the quality of our public debate - our cultural refinement. Perhaps Murdoch believes, as Hemingway once did of himself, that he can see the world clear and as a whole. But I don't think any man has a monopoly on wisdom. Martin McKenzie-Murray is an Age contributor.