For many years I read the Wall Street Journal at my workplace at no cost to myself. When I moved on, I was addicted and was forced to fend for myself. Luckily my wife’s work would pay for a subscription which was delivered to her home. Finally, even that boondoggle ceased and I had to actually cough up a buck for the privilege.

Happily, I was able to find a rock bottom subscription rate of around $100 a year, about the same price as the local rag but for a very fine newspaper. Then Rupert Murdock, the dark press lord of Australian, Britain and the Vulpine Empire, swooped in and bought the WSJ.

Several things happened. None of them good. Once meticulously edited, the paper began to assume the slovenly air of its lesser brethren. Errors began to pop up, typos, confusing syntax. Since all Murdock properties — think Fox News — are, like the pope, infallible, no corrections or apologies are ever offered.

The prose also began to take on a distinctively Fleet Street inflection. Words and idioms not familiar to American readers crept into its reporting. Every so often now we hear about the demands of labour. Corporations take decisions rather than make them. We are told about an elevation in shares prices, not a jump in stock prices. Presumably the workforce has been salted with invaders from the British Empire, like Darth himself.

Sports news, always an afterthought at the Journal, slowly began to feature more football — no, not the Tom Brady, Payton Manning variety, but World Cup, Manchester United football. And foreign news began to expand and the places covered began to coincide with parts of the former Empire — Hong Kong, Singapore, Kenya, South Africa, the Raj.

Then after a year or so, the subscription price doubled overnight. Now it was $200 per annum. Unwelcome, but when considered carefully not intolerable. At $4 a week it came to about 65 cents an issue. So I yielded to Darth and his Newstroopers.

Another year passed and the price took another great leap forward to $360 a year, an increase of 80 percent overnight. Yet readers of the publication in question were well aware that inflation was supposed to be all but nonexistent. This looked like gouging or as Murdock might say – “a right bloody lot of cheek.” That did it. I decided I could live without the pleasure of his company and cancelled. For 360 clams a year I could subscribe to quite a lot of alternative reading matter.

However, every once in while I would miss the Saturday personal finance section, the book reviews and the occasional acrostic puzzle. So I would schlep down to the local newsstand and pony up $2 for a single copy of the Saturday edition. Even if I did it 25 times a year, I was still clocking in at a fraction of the subscription rate. A small expense for a small pleasure. Less than I’d pay if I bought an absurdly priced mocha-chocha-frappatini at Starbucks, which I wouldn’t.

But then, a couple weekends ago, wanting to read some actual analysis of the cheerful-sounding November jobs report and hoping for a diverting puzzle, I grabbed a paper, went to the check out line, got out my $2 and was presented with the latest rapacious Putinesque move by Darth Murdock. The newsstand price was now $3 per issue, a 50% increase in the blink of an eye.

Obviously Murdock knows what I’m doing. Having refused to knuckle under to his extortionate demand for tribute in the form of subscription prices, I had tried an end run in the form of occasional newsstand copies. But through some Jedi mind trick he knew what I was doing and raised the single copy price to checkmate me..

This should come as no surprise. He has previously been caught spying on and tapping the phones of British politicians, Royals and the grieving families of crime victims. How big a stretch is it to suppose he is tracking the behavior of former subscribers?

Just to be sure I wasn’t missing some hidden deal, I went on line to check subscription offers one last time. I can get a full year of print and digital for $360. Or I can get digital only which requires Murdock to spend nothing on ink, paper and delivery for, let’s see, $360 a year. Or, instead of paying $3 a week for Saturday papers, I can subscribe and receive 52 Saturday papers for the low, low price of $150, for a saving of $6 per year off the newsstand price.

Obviously, Murdock has decided the WSJ should not really be seeking to expand its readership but to shrink it. He won’t be happy until it’s readership is restricted to the one percent. So we can expect the price to keep rising until only he, Mitt Romney, Bill Gates, the Koch brothers and Jabba the Hutt can afford annual subscriptions. That ought to cut down on delivery costs. He hopes the rest of us will get our non-reality-based news from Fox. The better to fool us with.