Buying an institution: $5 billion. Trashing the owner: Priceless.

Extraordinary amounts of hand-wringing today about the Latest Death of Journalism, this time because Rupert Murdoch got his mitts on the Wall Street Journal. Summing up:

“‘It’s sad,’ said a veteran reporter at one of the domestic bureaus, who did not want to be named because of concerns over his career. ‘We held a wake. We stood around a pile of Journals and drank whiskey.’”

A Journal staffer: “There’s a lot of corruption in this deal; people are getting bought off.” Another: “These money-grubbing scumbags were conspiring … from the start to make this deal happen.” Yet another: “(T)he crown jewel of American journalism [is being sold] to a creep.”

Reading the tea leaves of Murdoch quotes on the Journal: “When The Journal gets its Page 3 girls, we’ll make sure they have M.B.A.’s.” And this: “I’m quite ashamed. I enjoy popular journalism. I must say I enjoy it more than what you would call quality journalism.”

“(T)hat rotten old bastard won't be able to keep himself from defiling the paper. It's in his nature to contaminate his own wells.”

More from this Murdoch fan: “I predict he'll grow tired of the criticisms and sell it off. Will he have permanently crippled it? I suspect so. It takes decades for a newspaper to establish its good reputation. Murdoch will show the world how little time it takes to trash it.”

It’s not all brickbats, sort of: “(O)wning a pivot point in financial news will create some tidy synergies — content for a new Fox business channel to compete with CNBC on cable television, a global foothold for financial data, coverage of all of his competitors in The Journal. (Note to other media moguls keeping track at home: Mr. Murdoch just bought the scorecard.) … In the long run, however, it will be outside scrutiny from readers that will be more likely to keep him from interfering in the paper’s news pages, not an editorial independence committee.”

Murdoch won’t destroy the paper, but he may be too old-school to help it move forward.

The union representing Dow Jones employees is "disappointed with the apparent decision by key Bancroft family members to support the sale of Dow Jones & Company to News Corp.” And we all know how much you don’t want to disappoint a union.

Not to worry, says the paper’s publisher: “The same standards of accuracy, fairness and authority will apply to this publication, regardless of ownership.” That’s so precious.

Remember when those who owned newspapers had a sense of civic duty and integrity? You do? That’s so sweet.

Another, hey-give-the-guy-a-chance vote: “(M)edia writers should rejoice. The prospect of a world war waged between the Journal and the (New York) Times looms as an even better story than the saga of Murdoch's acquisition of Dow Jones.”

The Journal’s ipso facto association with Fox News Channel will hurt its reputation.

An artist takes his portrait of Murdoch to the WSJ offices and lets passers-by scribble on it. Then he put the thing up for sale on eBay.