The Wall Street Journal gave a big hello to its new owner, Rupert Murdoch, who takes over Dow Jones (owner of this site) today, by publishing this tough piece also today on the disaster of News Corp.’s investment in Gemstar-TV Guide International.

It comes from breakingviews, an online financial commentary Web site that the news organization regularly adds to its print paper and online site. Dow Jones also is a minority investor in the site, which was writing about the recently announced deal for Macrovision to buy Gemstar, in which News Corp. owns a 41% stake.

Money (or, more precisely, non-money) quote:

But in gross terms, Mr. Murdoch looks to have paid $1.6 billion–after selling the magazines in 1991 and receiving cash from Mr. Malone in 2000–for the first half of his Gemstar stake. He paid $6 billion in News Corp. stock for the other half. That is nearly $8 billion for an investment valued at $1 billion today.”

Ouch!

Seems the market’s not too keen on Macrovision spending that much money on Rupert Murdoch’s worst investment, even if it will allow Gemstar to offer copyright-protected libraries of shows, movies and music on TVs, mobile phones and the Internet.

In a conference call, Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso assured investors that the deal makes good business sense. “Look, I recognize this is a complex transaction, no kidding,” Amoroso said. “You’ve got a little company, you’ve got $800 million of debt, there are certainly questions, the debt markets haven’t been the most robust and all of that. But you know what? We don’t make decisions as a factor of what the immediate first-day market reaction is going to be … I have a confidence and a high expectation that as we continue to work over the next few months on integration–and beyond that after closing–that this is going to be an enormous value for our stockholders.”