Moral of the Koufax- Murdoch story is ...

Good old-fashioned morality tales don’t come along too often these days.

You remember them -- the sort in which virtue vies with vice, right with wrong. In the end, good triumphs and everyone takes home a useful lesson.

Nowadays, that sort of clarity is scarcer than a fairly priced gallon of gas. We deal, most of the time, in mixed motives and ambiguous outcomes.

That’s what makes the improbable faceoff between Sandy Koufax and Rupert Murdoch a tale worth pondering by anybody who cares about the state of the American media.

Over here, we have our hero -- the incomparable Koufax, greatest of all Dodger pitchers, Hall of Famer, three-time winner of the Cy Young Award whose four no-hitters included a perfect game. More important, the intensely private Koufax is a man who, throughout his 67 years, always has behaved with courage, fortitude and dignity.

Over there, we have our villain -- the Australian-born Murdoch, most rapacious of media accumulators, Exhibit A in any serious argument for more restrictive immigration policies. His most notable recent achievement was to transform the “Big Lie” from a propaganda tool into a business plan, using the purportedly liberal leanings of the mainstream press as an excuse to launch the Fox News cable channel, the most blatantly biased American news organization in decades. In the meantime, his News Corp. continues to publish a variety of tabloid newspapers whose distribution probably would be precluded by a slightly more liberal reading of the leash laws. Murdoch, in other words, stands for all the venality we’ve come to accept as a fact of contemporary life.

So, here’s the plot: In December, when sportswriter Jane Leavy’s book “Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy” was on the bestseller lists, a gossip column in Murdoch’s New York Post published this item: “Which Hall of Fame baseball hero cooperated with a bestselling biography only because the author promised to keep it a secret that he is gay?” (The book’s publisher, by the way, was Harper-Collins, another Murdoch property, as are the unfortunate Dodgers.)

The item was entirely false. Koufax, a sporting icon uniquely averse to trading on his fame, took offense. But true to himself, he made no public protest. As The Times reported Friday, he simply let friends in the Dodger organization know that, after 48 years, he was severing ties with the club and would have nothing more to do with it so long as it was owned by Murdoch.

Within 24 hours, the Post had retracted, adding, “We apologize to Koufax and Leavy for getting it wrong.” It would be nice to think the sentiments are sincere, but they probably have more to do with the fact News Corp. is trying to sell the Dodgers and doesn’t need bad publicity on top of bad balance sheets.

And the moral?

Gossip is a shabby business and its infiltration into the mainstream press under the guise of making news livelier, “younger,” more entertaining is to be resisted. Moreover, when a real human being, like Koufax, quietly demonstrates a preference for privacy over fame, the novelty of the choice reminds us all of how so-called celebrity journalism’s ubiquity has coarsened the popular sensibility.

Lurking behind the Post’s item, said David Halberstam -- equally at home writing about pro sports and diplomatic history -- was a sinister assumption. “Because Sandy Koufax wanted his privacy, there was an assumption something was wrong, that he was trying to hide something.” Athletes are particularly vulnerable “because there is an idea that because their activities occurred in the public domain, they should make every aspect of their lives available. If you don’t, then something is deeply wrong.”

USC professor Leo Braudy, author of “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History,” thinks Koufax’s ordeal “again raises the question of whether it is possible to maintain integrity and privacy in a world that seems not to care about truth and is hungry for any tidbit of behind-the-scenes sleaze. I think one of the worst ways in which this has developed is the tendency for other newspapers or news organizations to pick up a salacious item of this sort and, in essence, launder it. That’s done by saying, we’re not writing about the rumor, per se, but about the fact that some other sleazy magazine or newspaper printed it.”

To Braudy, the Koufax affair also renews the question of whether the only way to maintain privacy these days is to become a recluse. “That’s what J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon have done. It’s as if once you’ve done anything in public, there’s no longer a way to draw a line around any other aspect of your life.” To Halberstam, “the most interesting thing that’s occurred here is that Koufax got Murdoch to back down. I think he was only able to do that because he has consistently insisted that he wants to keep his private life private. He’s never bartered his privacy for profit or any special privilege and I think there’s an enormous reservoir of respect for that.” The result, in Braudy’s view, has been “a small victory for the good guys.”

And there, our morality tale ends, as every such lesson should.