Tempting as it is to sneer at the Bancrofts or even be a tiny bit disappointed in them, it’s not really on. Mr. Murdoch’s offer priced Dow Jones at 67 per cent above its market value.

The truth is that the value in Dow Jones lies in its digital operations, successful subscription-only website and wire services which supply business news round the world and, crucially, to Wall Street. There are plenty of players in online financial news, but no one player dominates among the FTs, Bloombergs and Reuters. There are obvious inroads to be made.

Whether they are obvious enough to justify the price tag is arguable. Mr. Murdoch paid a sum that no one else was prepared to for Dow Jones, but he will stick with it and no one else bets the farm quite like Mr. Murdoch.

The fear expressed by Bancrofts and leader writers alike in the U.S. is that the Murdoch-backed WSJ will team up with Fox News, the tabloid New York Post and the proposed Fox Business Channel to create some sort of multi-platform, rightwing, fire-breathing dragon. Add to this Mr. Murdoch’s express ambition to take on the Financial Times in Europe and Asia. Now it is a global behemoth of rightwing financial news terror, conquering territories with its contr ol of business information and mis-reporting stories according to the proprietor’s whim.

We know that Mr. Murdoch can’t resist meddling in the coverage of his newspapers because we have the expert witness of the journalist Andrew Neil testifying. We also know that meddling is nothing like as straightforward as a direct order that it’s in the appointing of staff who know what the proprietor likes or believe what he believes. That bias can be as subtle in what we don’t report as what we do.

Here is the rub though. If you abandon the traditions of impartial, broad, financial reporting that have taken the WSJ to the second-highest circulation in the U.S., then the market will abandon you. It is a busy market, filled with potential rivals, from the Financial Times to Bloomberg to Reuters and the New York Times. And for each of them the deal represents opportunity as well as threat. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail