The owners of a controlling interest in Dow Jones & Company, Inc. may be considering a move to sell the company to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. When the news that Rupert Murdoch was interested in acquiring The Wall Street Journal and adding all of Dow Jones to his News Corp. media empire, we wrote about the potential reluctance of the majority owners of the acquisition––the Bancroft family––and their longheld view that family ownership of a newspaper insulated it from profit-related concerns and guaranteed editorial independence. We also noted that $5 billion is a lot of money and the New York Times columnist David Carr predicted that Rupert Murdoch's past successes in wooing reluctant sellers, coupled with the disparate and disinterested ownership, would result in Murdoch's eventual triumph.
WNBC is now reporting that the Bancroft family is willing to meet with Murdoch and discuss the sale of Dow Jones & Co. This is not completely unexpected. Carr predicted that the vast wealth of News Corp. can ultimately prove irresistable to family members who grow away from the business that they were uninvolved with anyway, and the share price of Dow Jones never really retreated from the heights it reached following the announcement of Murdoch's bid, so the market seemed fairly convinced the family would sell.
Murdoch is promising that if he assumes control of The Wall Street Journal, it will continue to have editorial independence and would be open to setting up an independent oversight board to assure it. News Corp.'s chief recently weathered some attention over a gossip page embarassment over accusations that the New York Post's Page Six staffers took cash from story subjects and that Murdoch himself pressured the Post to write favorably or restrain from criticizing his business partners.
