News and Its Critics

[Commentary] When News Corp. and CEO Rupert Murdoch secured enough shares to buy Dow Jones & Co. four years ago, these columns welcomed our new owner and promised to stand by the same standards and principles we always had. That promise is worth repeating now that politicians and our competitors are using the phone-hacking years ago at a British corner of News Corp. to assail the Journal, and perhaps injure press freedom in general. Do our media brethren really want to invite Congress and prosecutors to regulate how journalists gather the news? Phone-hacking is deplorable, and we assume the guilty will be prosecuted. More fundamentally, the News of the World's offense -- fatal, as it turned out -- was to violate the trust of its readers by not coming about its news honestly. We realize how precious that reader trust is, and our obligation is to re-earn it every day.