Wall St. Journal Editors Held News of Murdoch Bid

WALL ST JOURNAL EDITORS HELD NEWS OF MURDOCH BID
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Andrew Ross Sorkin]
One of the trickiest things for a news organization to do is cover itself. That was the situation some editors at The Wall Street Journal found themselves in last month when they learned that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation was making a $5 billion bid for The Journal’s parent, Dow Jones, at least a week before the news broke elsewhere. It was one of the biggest business news events of the year, the kind that The Journal would typically pursue aggressively. But Paul E. Steiger, the paper’s top editor who knew of Mr. Murdoch’s offer, decided not to publish any news of it, according to people inside of Dow Jones who were briefed on the situation. As a result, The Journal was beaten on its own story when the bid was first reported last Tuesday on the financial news channel CNBC; The Journal posted its version soon after. That day, Dow Jones’s stock rose to $58.47, a gain of more than 50 percent. It is not unusual for senior editors at news organizations to balance their corporate and editorial roles when faced with these kind of decisions. But one unusual aspect of this story was that some investors may also have learned about the deal before the news broke, and traded on that information. As a result, the questions of who knew what and when they knew it inside The Journal could become an issue in inquiries by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York state attorney general into an unusual spike in trading in options to buy Dow Jones stock ahead of a formal announcement of the offer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/business/media/08journal.html
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See also --
* America Needs to Give Rupert Murdoch More Media Power
[SOURCE: The Huffington Post, AUTHOR: Norman Horwitz]
[Commentary] Horwitz looks back at an op-ed he wrote 5 years ago: Looking back on our nation's history, it seemed reasonable to have regulations that prevented a concentration of media ownership. It made sense that if you owned a newspaper in a market, you should have been precluded from owning a radio or television station in that same market. Certainly the passage of time and the miracles of technology have given many voices the opportunity to be heard in each market. Sadly, some of the voices are considerably louder than others. Governmental decisions regarding the media should be governed by the public interest, not corporate interest. One solution would be for the FCC to at least maintain current media regulations until, say, 2020, to allow the competitive conditions to level out. This might not suit the interests of Michael Eisner, Rupert Murdoch, Bob Wright, Steve Case or Sumner Redstone. But it might just suit the best interests of the citizens of the U.S. of A.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-horowitz/america-needs-to-give-rup_...