Categories: OLD Media Moves

Disney CEO not worried about who owns WSJ

Todd Bishop, a reporter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, wrote about comments made by Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger at the annual Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference about what the thinks about News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch‘s bid to acquire Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal.

Iger stated: “I find what Rupert (Murdoch) is doing, or attempting to do, with The Wall Street Journal to be very interesting, both from a business perspective and a consumer perspective. I certainly believe that the notion of creating a global financial news brand that not only occupies more space territorially but more space technologically is a sound one and an interesting one.

“But we’re not looking to grow in the global financial news space, so it wasn’t something that we would necessarily look at anyway.

“I’m not worried about who owns The Wall Street Journal. I read The Wall Street Journal, both as a consumer and as an executive, and I’m just going to hope that whoever runs The Wall Street Journal, owns it or runs it, is going to do so in a fair and balanced way. And until such time as I see otherwise, I’m not going to lose sleep over it. I’m sticking to our knitting, and if I have worries, which you’d expect anyone in this job would have at some point or another, it’s not about that. …

“But I watch with interest.”

Read more of Iger’s comments from Bishop’s story here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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