Murdoch: CNBC antagonistic toward business; Fox will be friendly

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, speaking Thursday at the Media Summitt in New York hosted by BusinessWeek, accused business news cable channel CNBC of being unfriendly toward business and added that his Fox Business News network, slated to appear later this year, would take an opposite tack.

Tom Steinert-Threlkeld, writing for Multichannel News, wrote, “‘We want to be more business-friendly,’ he said at the Media Summit hosted by BusinessWeek magazine at the McGraw-Hill Building in New York.

“He added that the Fox channel’s rival tends to be ‘negative’ toward business and to jump on scandals more than is warranted. But he did not offer any specifics about how the Fox business channel would operate, who its anchors would be, or the like.

“‘Within the next seven days, there will be more detail,’ he told BusinessWeek editor in chief Stephen J. Adler, terming the business-news venture a ‘real opportunity.'”

Read more here. A reader who pointed out this story to Talking Biz News commented, “Hasn’t he paid attention to the recent ‘Mariagate’ scandal? Hasn’t he read Howard Kurtz’s book The Fortune Tellers?”

Meanwhile, David Hirschman of Editor & Publisher wrote about Murdoch’s comments on Dow Jones and its flagship paper, The Wall Street Journal.

Hirschman wrote, “In talking about his interest in Dow Jones, Murdoch said the didn’t think that the company would soon be available, and that — even if that were a possibility — it would be hard to sell to his shareholders on the acquisition.

“Nonethless, he said he believes that the Dow’s Wall Street Journal has a ‘wonderful brand’ that had the possibility of competing nationally with the New York Times. He said the paper’s recent shrink in size made it ‘more readable,’ but he indicated that he didn’t agree with the changes that the paper has made in putting breaking news largely on the Web while filling the print edition with longer, more analytical pieces.

“Taking the Journal’s hard news onto the Web ‘has taken some of the urgency out of [the print paper,]’ he said, describing how now he often finds articles in the Journal that he thinks will be interesting and saves for later but then never gets around to reading.”

Read Hirschman’s story here.