Categories: OLD Media Moves

The News Corp. scandal and The Wall Street Journal

Nick Summers of The Daily Beast writes about how the News Corp. phone hacking scandal has affected its prize property, The Wall Street Journal.

Summers writes, “In the last week and a half, reporters and editors at the august Journal have had to come to terms with the fact that they share corporate DNA with publications that have paid police for news, paid large settlements to keep phone-hacking victims quiet, and provided Parliament with incomplete information, among other sins against journalism. The Journal’s publisher, Les Hinton, has been widely discussed as a possible fall guy for their malfeasance. For the Journal, covering it all has been an awkward and frustrating challenge.

“‘It stinks. It makes our stomachs churn, to be bizarrely held accountable for some dipshit tabloid guys from eight years ago. It’s absurd,’ said a staffer who has been at the Journal since before Murdoch bought the paper. Another reporter, also speaking anonymously, described an end to the era of pretending away the Murdoch taint: ‘This slightly naïve notion that nobody really knows that we’re part of News Corp., that what they do, what Fox News does, what Rupert Murdoch does, doesn’t affect us — when something like this happens, it forces people to recognize that it does.’

“In covering the story, the Journal has walked a fine line. After running articles on page B1 and B3 on its first two days, the News of the World closure made the front page last Friday. The story was then relegated back inside — although Journal reporters Jessica Vascellaro and Russell Adams broke news Wednesday with a report that News Corp. was contemplating the sale of its remaining British newspapers. As the scandal has continued to explode anew each day, the Journal has, indeed, upped its game. Murdoch’s decision to revoke his bid for British Sky Broadcasting was fronted again Wednesday, and yesterday, the paper published the first extensive interview with Murdoch.”