Weiss: Wall Street Journal not bound to hold story

Forbes.com columnist Gary Weiss wonders why Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger held the story of the paper’s parent company Dow Jones & Co. receiving an unsolicited $5 billion offer from News Corp. because he had received an e-mail from its CEO, Rupert Murdoch, alerting him of the offer. The disclosure that the story was held was in Tuesday’s New York Times.

Weiss wrote, “I don’t see why. The email was (presumably) unsolicited and there was no agreement beforehand to keep the contents of the email confidential. While I can understand why Steiger wouldn’t want to blast it over the front page, I can’t see how he and the rest of the paper could have just sat on this explosive news for weeks, without attempting to publish it.

“It’s unclear from the Times story if legal constraints, or advice, might have prevented Steiger from running with the story. But he did make it clear that the front office had no role, telling the Times: ‘Rich Zannino never spoke to me or communicated in any way about the situation — and neither he nor anyone else at Dow Jones corporate was involved in any way, either directly or indirectly, in The Wall Street Journal’s news decisions.’

“In the end, it was leaked (probably from the Murdoch camp) to CNBC, so the Journal wound up being scooped on its own story.”

Read more here.