WSJ ‘nowhere near as awful’ as thought it would be under Murdoch

Bloomberg Television is airing a show tonight on News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who in 2007 ruffled the feathers of a number of business journalists when he purchased Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal.

According to Dylan Stableford of Yahoo News, the show discusses the Dow Jones acquisition.

Stableford writes, “As for Murdoch’s latest prestige acquisition — the august Wall Street Journal, which passed into his hands in 2007 — the interview subjects stress that the hard-chraging executive had it fixed firmly in his sites when he first heard that a sale was possible. ‘When he first learned about the divisions within the Bancroft family that owned the [Wall Street Journal] for 100 years,’ Sarah Ellison, author and former WSJ reporter, noted. ‘That was sort of blood in the water so to speak for Rupert Murdoch.’

“But some of those who feared what Murdoch might do with the Journal after he bought it have been pleasantly surprised.

“‘I have to say in honesty that many of the things I said and feared that Rupert Murdoch would do he has not,” Jim Ottaway, former vice president and director at Dow Jones, admitted. ‘It’s nowhere near as awful as I thought it might be.'”

Read more here.