After reading the news yesterday, I was beginning to wonder if members of the Bancroft family were reconsidering their position on Rupert Murdoch’s $5-billion bid to take Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal off their hands. After all, yesterday was the day that Thomson, a Canadian financial data provider, announced it was buying the Reuters news wire for about $17 billion – which, on its own, shakes up the business journalism landscape rather significantly.
That deal could help slingshot Reuters ahead of its main competition, Bloomberg, and save Thomson and Reuters about $500 million a year. News of the deal caused Reuters shares to jump 3.3 percent in mid-day trading yesterday.
Meanwhile, the New York Times has reported that members of the Bancroft family had met by phone on Monday to discuss reopening negotiations with Murdoch’s News Corporation; this came after Murdoch sweetened the pot by promising to give the family a seat on the News Corp board of directors. Apparently, some members of the Bancroft clan see Murdoch’s offer as a way to protect the Journal’s editorial integrity while at the same time take advantage of Murdoch’s generous $60-per-share bid.
Of course, what connects these two stories together – other than the fact that both companies peddle in financial reporting services – is that journalists are up in arms over what these mergers might mean. A group of Journal reporters based in China urged the Bancrofts in a letter to turn down Murdoch’s offer – citing numerous occasions when Murdoch has directly interfered in News Corp’s editorial policy to meet business interests in the region. Meanwhile, the BBC reported that Reuter’s journalists are also ticked off: they’re worried that their news service will eventually be ‘marginalized’ if owned by a company whose main function is to provide business intelligence to massive financial institutions operating in global markets.
This sort of issue seems to come up every time we see consolidation of media ownership in the news. On the one hand, it makes good business sense for global publications to combine resources, reduce costs and tap into new sources of investment. Beyond giving the Bancrofts a seat on the board, Murdoch has also promised to invest heavily in the Wall Street Journal and set up an editorial board to mediate disputes that put journalistic integrity at odds with corporate agendas, much like he did with the Times of London. All good news for journalists.
On the other hand, a big part of the Bancrofts’ original reservations about Murdoch was they felt his ‘brand of journalism’ was too heavy-handedly conservative, as evident with News Corp’s 24-hour news channel Fox News. Often jokingly referred to as Faux News, Murdoch’s flagship news outlet has been accused of being nothing more than a mouthpiece for the U.S. Republican party and its harshly right-wing economic and foreign policies. In fact, Fox News has been caught stifling journalists whose line of reporting runs counter to the political views and business goals of the big boss.
So the real crux of this issue will be: what happens if News Corp turns the Journal into the financial world’s answer to Fox News, if this is in fact Murdoch’s hidden agenda? And if Reuters reporters are tied up doing ‘business intelligence’ for Thomson while the Journal is busily doing the bidding of the GOP, what will that mean to independent financial journalism in the future? And here’s the bigger question: does a compromised editorial integrity in a news outlet negatively affect the bottom line anyway? Shareholders of News Corp might have something to say about that.