Murdoch and the Bancrofts: why he really wants Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal

Exactly fifty years ago in Australia, a pudgy, aggressive, whiz kid business genius named Keith Rupert Murdoch was launching himself in Australia after inheriting from his father a half interest in a minor daily newspaper called The News and then starting a cheap, gossipy television magazine that produced rivers of money to enable him to expand.

Today News Corporation is like a giant squid, its tentacles encircling the globe and its blubber concealing the ruthlessness of its owner in his use of a mixture of trivial titillation and serious news manipulation that often reaches an Orwellian level of mischief.  

It was Murdoch who, in the Reagan years, helped bring to power the neo-cons who have ruined America. It was Murdoch who, in a series of telephone calls from New York over a period of nine days, pressured Tony Blair and John Howard into throwing their nations into the insanity of Iraq.

For years Murdoch has strived, mostly unsuccessfully, to extend the tentacles of his empire into the  exploding markets of east Asia.  Swindled and largely rejected in India and China, he has found the crack in the door he has been seeking. That is, if he can seduce the Bancrofts to hand over their family legacy.

It was nearly a year ago that Murdoch decided to vamp the Bancrofts, who have no idea of his true intentions.  By offering more than twice the market value he threw pandemonium into their ranks. They knew of his unscrupulous behaviour in the past.  An insight into his character is spread every day over the front pages of his best selling newspapers in London, New York and all over Australia.

The Wall Street Journal is the second-biggest selling newspaper in the US. He says he wants to use the Dow Jones brand for a business channel on his blatantly propagandist Fox News network.  But it is other ambitions that make The Wall Street Journal a prize for which he is prepared more than twice as much as it is really worth.

The Journal, under the management of his astute Chinese wife Deng Wen Di, will become the battering ram with which he will break down the Great Wall of China and the passive resistance of India and the other east Asian nations. It will extend his influence into regions where he has always been seen as a barbarian.

The paper's Asian editions sell around 100,000 copies a day but its readership is the elite business communities of these countries, the best educated and the wealthiest existing and future leaders in both politics and commerce.  It is the minds of those people that Murdoch wishes to enter.

The Asia Wall Street Journal, has fifteen editorial offices, nine printing plants and employs about two hundred Dow Jones News Service reporters. Another part of the deal is Chinese WSJ.com, a Chinese-language online news source.

Dow Jones has the largest editorial staff  of all the newspapers in Asia, and the cost has been a drag on its annual returns to shareholders. Its expansion stalled under the existing management for lack of a determined owner prepared to make a huge cash investment and fully exploit the market it has created.  

Murdoch will be able to provide all the money needed for urgent expansion not only in the Asian editions but also in Europe, where the Journal has an even stronger elite readership.