ZEENAT MOORAD: Inside the media wars
Fox’s bid for Sky has run into difficulties with UK regulators, who say the deal could concentrate too much power with the media mogul
I almost met Rupert Murdoch once. I was at The Wall Street Journal in New York and he, as founder and chairman of News Corp (which owns the paper), was ensconced on the upper floors, being a hands-on newspaperman. Even then, at 80-something and with the phone-hacking scandal neatly tucked away, the press lord’s presence, and by extension influence, was felt in not so subtle ways: the air thick with the prospect that he might come down and walk the floor, greeting reporters and editors, as if on a royal tour. If you need a little reminder on how he came to own the Pulitzer prize-winning paper, here we go: Murdoch’s US$60/share bid valued The Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones at $5bn, offering a 67% premium for the Bancroft family-owned empire. This was in 2007, when newspaper share prices had been flagging for more than two years and the costs of newsprint, production and distribution were rising quickly. The Bancrofts had owned The Wall Street Journal for more than a century. ...
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