The Basics On The Latest Murdoch Scandal

Yet another scandal is bubbling up at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. On Tuesday, the Murdoch-owned Dow Jones announced [1] that the publisher of The Wall Street Journal’s European edition was resigning, without mentioning why. The next day, The Wall Street Journal reported [2] that the top European exec stepped down after an internal ethics investigation found he had pressured reporters to write two positive [3] stories [4] about a Dutch firm with which the paper had an agreement that helped boost circulation figures.

Circulation numbers matter because they’re used to set advertising rates, and American papers are no strangers to scandals over inflated circulation figures [5].

But that was just the beginning. Also on Wednesday, the Guardian came out with a story [6] by Nick Davies — the same reporter who first drew attention to the breadth of the phone hacking scandal [7] — asserting further transgressions. The Guardian suggested that The Journal funneled its own money to the Dutch firm, Executive Learning Partnership [8], through middleman companies. In other words, the Guardian reported, The Wall Street Journal Europe was buying its own papers by proxy. The Guardian also reported that Dow Jones and News Corp. executives had known since December that this was going on, and fired the employee who brought it to light.

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