http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007 ... ct_auletta
What might the Wall Street Journal become if Rupert Murdoch owned it?
Murdoch’s business relations with China―and the coverage of China by the Murdoch press―have been especially questionable. In 1993, when he bought Star TV, he called advances in technology a “threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere,” an assertion that angered the Chinese government, helping prompt a virtual ban on individual ownership of satellite dishes in China. In the case of Star, the threat to the Chinese regime turned out to be more notional than real. To show his contrition, in 1994, after China complained about coverage by the BBC―in particular, a documentary about Mao Zedong that took note of Mao’s unorthodox sex life―Murdoch dropped the service from Star, and substituted a Mandarin-language film channel. Two years later, Star established a joint venture―Phoenix satellite TV―with a Chinese broadcaster close to the government, and in another act of contrition a Murdoch company published and fêted a mediocre book by a daughter of Deng Xiaoping.
Murdoch insisted to the Financial Times in May that the decision to drop the BBC “was driven by commercial considerations,” and not by a “request from anybody in China.” At the time, however, the authorities’ displeasure was well known. “The BBC was driving them nuts,” Murdoch had told me. “It’s not worth it. . . . We’re not proud of that decision.” Not surprisingly, the Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting team in China has publicly expressed alarm at the prospect of a Murdoch takeover of Dow Jones, saying in a letter to the Bancroft family that Murdoch “has a well-documented history of making editorial decisions in order to advance his business interests in China.”
I remember years and years ago it did an investigative piece on his Chinese wife. The article digged out all the dirt about how she came to US and what she did at business school. Now it's common knowledge, but WSJ was first to report that. Who would have thought years later she will become the wife-of-the boss of the newspaper who "ousted" her?
