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The Wall Street Journal's editor has thrown his weight behind efforts to find an agreement that preserves the newspaper's editorial independence under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch, potentially taking the sting out of newsroom opposition to the mooted US$5bn takeover.
Marcus Brauchli, who took over the job of
editor earlier this year, said yesterday that he appreciated guidelines "reaffirming our principles of journalistic independence" and thanked "the Murdoch family and their colleagues at News Corp for their efforts toward an agreement to preserve those principles".
His comments - in a statement also signed by the managing editor of the Journal's sister company, Dow Jones Newswires - came after the publication of the agreement hammered out last week by Mr Murdoch's News Corp media empire and the board of Dow Jones, which owns the Journal.
That agreement specifically promises that Mr Brauchli will stay in his post after a takeover, and makes similar promises regarding Paul Gigot, the editor of the Journal's opinion pages, and Neal Lipschutz, the managing editor of Dow Jones Newswires.
The Bancroft family, which has controlled Dow Jones for more than a century, has been insisting that Mr Murdoch offers a fail-safe plan to safeguard the Journal from what it views as his tendency to interfere in editorial coverage in order to promote his personal business interests.
It is not yet clear whether the agreement will satisfy the majority of the Bancrofts, since the family is split on whether it should sell to News Corp, despite the generous price tag attached to the business.
The family had been deadlocked on exactly what promises it should demand from Mr Murdoch, prompting the Dow Jones board to take over the negotiations.
And a union representing 2,000 Dow Jones employees said the agreement was not good enough.
"It is the sort of agreement you might have with your dad," said Steven Yount, the president of the IAPE-CWA.
"If there is love and trust on both sides, it can work. I am not sure that is the sort of relationship you have here."
The agreement provides for a five-person committee of "distinguished community and journalistic leaders" which must approve the hiring and firing of the Journal editor and the head of the opinion pages.
It will also have the power to arbitrate any disputes where Mr Murdoch is accused of interference, and also have the right to publish its rulings on the opinion pages of the paper, but it remains vague on what exactly constitutes interference, and it gives the right to appeal to the committee only to the paper's top editors, rather than to individual journalists.
The committee members would have to be independent of Mr Murdoch and the Bancroft family, but would still have to be approvedby News Corp.
- INDEPENDENT