It looks like Dow Jones will join MySpace as part of the News Corporation empire. Rupert Murdoch has won enough support from the Bancroft family to buy Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Company for $5 billion. From the NY Times:

“Mr. Murdoch first made his offer to Dow Jones’s chief executive, Richard F. Zannino, over breakfast on March 29, and made a formal, written bid to the board on April 17, but the news did not break until May 1.

That breakfast with Mr. Murdoch set in motion a four-month struggle within the Bancroft family. Factions formed and dissolved, and momentum swung widely as family members changed sides, children were pitted against parents and, in some cases, siblings opposed each other.”

We’d like to think that those factions and conflicts within the Bancroft family were part of the struggle to keep Dow Jones (specifically the Journal) out of Murdoch’s hands. And while they could have prevented the acquisition it is more likely that money caused the majority of the conflict, who would get what. When someone offers $60/share on a company worth $36/ integrity has a way of going out the window.

We won’t pretend that we read the WSJ, but we’re still disheartened by what the sale implies. The fact that it’s even legal for News Corp to buy Dow Jones is a massive failure in oversight. Sure, Murdoch doesn’t technically have a monopoly on newspapers or news or internet; he owns a little of each, which in the long run is probably worse–his influence grows evermore pervasive and inescapable.