Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire

Paper Chase

By LLOYD GROVE

WAR AT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
NYT Book Review

By Sarah Ellison
274 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $27

Until their tastefully muted leave-taking from Dow Jones & Company and The Wall Street Journal — having sold their birthright for a mess of Rupert Murdoch’s pottage — the Bancrofts could boast a family tradition of extravagant exits. The Boston Brahmin Clarence Barron, a 5-foot-5, 330-pound patriarch known to his descendants as Grandpa (he was so fat he employed a male nurse to button his trousers and tie his shoes), paid $130,000 for Dow Jones in 1902 and pretty much invented financial journalism. He cried out “What’s the news? Are there any mes­sages?” just before expiring in 1928. In 1982, Barron’s rowdy granddaughter Jessie Bancroft Cox, another plump, no-­nonsense Bostonian, was attending a celebration of Dow Jones’s 100th anniversary at the “21” Club when she keeled over after delivering a typically profane lament for her beloved Red Sox.

Grandpa Barron and Mrs. Cox would surely have given Murdoch a run for his money had they been around to resist that media tycoon’s annexation of their cherished kingdom. But by the spring of 2007, Dow Jones was vulnerable to attack after years of management missteps that had left the company with a depressed stock price and no discernible path for expanding beyond its core enterprises, The Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, while competitors like Bloomberg and Reuters were roaring full speed ahead. Clarence Barron’s heirs — including such assorted Bancroft cousins as the Coxes, the Hills and the Goths, scattered in a diaspora from New England to California — were ultimately no match for a brash Austral­ian press lord who encouraged the almost 60,000 employees of his global News Corporation to think of themselves as pirates.

In “War at The Wall Street Journal,” Sarah Ellison has written a definitive, indeed cinematic, account of the News Corporation’s conquest and occupation of this venerable business publication, and of the subterranean battle of motives and moods in the Bancroft family psychodrama. Perhaps “war” — as in a contest between nearly equivalent adversaries — is not the right word. As with the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary, Murdoch’s hegemony was never really in doubt. But it resulted in a clash of cultures (swashbuckling News Corporation meets stuffy Dow Jones) as his trusted lieutenants — the Australian Robert Thomson, appointed editor in chief, and the British-born publisher, Leslie Hinton — transformed The Journal from a niche-market second-read into a general-news-driven first-read, poised to compete head to head with The New York Times. Last month, The Journal even began publishing a metro section.

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