Here’s a Way Not to Protect CNN from the Ellisons

The last stumbling block to Rupert Murdoch’s 2007 takeover of Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, was agreement on the creation of a Special Committee to ostensibly ensure the editorial independence and integrity of the paper, especially given Murdoch’s penchant for meddling. The members of the Bancroft family, who owned a controlling interest in Dow Jones, proposed a committee with the ability to significantly constrain Murdoch’s management. In the end, as detailed in former Journal reporter Sarah Ellison’s excellent 2010 book, War at The Wall Street Journal, the Bancrofts caved, and Murdoch got a committee with more process than teeth.

I bring up this history because some are starting to suggest that the best solution to safeguarding CNN from Larry and David Ellison is to create an analogous mechanism there. The Journal itself ran a story about this possibility yesterday. This week, by delving into the experience at Dow Jones and the Journal, I want to explain how that could provide false comfort.

I confess at the outset that this is a bit personal for me. I worked 15 years at Dow Jones and the Journal, ultimately as the newspaper’s assistant publisher, before leaving in 2004, and have worried here about changes in its culture even as I continue to admire much of its reporting.

Three of the five members of the Dow Jones Special Committee have, from the outset, been journalists, and I have been friendly with five of the six people who have filled those seats over the years. So I am not questioning the integrity or good faith of the Committee’s members. But the group had been neutered by design, and at times I think it has behaved naively and too circumspectly.

A history lesson

The history of the Special Committee is not an auspicious one. Under the charter agreed in 2007, the Committee is entitled to approve the hiring and review the firing of top editors at the Journal. But four months after Murdoch’s takeover, he fired managing editor Marcus Brauchli, and didn’t even tell the Committee about it until the day it was publicly announced as a “resignation.” The Committee noted that the agreement didn’t give it jurisdiction over voluntary departures, but said it considered the circumstances of Brauchli’s departure to have “violated the letter and spirit” of its charter, yet was powerless to reinstate him.

It said it was reassured by Brauchli that he believed Murdoch was entitled to his choice of editors. No public reference was made to what Sarah Ellison (no relation to Larry or David) pegs as a $3.5 million severance payment, above and beyond Brauchli’s legal entitlement to $3 million more. It does not appear that the Committee inquired about any such payment.

In light of the Brauchli fiasco, the charter of the Special Committee was amended the next month, including to require that Murdoch’s company not initiate communication with a top editor about their removal “without first notifying and consulting with the Special Committee,” and that such notification had to take place when the company “contemplates such removal.” (The Committee shared the amendment with me, although it has apparently never been published or filed publicly. I have therefore posted it to DocumentCloud.)

The Committee’s sole weapons, under the charter, are 1) to refuse to approve top editorial appointments and 2) to issue public statements, which must be published in the Journal. All four times Murdoch has replaced the top editor, the Committee has approved his choice. The Committee has issued no public statements in the last 15 years, other than those announcing new members.

 

Members receive $100,000 each per year, plus travel expenses to quarterly meetings in New York. (Meetings during COVID were held remotely.) So, cumulatively, Murdoch has paid members more than $9 million, with the sole original member still on the Committee having personally received more than $1.8 million.

A closer look

And it gets worse if you look closer: Murdoch has, as noted, named four top editors of the Journal over the last 18 years. One, Robert Thomson, had been at the Journal only four months, after having worked for Murdoch elsewhere for more than six years. The next, Gerard Baker, had worked for Murdoch for five years before joining the Journal as deputy editor. The current editor, Emma Tucker, spent 15 years in the Murdoch empire before joining the Journal in its top job. Independence, indeed.

The only exception, Matt Murray, a veteran of the Journal’s ancien regime, was dismissed in 2022, four weeks after his replacement by Tucker was first publicly rumored. Murray was given a one year consultancy, and later moved on to edit the Washington Post. The Special Committee said nothing publicly, even though the company violated the Committee’s amended charter in not telling them about the contemplated switch in editors, as it was obligated to do, prior to the leak. A similar sequence (albeit without a leak) had taken place when Murray replaced Baker, who became a columnist, in 2018; again, the Committee said nothing publicly.

Dow Jones did not respond to a question about the timing around Tucker’s replacement of Murray. Larry Ingrassia, the chair of the Committee told me, “Without getting into all the details of the committee’s deliberations and interaction with the company, we fully exercised our power to approve a change in editors- before the changes were made,” in both cases. Unfortunately, that is true only if you consider the changes to have been “made” at the time they were publicly announced, rather than when the editors involved were first informed. Ingrassia continued, “Prior to giving our required approval, in no case did we hear from the departing editor that improper political or business interference from above, which has been the committee’s essential focus, was a cause for the change.”

When the legendary David Carr, in late 2009, raised concerns about a tilt from the top in the Journal’s political coverage, the Special Committee had also said nothing. The one significant inquiry we know the Special Committee undertook was in 2011, in the midst of the phone hacking scandal surrounding Murdoch’s UK properties. In a statement published in the Journal, the Committee reassured us all that, “we have found nothing to even hint that the sort of misdeeds alleged in London have somehow crept into Dow Jones.” The one blemish: “We agree [the paper] could have done a better job with a recent story allowing Mr. Murdoch to get his side of the story on the record without tougher questioning. We have discussed this with the involved editors.”

That was the last substantive public statement the Committee has ever made.

More on what the committee says

I asked Ingrassia, a former senior editor at the Journal, the New York Times and the LA Times, if he could cite any influence the Committee has had on the news or editorial operations of the Journal, or on its independence. He replied that, “The committee’s discussions are confidential, so staffers know they can speak freely. It’s worth noting that since the purchase of Dow Jones by News Corp. in late 2007, independent surveys have found that the WSJ remains at or near the top of the news sources that Americans trust most.” Ingrassia cited a YouTube survey that shows modest growth in trust for the Journal from 2022 to 2026; a longer series, from Pew, shows roughly equivalent declines for the Journal from 2014 to 2025, but it’s unquestionably true that the Journal has suffered less than many peers from the declines in trust in the press.

As for the Committee’s practice, it “has reached out to and talked with many different reporters and editors over the years — certainly well over 100,” Ingrassia added. “We inquire about both routine coverage and the most sensitive stories, and have been told they haven’t seen any inappropriate efforts by the business/corporate employees to influence coverage. If they did, they say they would let us know — and the committee would investigate and exercise its prerogative to publish its findings in the WSJ if we determined there was interference.”

Others have told me privately over the years that they believe Murdoch interference is rare but not unknown, most often routed through News Corp. employees of long standing, and most frequently (although not exclusively) occurring on stories concerning News Corp. and its competitors.

Can special committees ever work? Marcus Brauchli told me this:

There may be some benefit to these structures in an era when the people who own big journalism outlets made their fortunes elsewhere, then bought their way into media. Bill Paley got rich in media. David Ellison inherited tech wealth. Paley wasn’t above meddling at CBS News, as we all know, but it was his company; he built it. Ellison says he respects what came before him and will protect CBS News’s integrity. The risk of a special committee calling out editorial infringements publicly is a guardrail, especially for people who didn’t come up in or even build the business. That’s not to say they can’t jump the guardrail and go down the cliff. 
 

As Brauchli suggests, David Ellison may well have been right last week when he said that the issue in challenges to Paramount’s attempt to take over Warner Brothers Discovery “is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN.” (I would add that the issue extends to his father, whose money he is employing.) Based on the Ellisons’ stewardship to date of CBS News, I have my own doubts. Either way, a group modeled on the Dow Jones Special Committee hardly seems like the way to instill such trust.

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