The Daily Background
| Report: Murdoch’s Dow bid successful
by Arlen Parsa
CNBC is reporting that Rupert Murdoch will be successful in his bid to buy the Dow Jones company:
Nearly three months after CNBC’s David Faber broke the news that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. was making an offer to buy the Dow Jones Company, Faber reports this morning that it’s a done deal, and an “agreement is expected tonight.”
Apparently, enough members of the family which controls 64% of the voting shares, have agreed to sell. A little more than 3 months from now, Murdoch launches his business news companion to the #1 cable news network, the Fox Business Network.
Phew. Well crap. Of course, there have been plenty of times when there was supposed to be an imminent announcement that never happened before, but this time it really does seem like the deal is going to go through. What Murdoch wants, Murdoch gets.
This whole thing is sort of seen as a side deal to bolster the upcoming Fox Business Channel, which will be a direct rival to CNBC. The idea being that, even though CNBC is currently partnered with the WSJ until 2012, the WSJ will work with the new FBC to do its behind-the-scenes reporting. There’s some talk of CNBC switching partners to the Financial Times out of London if the quality of the Dow goes down the tubes or Murdoch tries to force them out of their partnership.
Update: Reuters says it’s a done deal.
The future partnership of the Financial Times and CNBC looks like it could develop naturally out of the parent companies connections in the business world. The Financial times, owned by Pearson, and CNBC who is owned by GE have pretty strong relatioships.
http://www.newsvisual.com/newsvisual/2007/07/ge-and-pearson.html
This link shows how many shared board memberships each parent company has and the connections that could produce this partnership in the future.