Rupert Murdoch

Federal regulators on Monday approved a long-pending deal allowing News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch to swap his controlling interest in satellite broadcaster DirecTV Group Inc. for a larger stake in his own company. News Corp.'s 38.4% stake in El Segundo-based DirecTV goes to former cable executive John Malone and his holding company Liberty Media Corp. Liberty also gets $550 million in cash and Fox's regional cable sports networks in Seattle, Denver and Pittsburgh in exchange for its 16.

A year or so ago, at a dinner of media executives and a few journalists, one of the guests told this joke: "Rupert Murdoch, asleep in the middle of the night, is awakened by a flash of light. He sits up, rubs his eyes and sees Satan standing at the foot of his bed. " 'What are you doing here?' the mogul demands. " 'I have come to offer you any deal you can imagine,' the devil responds. " 'What do you want in return?' says Murdoch, clearly intrigued.

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has awarded an estimated $600 million worth of News Corp. shares to his six children, according to regulatory filings. Murdoch's six children, including Lachlan Murdoch, the former chief operating officer of News Corp. who left the company last year, will each receive about $100 million of Class A nonvoting shares each, a company spokesman said. News Corp. said the award was for financial planning purposes.

Rupert Murdoch made a surprising $5-billion bid Tuesday for Dow Jones & Co., parent of the Wall Street Journal, a deal that would unite the most prestigious name in business journalism with News Corp. properties such as the Fox News channel, the New York Post, "American Idol" and MySpace.com. The driving force behind the unsolicited offer appeared to be Murdoch's planned launch this summer of a financial news channel that would compete with CNBC.

Last week, Rupert Murdoch sat among the Los Angeles audience watching "American Idol," his Fox network's ratings phenomenon. Tuesday, it was Murdoch himself commandeering a national stage with an audacious $5-billion bid for Wall Street Journal owner Dow Jones & Co., garnering some reviews that might even make "Idol's" acerbic judge Simon Cowell wince. Some of his News Corp. shareholders cringed at the price he was willing to pay for an old-media company.

Rupert Murdoch's bid for Dow Jones & Co. ran into more resistance Sunday as a large Dow Jones shareholder said he strongly opposed News Corp.'s bid to take over the financial news publisher, which owns the Wall Street Journal. Jim Ottaway Jr., a former Dow Jones board member, said in a statement posted on the Journal's website that a Murdoch takeover would lead to the "loss of the independence and integrity of a leading national editorial voice."

On the day after elections that handed the Labor Party a worrying midterm report card, Friday's editions of the Times offered readers an unusually handsome, front-page portrait of Gordon Brown, the probable next leader of Labor, and an authoritative account of what transpired at the polls.

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch continued to spar Monday with foes of his proposed takeover of Dow Jones & Co. who have contended that he would compromise the journalistic integrity of the Wall Street Journal. In a letter to members of the Bancroft family, which controls Journal parent Dow Jones, Murdoch wrote that "maintaining the heritage of independence and journalistic integrity" at the second-largest U.S. newspaper "would be of utmost importance to me and to News Corp."

Rupert Murdoch's dream of owning the Wall Street Journal moved closer to reality Thursday when the family that controls the paper's parent company agreed to meet with him after snubbing the $5-billion bid he had made a month ago. The Bancrofts said they had decided that Dow Jones & Co. might be better off allying with Murdoch's News Corp. or another company.

NEWS that the Bancroft family has agreed to sit down with Rupert Murdoch and discuss his offer to purchase the Wall Street Journal has transformed an ominous situation into an alarming possibility. How alarming? Well, probably not quite as frightening as the day we learned Kim Jong Il has the bomb, but close ... very close. It could be worse.