Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal

CHAPTER 28A Public Trust—and a Betrayal

“WE HAVE LONG REGARDED Dow Jones’s corporate purpose as more than that of a business enterprise alone. The important role that our publications … perform in informing the public, in encouraging debate on national issues, and in education is a service to our society that we regard as a public trust.”

This statement, from our company’s 1975 annual report to stockholders and repeated in a February 1976 newsletter to employees, was one I made again and again over the years. I first made it, with considerable elaboration on “our common purpose,” in a December 1972 employee newsletter shortly after I was named Dow Jones’s president. I acknowledged that it sounded self-evident and even trite, but that didn’t make ...