The largest outside shareholder in Dow Jones & Co. is urging the Bancroft family to sell it to Rupert Murdoch, the Financial Times reports on its website today.

Brian Rogers, the chairman and chief investment officer of T. Rowe Price, said the $60-a-share offer from Murdoch's News Corp. was a "fairly attractive" price--and that the Bancrofts, who control Dow Jones with supervoting shares, had no plan to raise the share price to that level without taking up Murdoch's offer.

"There might be other buyers more palatable to them," he said, but none has stepped up so far. Besides, he added, "Who's to say Rupert Murdoch is all that bad?"

Rogers' comments dramatized the gulf between financiers eager to make a quick profit and journalists--supported by some members of the Bancroft family--who fear Murdoch would destroy the integrity of Dow Jones and its crown jewel: The Wall Street Journal.

The latest disclosure upsetting Dow Jones insiders is the news that Murdoch once tried to kill a Journal article being prepared about his then-new wife, Wendi Deng, in the fall of 2000.

At the time, Murdoch's displeasure with the Journal's plan for a Deng profile was widely known inside the paper's newsroom. Not known until now is that Murdoch had called Paul Steiger, the Journal's managing editor to try to kill it, before it was published.

The article described Deng's rapid rise from intern at News Corp.'s Star TV in Hong Kong to wife of the company's chairman. "Having left China in obscurity as a teenager," the Journal reported, "Ms. Deng is now returning in grand style, as the wife and counselor of a global media baron."

The story said that together with Murdoch's son James, Ms. Deng had "initiated or advocated Chinese Internet investments totaling between $35 million and $45 million."

A spokesman for the News Corp., Gary Ginsberg, confirmed Murdoch's call to Steiger, and the spokesman used the opportunity to denounce the six-and-a-half-year-old article again.

"They used a flimsy hook of $25 million of internet investments as a pretext for covering her life, when in fact she was a private citizen," Ginsberg said. "If you look at the story it was much more befitting to the National Enquirer than the Wall Street Journal."

He added that Murdoch had called Steiger to complain before the piece had appeared but after Murdoch had received a list of 72 questions from John Lippman, one of three Journal reporters whose bylines appeared on the story.

According to Ginsberg, one of the questions was, "'Has your wife ever had plastic surgery, and if the answer is yes, to which part of her body?'"

Reached by Portfolio, Lippman said he remembered submitting a list of questions, but he could not remember if there were 72 queries on it. He said it was possible that he had included a question about whether Deng had had plastic surgery.

He added that Murdoch would not grant interviews with him again after the piece appeared, although Lippman continued to cover the News Corp. for the Journal. "The joke was, if Rupert buys the Journal, I'll be the first to be fired," Lippman added. The reporter is no longer at the Journal, and now works for a public relations firm.

The News Corp. spokesman said, "Murdoch called Steiger and said, 'This is an inappropriate story.' If you want to call it trying to kill it, you can call it anything you want."

Recent revelations about the scandal at Page Six, the gossip column in the News Corp.'s New York Post, increased fears about the integrity of Murdoch's newspapers.

The Post itself has reported that Page Six editor Richard Johnson had accepted a cash payment of $1,000 from a New York restaurant. In the same article, Post editor Col Allan said that after Johnson "informed me of his error in judgment, he was reprimanded, and policies were adopted that render such ethical lapses completely unacceptable."

The news department of the Journal has a reputation for fairness and objectivity, about the Bancrofts or anything else. Many current Journal staffers feel that tradition would be jeopardized if Murdoch gained control of the company.

Lippman said Steiger had been completely supportive of his story about Deng. Lippman added that he had heard a rumor that Murdoch had called Steiger, but that Steiger had never mentioned the call to Lippman.

Steiger confirmed the call from Murdoch. In an e-mail message to Portfolio.com, he said, "His call was exactly the kind of call I received regularly during my term as Managing Editor of the Journal, and nothing Rupert said was at all unusual or inappropriate."

by Charles Kaiser

Photograph of Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng