News and Corporate Governance : What Dow Jones and Reuters Teach Us About Stewardship
Corporate governance in the media faces an intractable problem. There is an important public interest in the integrity of news, which is the lifeblood of an open society. Yet the shareholder value model of governance offers no guarantee that the in...
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| Format: | Brief |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2012
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2007/12/9432093/news-corporate-governance-dow-jones-reuters-teach-stewardship http://hdl.handle.net/10986/11160 |
| Summary: | Corporate governance in the media faces
an intractable problem. There is an important public
interest in the integrity of news, which is the lifeblood of
an open society. Yet the shareholder value model of
governance offers no guarantee that the integrity of news
will be protected. Indeed, conflicts of interest abound in a
business where dominant CEOs often put their own private
interests before those of other shareholders, reflecting the
principal/agent problem, as well as before those of society.
In this paper Donald Nordberg, a former senior editorial
executive at Reuters who also worked as a consultant for Dow
Jones, explores the respective governance of these two media
giants, which received bids last year respectively from
Thomson Corp of Canada and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
The perception that Rupert Murdoch had given in to pressure
from the Beijing government to drop news channels from his
company's television transmissions into China raised
the issue of conflicts of interest very starkly for
executives and journalists on the Wall Street Journal, the
crown jewel of the Dow Jones group. |
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