How incredibly disingenuous of key Wall Street Journal stockholders to state publicly that they never would have sold the vaunted publication to Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. if they had known the company was involved in telephone hacking. Bullshit. While they didn’t know the company was hacking phones, they absolutely knew that it was built on sleazy, dishonest practices, intent on misinforming the public and promoting a warped political agenda. That should have been enough. They simply did at the time what they felt was in the best interests of their stockholders, themselves, and, I suppose, the paper. But feigning disgust over News Corp. business practices now is nonsense.

From the Lede blog at the New York Times:

“‘If I had known what I know now, I would have pushed harder against’ the Murdoch bid, said Christopher Bancroft, a member of the family which controlled Dow Jones & Company, publishers of The Wall Street Journal. Bancroft said the breadth of allegations now on the public record ‘would have been more problematic for me. I probably would have held out.’ Bancroft had sole voting control of a trust that represented 13 percent of Dow Jones shares in 2007 and served on the Dow Jones Board.”