War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire. Sarah Ellison. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Inc., 2010. 274 pp.
The sale of the Wall Street Journal in 2007 was a major news event, and rightly so. After all, the newspaper had (and still has) the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the United States. Founded in 1889, it soon came to be recognized as the nation’s preeminent business publication. When it was sold by the Bancroft family, which held a controlling interest, the buyer was perhaps the best-known and most controversial figure in modern journalism: Rupert Murdoch, the owner of global media giant News Corporation. Many of the circumstances surrounding the sale only added to the story’s appeal.