The Man Who Owns the News by Michael Wolff Read Free Book Online

company’s history as a public corporation.
    And it took the biggest dive to raise the Bancroft family’s eyebrows. But even here, the family has remained mostly understanding. In fact, if there are some grumblings inside Dow Jones about Kann, he knows he has the nonjudgmental support of the Bancrofts. And if there are some Bancrofts who might feel some vague frustration over the way things are going, there is the weight of the rest of the family to buffer any expression that might be seen as ungenerous.
    The exception is Billy Cox III, from the Cox-Hill branch of the family. Billy’s grandmother is Jessie Bancroft Cox, the daughter of Jane Barron and Hugh Bancroft. His father is Bill Cox Jr. His father’s sister is Jane Cox Hill MacElree. Of the three branches of the Bancroft family, the Cox-Hills are famously the most difficult—although, in their fashion, nobody in the Bancroft family quite acknowledges that anyone can be difficult.
    Billy Cox—forty-one in 1997—and his father, Bill Cox Jr., and grandfather, William C. Cox, are the only Bancrofts to have actually worked at Dow Jones since Hugh Bancroft’s suicide. Bill Cox Jr.—whom everybody in the company tends to call Bill Cox Sr.—has with equanimity worked out a middle-manager position for himself in the company. He has become a kind of affable mascot. His charm is in the constant assertion of his insignificance.
    His son, Billy, hasn’t been so deft or submissive. Genteelly put (at least by management), he hasn’t been able to do what his father did: find the right role. Less genteelly put (also by management), he is a disgruntled employee.
    Telerate, whose failure he thinks he understands from his view inside the company, becomes Billy’s opportunity to express his anger. In a series of letters to Kann and to the Dow Jones board, he becomes an annoyance and, although no one will admit this, an unsettling reminder of ultimate accountability.
    He is joined in his agitating by his second cousin Lizzie Goth—thirty-two in 1997. Lizzie Goth is the daughter of Bettina Bancroft, who is the only child from Hugh Bancroft Jr.’s (the son of Jane and Hugh Bancroft, from whom everyone in this tale is descended) first marriage, to Bettina Gray.
    Lizzie’s mother, Bettina Bancroft, died in 1996, at the age of fifty-five, leaving all her holdings to Lizzie, the first member of the younger generation to receive a direct stake in the company—hence her sudden and uncharacteristic (for a Bancroft) activism: It is her money.
    Together, Billy and Lizzie start asking advice of investment bankers (among them Nancy Peretsman at Allen and Company, Murdoch’s longtime banking firm) and—most noxiously to the rest of the family—going to the press. Such media attention, notably an article in Fortune by Joe Nocera for which Cox and Goth were obviously the source—draws a parade of suitors to the Journal ’s office. These include Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of the New York Times Company; Donald Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company; Marjorie Scardino, chairman of Pearson; Michael Bloomberg, chairman of Bloomberg LP; and Rupert Murdoch. (Ten years later, though, Murdoch won’t remember that it was the Cox-Goth contretemps that caught his attention. His visit will blend with all the other times he thought about how much he’d like to buy Dow Jones.)
    All suitors are given the prescribed response: “No way!”
    But neither Billy Cox nor Lizzie Goth nor any other members of the family, including those on the Dow Jones board, are informed that the company has suitors—not a peep. So the possibility that the family might convert its holdings into cash is not broached, nor is the possibility that it might create with the Times, Post, or Financial Times a quality publishing powerhouse, with the scale, brand, and cash flow that might dominate the information industry.
    After they blab to Fortune , Cox and Goth are, for all practical purposes, shunned by the rest