NEW SCANDAL HITS NEWS CORP — THIS ONE INVOLVING WALL ST. JOURNAL

Yet another scandal has hit Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, as Andrew Langhoff, the publisher of Wall Street Journal Europe, submitted his resignation after an internal investigation revealed that the European edition of the News Corp-owned newspaper had a deal with Executive Learning Partnership to sell it copies of the newspaper for use in schools and elsewhere. As part of the deal, ELP was promised coverage in the newspaper, according to the investigators, and Langhoff “personally pressured two reporters into writing articles featuring ELP. The newspaper has now attached an editor’s note to the articles that can be downloaded over the Internet, which says in part: “The impetus for writing the article was the agreement [between ELP and the Journal].” It maintained, however, that the reporting was not influenced by ELP. Nevertheless, it said, the deal represented “a breach of the ethical standards of the Dow Jones & Co.,” the publisher of the Journal. Meanwhile, News Corp on Tuesday responded to growing demands from prominent shareholders calling for the removal of Rupert Murdoch’s two sons from the board of directors and the removal of other board members close to media mogul, who failed to provide sufficient oversight of News of the World‘s phone-hacking activities. News Corp acknowledged that the scandal has proved to be costly to the company but said that it has taken measures to prevent a similar one from occurring in the future. The “disproportionate focus” on the hacking scandal, it said, was “misguided.”