The article was signed by the five members of the Dow Jones Special Committee -- Thomas Bray, Louis Boccardi, Jack Fuller, Nicholas Negroponte and Susan Phillips -- which oversees editorial practices at the Journal and the Dow Jones Newswires. (Dow Jones is an American subsidiary of News Corp, acquired in late 2007. Its CEO, Les Hinton resigned on July 15, a few days before Chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son, James Murdoch, appeared before Parliament for questioning.)
Although the committee acknowledges that the Journal has changed in "focus, style and content" since it came under News Corp leadership, "we have found nothing to even hint that the sort of misdeeds alleged in London have somehow crept into Dow Jones," they wrote.
The WSJ has come under fire lately for the latency with which it pursued the phone-hacking scandal story, for not putting tougher questions to News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch in a recent interview, and for an angry, unsigned editorial published last week that criticized journalists at The Guardian, the BBC and elsewhere for pushing coverage of the phone-hacking story for "commercial and ideological motives."