Rupert Murdoch almost seems to be living up to the worst fears many had when made his bid for Dow Jones. Almost.

He’s been “flexing his muscles” by calling Wall Street Journal reporters, according to the Los Angeles Times. At least three reporters have had calls for him.

So what has prompted Murdoch’s calls? Does he want more favorable coverage of China? More “fair and balanced” Fox New Channel style reporting? A five-star review for the Simpson’s Movie?

Not quite. It seems that what Murdoch has been doing is attempting to keep the reporting staff of the Journal intact. The three reporters he’s called were considering leaving the Journal and Murdoch has asked them to stay.

“Murdoch, who has been vacationing in the Mediterranean in recent days, made the calls to the reporters from his yacht, the Rosehearty, named for the Murdoch family’s ancestral home in Scotland,” the LA Times reports.

Scandal upon scandal! He’s got a yacht! It’s in the Mediterranean. Where are the reporters’ yachts? Where is the Mediterranean for the reporters?

We’re not sure why this is anything but a positive story for the Journal, its editors, its reports and its readers. As we maintained from the beginning, Murdoch did not come to destroy the Journal but to own it. And now he’s personally reaching out to reporters in an attempt to keep it intact.

But there’s already a movement to make something scandalous of these moves. “Some journalists in the newsroom took the gesture as a sign of Murdoch’s commitment to keep the staff’s quality high. Others said it showed that Murdoch would take a hands-on approach in newsroom affairs despite a special committee established to keep him from interfering in coverage,” the LA Times reports.

Heaven forbid! The owner is trying to keep his top reporters! It’s a clear violation of the editorial integrity of the newspaper, which apparently now means letting the newsroom fall report.

So who are the put-upon reporters who got the call? The LA Times named them as Tara Parker-Pope, Kate Kelly and Henny Sender. The latter two are DealBreaker favorites, who have broken important stories in recent months. (Tara Parker-Pope is a Health writer.) We’re sure they’re in high demand, and it just seems demented to expect that Murdoch wouldn’t fight to keep them on board.

Our question: is this what they were talking about when they said Murdoch would “interfere” with the Journal? If so, bring it on!

Murdoch’s presence felt at Journal [Los Angeles Times]

This is a list of people who we respectfully submit are liars: CNBC’s David Faber, Thestreet.com’s Nat Worden, and Reuters. We believe these entities to be capital ‘L’ small ‘i’ small ‘a’ small ‘r’s because among them they share the distinction of having reported or re-reported this morning that there will be an official announcement of News Corp.’s Dow Jones victory tonight. Nothing personal, it’s just that we no longer believe the words coming out of the mouths of people who say anything—outright, implying, leading, lip synching—that even hints that this whole thing will be conclusively finished before hell freezes over. We WANT to believe them, we just can’t. Know anyone you’d like to add to our list? Send his/her name to tips at dealbreaker dot com.

In other news, MySpace co-founder Brad Greenspan sent an open letter to Dow Jones shareholders detailing a new proposal (he’s done this before, several times) in which he would invest $600 million in cash and stock in three joint ventures with DJ. Greenspan says he’s received “interest” from five “credible” investor groups, though he would not disclose their names, and their profiles are set to private. Brad informed shareholders that he and his investors “can meet this week” in order to “firm investment commitments,” but starting next week things are going to be really tight for him, so if Dow Jones could really get back to him A-sap to nail something down that would be solid, just name the time and place, but seriously, get back to him soon, otherwise, who knows, he could be busy.

Dow Jones to Agree To Takeover by News Corp. [CNBC]
Dow Jones Deal Gets Closer [WSJ]
Dow Jones Soars As Deal Appears Near [thestreet.com]
News Corp., Dow Jones deal expected Tues [Reuters]
MySpace Co-Founder Makes Another Dow Jones Proposal [Bloomberg]

Geoffrey Raymond is at it again! Now he’s gone off and painted good ‘ol Rupert Murdoch in his classic style, but this time he’s asking for a little help from the viewer. Raymond is displaying his masterpiece outside of One World Financial Center so that Wall Street Journal employees and tourists alike can add their feelings about Rupes directly to the piece. WSJ employees in red marker, everyone else in black, with Raymond acting as a moderator. Barring rain, Raymond will be there until the end of the week and then the painting is going to the highest bidder. By highest bidder we mean any bidder, as the eBay auction starting at $3,500 has no bids to date with just three days left.

To one man walking by who refused to stop but still seemed interested, Raymond said defensively, “It’s not a picture of Rupert Murdoch, it’s a picture of a moment in the history of the Wall Street Journal.” Apparently this painting took only about two weeks to complete with Raymond rushing to finish before any official announcement about the fate of Dow Jones is announced. His painting of the $Honey is still a work in progress, he told DealBreaker — Raymond hasn’t yet figured out the finishing touch.

After the jump we bring you some pictures of the painting’s set up on Liberty Street.

The Annotated Murdoch [eBay]

Off to a slow start here this morning because of the rain in New York City. We had to wait for our interwebs to dry out. (Just like Alphaville, the deal blog at Financial Times, which has reportedly had trouble due to the flooding in England. Unless that’s just Brit-speak for, uhm, one too many pints on Sunday night.)

But it’s back to business now. And by “business” we mean, of course, the saga of Rupert Murdoch, the Bancroft family and the Wall Street Journal.

One of the things we’re sure has been absolutely frustrating to anyone who has been following the endless tape of this story has been the complete lack of information about which members of the Bancroft family and its representatives control exactly which shares and which percentage of the votes. It was only at the middle of last week that we learned that Michael Elefante, the partner at the Boston law firm Hemenway & Barnes who is a trustee for two of the largest trusts holding shares for the family, can deliver a little less than half of the family’s 64% voting stake. Let’s call that 30% of the total voting power of the company.

Today the New York Times reports that the leader of the opposition to Murdoch within the family, Christopher Bancroft, controls around 14.5 percent of the total Dow Jones shareholder vote as of January. And his cousin, Jane Cox MacElree, is running around with 14.8 percent. (Apparently no-one else has more than 4.3%.) But you have to read a bit between the lines of the Times—too often the stuff we really want to know apparently isn’t “fit to print”—to understand why they spend so much time talking about Chris and so little talking about Jane. It’s because Jane isn’t really involved with the Dow Jones stuff, and leaves the decision making to Chris. So you can count her shares as shares controlled by Chris. That gives him around a little more than 30% of the voting power of the company, or about what Elephante controls. To that you can add the “Never Murdoch” shares controlled by the Ottaway family to come up with a 36% opposed number.

In short, going into today’s big Boston Bancroft powwow, Murdoch is a bit behind. Probably at least 36% of the voting power of Dow Jones opposes him. He’s got 30% on his side. But Murdoch has a secret weapon: the 30% or so of the voting power vesting in shares that were once held by the general public and are now held by stock arbitrageurs, the Bancrofts, the Ottaways and a few people who aren’t paying any attention. Most of those shares will vote his way. To play it safe, let’s put that pro-Murdoch number at around 25%.

Which gives Murdoch right around 55% of the voting power of the company. Since he only needs 51%, that means he wins. But it’s close. And since we’ve been guestimating at a few of the crucial numbers, it’s possible that it’s even closer than this. If the numbers are shifted a couple points in the only direction—say, Elefante only has around 28% of the vote in his pocket and only 22% votes held by common shareholders go for Murdoch, he’s down to a losing 50%.

Which leaves us at the exciting possibility that we may be entering the rare situation where a very few amount of votes—perhaps those held by a small shareholder who doesn’t even remember he has the shares in his account (or his attic)—could swing the voting. In short, the Bancrofts may be meeting in Boston in 2008. But the voting may well be in Florida, 2000 territory.

A Family Meets Today to Hear the Complexities of a Bid for Dow Jones [New York Times]
Bancrofts To Consider Murdoch Bid, ‘Close Vote’ Predicted [New York Sun]
Know Your Bancrofts [New York Magazine]

Renaming an institution like the Dow Jones Industrial Average and getting people to use its new name is a pretty difficult task. It’s doubtful that either residents or tourists living near or travelling to Auschwitz-Birkenau will take the extra effort to say “Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau,” though Poland is hoping we’re wrong (it’s happened). Still, it seems like there’s a chance that Rupert Murdoch suddenly get all egomaniacal upon acquiring Dow Jones, and want to brand his territory.

Thestreet.com took a shot today and came up with: “The Fox Dow Jones Industrial Average,” “The Fox Business Network Average” and “The Rupert and Wendi Murdoch Industrial Average,” submissions that don’t want to call “awful” but maybe “not good.” Definitely “not funny.” Unfortunately, it’s easier to call out other people’s shoddy ideas than come up with your own, which is our way of saying, “we’ve got nothing.” (Carney nixed Asians Keep You Young Industrial Average). So, let us know if you’ve got anything.

Ready for the Fox Dow Jones Industrials? [thestreet.com]

We got so caught up in the excitement over the board of directors, Bancroft family, Rupert Murdoch, News Corp drama that we’d totally forgotten about the insider trading angle to this story. But fortunately we have the Securities and Exchange Commission to remind us that prior to the public learning of the deal, a Hong Kong couple with ties to Dow Board member David Li, chief executive and chairman of the Bank of East Asia, allegedly engaged in insider trading.

According to published reports, the SEC has issued a Wells Notice to Li, informing him that it plans on filing civil charges against him.

For those of you who have never gotten one—a Wells notice is a sort of like a bill from the utility company stamped Final Notice. Except that instead of shutting off your electricity, if you don’t respond to the notice you wind up getting sued by the SEC. It’s basically your last chance to convince them that they shouldn’t file a lawsuit against you. Or, as a friend of ours once put it, it’s a notice that it’s time to move your funds off-shore, get out of the country and hire some very good lawyers.

SEC to File Civil Charges Against Dow Jones Director [Wall Street Journal]

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp will acquire Dow Jones.

Although two members of the Bancroft family signaled their continued resistance to the deal by abstaining from last night’s board vote or leaving the meeting before the vote, a key member of the board voted to accept Murdoch’s bid. The story is buried in most of the news coverage, which focussed on the broader question of board approval. But this single vote almost certainly means that nothing can stand in the way of the deal now.

The key vote came from Dow Jones board member Michael Elefante. Most of the Bancroft family’s shares are not held by individual family members but in family trusts controlled by trustees. For the first time yesterday, we learned that Elefante, a partner at the Boston law firm Hemenway & Barnes, can deliver a little less than half of the family’s 64% voting stake.

Once we know that Elefante supports the deal, the math is so easy even the Wall Street Journal can do it. “That rough one-third of the company’s voting power likely would be enough to cement a sale to Mr. Murdoch. That is because some 29% of the total voting power of the company rests in the hands of non-Bancrofts. Almost all of these holders, many of them arbitragers, are expected to support the deal,” the Journal’s report this morning states. In other words: 30% plus 29% equals more than the 51% needed to approve the deal.

So the much heralded and awaited for split in the Bancroft family has finally happened and it has the result of all but guaranteeing that Murdoch will get the company. We say “all but” only because there was earlier discussion that it might only take a small number of Bancroft shares to prevent the sale. Lawyers familiar with the transaction say this can be structured around and does not prevent a serious obstacle.

Dow Jones Board Approves Sale [Wall Street Journal]

When Wall Street Journal’s Sarah Ellison broke the story late Monday that Dow Jones chief executive Richard Zannino and News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch reached a tentative agreement over lunch to bring the News Corp’s bid for Dow Jones before the board of directors, many were surprised that the offer price hadn’t budged from original $5 billion, or $60 a share.

They shouldn’t have been. Throughout the months since Murdoch first approached Dow Jones representatives with his offer, advisers to Murdoch have coached him not to increase his bid. Early on some thought he might increase the price in an attempt to overcome resistance from some members of the Bancroft family. But Murdoch’s investment bankers advised him that it was foolish to bid against himself, raising his offer at a time when the Bancroft’s had not yet indicated that they were willing to sell at any price.

Some of Murdoch’s advisers believed that a higher, second bid might have actually invited a competing bid for the company if it was seen as Murdoch’s best offer. By sticking to the original bid, Murdoch may have discouraged other potential bidders who were not sure they could outbid the deep pockets of a cash rich News Corp.
Even after negotiations with the Bancroft family began, some observers thought Murdoch might increase his bid. “While the initial $60-a-share offer represents a hefty premium over where Do Jones’s stock was trading before Mr. Murdoch’s offer became public, Dow Jones hopes the Bancroft family’s ambivalence about the Murdoch deal could help the company extract a few more dollars per share,” Ellison writes in her story today.

The thinking in the News Corp camp, however, runs completely in the other direction. The Bancroft family had already extracted value from News Corp in the form of promises of editorial independence, and had dragged out the negotiating process—taking up time and energy from Murdoch and his advisers. These discussions and concessions have been seen as part of the price News Corp was paying to buy Dow Jones. In effect, they were counted as increasing the cost of the deal.

What’s more, the Bancroft family’s continued ambivalence despite the negotiations and concessions has frustrated Murdoch and his advisers. The view within the Murdoch camp has been that as long as the Bancroft family continued to resist selling the Dow Jones for non-financial reasons, there was little point in increasing the financial incentives.

“The Bancrofts kept saying that this wasn’t about the money,” one person familiar with the News Corp strategy said. “Murdoch decided to take them at their word.”

While initially trading higher this morning, the stock dropped today to its lowest level since the Bancroft family first agreed to meet with Murdoch at the end of May. This may indicate traders now believe that Murdoch will not offer a higher price than his original bid.

Dow Jones, News Corp. Set Deal [Wall Street Journal]

The co-author of the fabricated tale from Friday about News Corp. having bought Dow Jones is sticking by his story. Andrew Neil, who wrote the article with James Forsyt, and is “credible” because (in light of?) he edited Murdoch’s Sunday Times of London for 11 years, took issue with the fact that Dow Jones representatives called him out for lying. His take? “[The protestations] are rubbish…They’re all swearing at us because, I assume, they’re all out in the Hamptons.” Mr. Neil, the Times reports, was drinking at the Ritz at the time.

Earlier: Rupert Murdoch Does Not Own Dow Jones…Yet!
Interminable Dow Jones Saga Possibly Over?

Expert on Murdoch Insisted the Dow Jones Deal Was Done [NYT]

For a couple of weeks, shares of Dow Jones & Company have been trading below the $60 price Rupert Murdoch offered, which most likely reflects a slight discount for risk that the deal won’t ever go through, skepticism about the notion that Murdoch might offer even more money for the media company and the belief that the deal won’t close immediately. We’ve had the Murdoch Meter, which measures the chance of Murdoch buying the company at his offer price, fixed at 90% for some time. And shares have been trading between $58 and $57.

This morning world came from across the Atlantic that negotiations with the Bancroft family were done and a deal announcement was imminent. Shares jumped on the open and kept climbing despite reports on CNBC and DealBreaker quashing the rumor. They’re now at $59. This pushes our auto-arbitrage meter up to 95%.

Ordinarily we’d just correct the meter if it moved on fake news. But we’re hearing things that are convincing us that although the Bancroft family may not yet have formally accepted the offer, an announcement may be coming soon. The right people—lawyers, bankers—are busy this weekend, not making appearances at places we expected them to be. And they are clamming up, as they often do before a deal is announced to the market. From this, well, anti-leaking we’re reading an imminent deal.

Of course, since so much of this depends on what is decided a very few individuals who happen to be descended from people who bought the company a few generations ago, this could all change. But we’re following the arbs and fake news today and moving the meter up to 95%.

Still bitter over the Post’s coup that was the Keith Richard’s cover/headline, “I Snorted My Father,” British tabloids took the genius strategy of inventing the news this morning when it claimed that News Corp had bought Dow Jones. No stranger to taking liberties with facts (News Corp, as you well know, owns the paragon of journalistic integrity, thePost), the injured party issued a statement that “the story isn’t true.” Dow Jones shares gained 55 cents to $58.40 at 9:31 a.m. in NYSE composite trading and Lindsay Lohan smoked pot in the Port Authority with two trannies last night—pics inside!

Dow Jones, Bancrofts Are Still in Talks With Murdoch [Bloomberg]

It’s only been reported in one British paper (so let’s remain skeptical, because those publications have a tendency to lie) but according to The Business Rupert Murdoch has “succeed with his $5 billion bid for Dow Jones.”

Allegedly, negotiations have been completed (less, “we want more money,” more “editorial independence, don’t make this the Post, you can only hire and fire the top editors and publishers, etc”), the board says the deal will be accepted by the Bancrofts over the next few days and a formal announcement is expected net week. News Corp will apparently pay $60/share, a 67% premium on the $36/share price in April.

Like we said, no one else has this story, though one of the writers, Andrew Neil, is a former “Murdoch lieutenant,” so perhaps that adds a miniscule amount of plausibility. According to CNBC’s David Faber no deal has been reached, despite news to the contrary from “some rag in a far away place.” Anyone else care to comment?

EXCLUSIVE: Rupert Murdoch buys Dow Jones, owners of the Wall Street Journal [The Business via Gawker]
‘Murdoch buys Dow Jones’ report [The Guardian]

We were so busy bringing you the news that the board of Dow Jones & Company and News Corp have agreed in principle on a plan to protect the editorial independence of the Wall Street Journal (apparently no one cares about Barron’s), that we neglected to update the Murdoch Meter.

Contrary to the suspicions of some, the meter isn’t set by the arbitrary whims of the DealBreaker editors and reports. It’s set by the interns.

Just kidding. We employ a complex formula employing market variables to distill the meter’s current standing. Without going into the details of our secret formula, we’ll give you the outlines. We take the current share price compare it to Murdoch’s offer, and discount for information we think may not yet be fully digested by the market. Right now the Meter tells us that Murdoch has about a 95% chance of acquiring Dow Jones. (In case you need a more recently updated version, you can now click here.)

By the way, the deal is not quite done. Although the Dow Jones board, which includes representatives of the Bancroft family, may have more or less reached an agreement with Murdoch, the family has been surprisingly fractious and unpredictable through this process. It’s not clear that any attempt has been made to poll Bancroft family members on the proposal. Most likely, they haven’t even seen the details yet.

What’s more, the Wall Street Journal reports that there are still “open items” that remain. In our experience, these small “open items” that get left until the last minute either get swept away or become DealBreakers. Sometimes they remain open because nobody could be bothered to deal with the small things. After hour upon hour in a conference room, when the only thing left to drink is diet Sprite and all the cookies are raisin granola, you’re hardly in the mood to debate the eye-care plan for executive assistants. But sometimes those things end up mattering to someone who matters, or cost more than anyone imagined. We’ve walked back into conference rooms the day after to discover that our small “open items” list—usually kept on a legal pad or a laptop by the most junior person in the room—has become a list of DealBreakers. Beware the open items.

Update: Some are wondering whether this whole process is a farce. Gary Weiss writes of the agreement to protect the editorial independence, “I think any such agreements aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, but then again I’m cynical.”

Dow Jones, News Corp. Agree On Set of Editorial Protections [Wall Street Journal]

Less than twenty-four hours after the board of directors of Dow Jones announced they were taking over negotiations with News Corp, Financial Times publisher Pearson and General Electric announced they were dropping plans to make a joint bid for the company that owns the Wall Street Journal.

The two companies had been negotiating with each other over a deal that would have combined the financial news network CNBC, Dow Jones and the Financial Times. Critics of the proposed plan said that it was too complex, would cost too much and was likely to result in job losses at the newspapers. Shareholders at Pearson had already begun to object to the company spending heavily to buy another financial newspaper. And some wondered whether antitrust authorities in the US and Europe would even permit the combination.

But for all its problems, the potential partnership was arguably the only credible alternative to the offer from News Corp. Despite the Bancrofts publicly saying they would sell the company under the right circumstances and a hunt by union representatives for an alternative buyer, no one else has emerged with a firm offer for the company. Right now it’s Rupert or nobody.

Pearson, General Electric Drop Plan for Dow Jones Bid [Bloomberg]

On the stage of comic Dow Jones bidding foils, enter Brad Greenspan (pictured, really leveling with us), otherwise known as the guy who owned the nest that MySpace hatched in. That is until Rupert Murdoch stole the hatchling for 0.1x, which is something ‘Beenspan’ is more than a little bitter about.

Beenspan outlined his vendetta bid in a letter to the Dow Jones board. He wants to buy 25% of DJ’s stock at $60 a share (about $1.25bn), opposed to the people who want to buy 100% of DJ’s stock for $60 a share or more. This, apparently, gives the deal the flexibility to provide willing sellers with liquidity, while ignoring the people who don’t want to sell in the first place. It also gives Beenspan the ability to avoid explaining why there isn’t enough cash in his wallet, which can be an embarrassing first date.

What Beenspan brings to the table are these new-fangled things called social networks. Scratch that, they aren’t social networks, they’re business networks. It’s not Web 3.0, it’s Web 3.05, beta – the WSJ as a business network with user-generated content, enhanced interactivity, and other buzzwords. Beenspan also wants to tart up the WSJ with the revolution that is video content, lots and lots of video content.

This original brilliance provides the following relative advantages, according to Beenspan’s letter:

1) KEEPS THE DJ/WSJ INDEPENDENT FOR THE BENEFIT OF LARGE CONSUMER BASE. (or at least free of a “fair and balanced” take on finance)

2) PROVIDES PREMIUM LIQUIDITY EVENT. (at a convenient discount to other premiums)

3) ALLOWS DJ TO GO ON OFFENSE. (essential when WSJ plays the Colts)

4) UNLOCKS HIDDEN VALUE. (like when you duck behind the last gray block in stage 1-3)

5) PROVIDES UPSIDE FOR EVERYONE! (“Myspace Tom” will be your friend and business partner, and so will Amber, who insists that she’s online in a video chat room right now and that you don’t need a credit card to talk to her)

Sheer Bradness [ValleyWag]

The board of directors of Dow Jones will take over the negotiations on the future of the company, the Wall Street Journal is reporting. The Journal says that the describes the board as “frustrated by the Bancrof family’s foot dragging in its negotiations with News Corp.”

This new move by the board, which had taken a deferential stance to the Bancroft family until today, makes it far more likely that Rupert Murdoch’s New Corp will buy succeed in buying the company.

“In recent weeks, members of the Bancroft family had grown wary of any deal with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and had been laboring over a proposal to safeguard the editorial independence of Dow Jones,” the Journal’s Sarah Ellison writes. “But as the family’s negotiations with each other and their advisers continued with no resolution in sight, the company’s directors were growing increasingly concerned that by not responding to Mr. Murdoch, the family was endangering the negotiations.”

The Murdoch Meter has jumped up another five points to show a 90% chance that News Corp will buy the company.

Dow Jones Board Takes Over Talks [Wall Street Journal]

The potential bid for Dow Jones from GE and Pearson is looking even shakier today. Yesterday we noted that newsroom rivalry might derail support for the deal among employees of the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Today the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column points to other constituencies that are raising objections to the deal, including at least one member of the Bancroft family and some prominent shareholders of Pearson.

Heard on the Street agrees with our analysis that a Pearson-owned Dow Jones would likely seek cost-savings by reducing overlap between the Journal and the Financial Times.

The easiest way to meet the cost-savings goals would be for the newspapers to cut their biggest expense — journalists. The Wall Street Journal has roughly 700 reporters and editors, and about 100 of them work outside the U.S., while the Financial Times has 510 journalists, the majority of whom are in the United Kingdom. While it is unlikely the two newspapers would be combined, they could share some stories, allowing the FT to cut its staff in the U.S. and the Journal to cut back in Europe.

The GE-Pearson bid looks weaker every time we glance in its direction. The Murdoch Meter gets moved up to the 85% mark today on the expectation that enthusiasm for this bid will continue to fade.

GE, Pearson on Defensive [Wall Street Journal]

Is Rupert Murdoch expressing unbridled confidence (“I can take a few days off, Dow Jones will be there when I get back”) or throwing in the towel?

Check out the full picture after the jump.

Although Pearson PLC is being called a possible ‘white knight’ bidder for Dow Jones & Co, many in the newsroom of the Wall Street Journal are not enthusiastic about being bought by the publisher of the Financial Times. Reporters at the Wall Street Journal, many of whom regard the Financial Times as an inferior paper with low-quality “Brit journo” standards of fact-checking and sourcing, are worried that ownership by Pearson will deteriorate journalistic standards at the paper, a source at the Journal told DealBreaker.

“I took a straw poll around the office. A lot of people are worried about what this will do to the Journal’s reporting,” the source said.

Word began to circulate late on Friday afternoon that General Electric and Financial Times publisher Pearson were “in talks” about a potential joint offer for Dow Jones & Co. Over the weekend, the story ran in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. A decision on whether or not to make a bid is expected to come within days.

A news of a possible bid from Pearson and General Electric may have the ironic effect of making the bid from News Corp more attractive. While News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch has promised to spend more on the Wall Street Journal, expand its international presence and has announced plans to launch a new cable news network for financial news that may give Journal reporters more outlets for their reporting, a bid from Pearson and General Electric would likely involve mostly cost-cutting synergies.

[After the jump, the not-exactly-surprising news that Journal reporters aren’t totally psyched about working for the publishers of the Financial Times.]

The Bancroft family has reportedly rejected a proposal prepared by its lawyers. The proposal was intended to protect the editorial independence of the Wall Street Journal and it was widely expected that it would be submitted to Rupert Murdoch this week. After debating the proposal, however, the family has apparently decided that it did not offer adequate protection for the paper.

To grasp the most striking thing about the rejection of the proposal you have to know something about the folks who prepared it. One of the law firms representing the family is Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz (they are also represented by Boston law firm Hemenway & Barnes), which is legendary for its defense of corporate boards and management against unsolicited takeover offers. Name plate lawyer Marty Lipton is often credited with inventing the so-called ‘poison pill’—a controversial tactic that prevents hostile takeovers by creating new shares of stock to dilute the ownership of the would-be acquirer. If Lipton—or the top-of-the-class, Ivy-league trained lawyers who work for him—has drawn up a plan to defend your interest in a company and you conclude it’s too weak, you might not quite be operating according to a map that has a lot of overlap with a territory called reality.

[More on the Bancroft Family follies after the jump]