# Wall Street Journal The **Wall Street Journal** is the newspaper of the American executive class — founded July 8, 1889 by Charles Dow, Edward Jones and Charles Bergstresser, owned by the Bancroft family from 1902 to 2007 and by [[Rupert Murdoch]]'s [[News Corporation]] since. It matters to this vault for three separate reasons that pull in different directions: its editorial page is the house organ of pro-business conservatism; its newsroom is one of the few institutions the right cannot dismiss as liberal and which has nonetheless produced some of the most damaging reporting on [[Donald Trump]]; and its ownership makes it a Murdoch property, so its fate is bound to the [[Murdoch Trust Settlement]] and to whatever [[Lachlan Murdoch]] decides the empire is for. ## Ownership Clarence Barron bought [[Dow Jones]] for $130,000 in 1902; his Bancroft descendants held it through a dual-class structure for a century. Murdoch's $5.6B, $60-a-share bid in 2007 — a 67% premium engineered to be irresistible — ended that; the deal and the Bancrofts' regrets are on [[News Corp - Wall Street Journal Acquisition]]. The paper has since been the prestige asset of News Corp (as distinct from Fox Corporation, which holds [[Fox News]]). As of June 2025 it reported about 4.54 million subscribers, 4.13 million of them digital-only — a subscription business rather than an advertising one, which is part of why its newsroom has been more insulated from owner pressure than Fox's. ## The two papers The split between the Journal's news pages and its editorial page is older than Murdoch and survived him. The editorial page — center-right, free-market, supply-side, pro-immigration-for-business — has been the venue for the movement's economic argument for fifty years: it published [[Peter Thiel]]'s 2014 "Competition Is for Losers" (see [[Peter Thiel - competition is for losers]]), it carried the [[Trickle-Down Economics]] case through the Reagan years, and it has been the most consistent establishment-right critic of Trump's tariff policy. The news pages operate by conventional standards and the paper has kept them that way through the Murdoch era, which is the reason the Epstein story could happen. ## The Epstein letter and the $10 billion suit On July 17, 2025 the Journal reported that Trump had contributed a bawdy letter and drawing to a 50th-birthday album for [[Jeffrey Epstein]] in 2003. Trump denied it and the next day sued the paper, Dow Jones, News Corp, Murdoch and the two reporters for $10 billion — the first defamation suit by a sitting president against a news organization. Judge Darrin Gayles dismissed it on **April 13, 2026**, finding Trump came "nowhere close" to pleading actual malice, without prejudice; Trump refiled on May 28, 2026. The case is the vault's cleanest example of a Murdoch outlet being sued by the president the rest of the Murdoch empire supports — evidence that the news/editorial split, and the Journal's separation from Fox, are real rather than cosmetic. ## Why it links from where it does Thirteen folders link here. The Deals and Companies pages ([[Dow Jones]], [[News Corporation]], the Disney–Fox and Murdoch-trust pages) treat it as an asset; the Timelines and Events pages ([[Enron Scandal]], [[Catch and Kill]]) treat it as a newsroom; the People pages for economists ([[James Tobin]], [[Stephanie Kelton]]) and operatives ([[Karl Rove]], a regular columnist) treat it as the editorial venue where the right's economic orthodoxy is argued. Reading the Journal in this vault means knowing which of the three you are looking at. ## See Also - [[News Corporation]] · [[Dow Jones]] · [[Rupert Murdoch]] · [[Lachlan Murdoch]] - [[News Corp - Wall Street Journal Acquisition]] · [[Murdoch Trust Settlement]] - [[Fox News]] · [[New York Post]] · [[Right-Wing Media Timeline]] - [[Jeffrey Epstein]] · [[Peter Thiel - competition is for losers]]