What Murdoch didn’t volunteer is other reasons he has for wanting to own the Journal. Whatever his commercial successes, he has never produced a great newspaper, and he seems to value even a trophy property like the Times of London less for its prestige than for its influence—its power to help sway elections, to promote his political ideas, and to protect his corporate interests. “I wonder how many even of his admirers would argue that Mr. Murdoch, for all his successes, has created even one serious, authoritative and truly independent newspaper,” the columnist Martin Wolf wrote recently in the Financial Times, alluding to Murdoch’s ownership of four national newspapers. “Mr. Murdoch can take substantial credit for the tide of vulgarity that now floods the U.K.”

On May 31st, the Bancroft family reversed itself and agreed to meet with Murdoch, issuing a statement that said, in part, “The mission of Dow Jones may be better accomplished in combination or collaboration with another organization, which may include News Corp.” A crucial factor in turning the family around, according to a board participant, was Elizabeth Steele, the family member who had nearly wept at Zannino’s presentation on May 1st. During board conference calls, the members discussed who should attend the session with Murdoch, to be held at the Manhattan offices of the family’s legal adviser, Martin Lipton, of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. Michael Elefante said that he and the three family representatives—Christopher Bancroft, Leslie Hill, and Steele—should attend, along with the board’s chairman, McPherson. McPherson suggested that Zannino should be included.

“That’s not what we had in mind,” Elefante responded, according to the board participant. Elefante decided that no one from management would attend. “I read it that Elefante and the family are not happy with Rich,” the participant said.

At the meeting, which took place on June 4th, Murdoch was joined by his son James, who is thirty-four, the C.E.O. of British-based BSkyB, and by his counsel and chief financial officer. The four-hour session reportedly did not address what News Corp. would pay for or invest in Dow Jones. Instead, discussion focussed on whether Murdoch could be trusted to keep his distance from news coverage, and what kind of independent board could assure this. The Bancrofts wanted a board that the family would control in perpetuity, with the power to hire and fire the editors and the publishers, and leverage to protect employees from Murdoch—an extraordinary proposition. It is a measure of Murdoch’s discipline that he did not explode at the implication that he was some sort of uncaged vulgarian or at the idea that the Bancrofts would control the paper after selling it. Instead, Murdoch said—gently, by all accounts—that he could not invest five billion dollars of his shareholders’ money in order to become a mere spectator. He proposed a board like the one he had established for the Times of London and the Sunday Times, where of the fifteen members only seven have no ties to News Corp., and where he can theoretically hire or fire the editor only with the assent of the board.

In London, the Times board rarely meets, and is reliant for much of its information on Murdoch. In an interview with two Journal reporters, Steve Stecklow and Martin Peers, excerpts of which were published on June 5th, Murdoch not only made clear that he wanted a similar arrangement—one that permitted the board to “interview the editor before he’s appointed”—but insisted that the board could not get into “business judgments,” including newsroom budgets, as the Bancrofts were proposing. Murdoch said that he would countenance a board that had “absolutely no business connections to me.” What he would not consider was a board appointed by the Bancrofts. “The family’s selling out,” he said. “They can’t sell and keep it.”

No outside board can tame any owner, a former Sunday Times investigative reporter, Bruce Page, told me. “Newspapers are like ships,” he said. “They are real-time systems. You must make your decisions. It is better to have bad decisions rather than no decisions. You can’t have the captain of the ship appointed by people onshore, and fire him when he comes back to shore.” Murdoch and the Bancrofts agreed to keep talking.

In 1995, I spent several months reporting for a Profile of Murdoch for The New Yorker. During ten days in his offices, I attended meetings, witnessed negotiations, listened to his phone calls, and conducted about twenty hours of taped interviews with him. At least a couple of times each day, he talked on the phone with an editor in order to suggest a story based on something that he’d heard. This prompted me to ask, “Of all the things in your business empire, what gives you the most pleasure?”

“Being involved with the editor of a paper in a day-to-day campaign,” he answered instantly. “Trying to influence people.”

I portrayed Murdoch then as a visionary who could make a large company move with the speed of a small one. I also saw him as a modern pirate, a press lord in the tradition of men like James Gordon Bennett, who created the New York Herald in 1835 and also became an adviser to politicians; or William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, and Lord Beaverbrook, who used their properties to try to influence events throughout the last century. Murdoch’s power and influence, though, reach far beyond one nation. Murdoch was unhappy with the article, and although he is unfailingly polite in person, he has since declined to sit for an interview with me.

Those who are suspicious of Murdoch’s pledges of noninterference recall what happened when he first extended his press holdings beyond his native Australia, nearly forty years ago: he persuaded the Carr family of London to sell him the sensational tabloid News of the World, and promised to run the paper in partnership with the family that had owned the paper for nearly eighty years; he abandoned this pledge after learning, he said, that to honor it would harm shareholders because the Carrs had created “a total wreck of a company.” When he bought the New York Post from Dorothy Schiff, in 1976, he publicly pledged to leave its liberal editorial stance unchanged, saying, “The New York Post will continue to serve New York and New Yorkers and maintain its present policies and traditions”—and promptly reversed course. But Murdoch’s approach may best be seen in what happened after he bought the influential and once storied Times of London and the Sunday Times, in 1981. At the time, English journalists asked their Australian-born colleague Phillip Knightley to analyze how Murdoch might behave, and as Knightley now recalls, “The point I made was that Murdoch came from a tradition very different from European and American proprietors. In Australia, a proprietor owned the paper and considered it was his to do whatever he liked with it. Proprietors used their newspapers to support or oppose political parties, settle private feuds, and cross-promote their other interests. Any idea that they could not do this would have met with bewilderment.”

Within a year of acquiring the papers and promising not to interfere in the editorial operations, Murdoch fired Harold Evans as the editor of the Times and transformed the paper into an often-partisan voice on behalf of Margaret Thatcher. Evans had been the twelfth editor at the Times in nearly two hundred years; Murdoch hired and fired five editors in his first eleven years. Evans, in his 1983 memoir, “Good Times, Bad Times,” wrote, “The most charitable explanation of Murdoch’s attitude to a promise was that he meant it when he made it; only circumstances changed.”

Bruce Page, who left the Sunday Times before Murdoch took control, and who wrote the 2003 book “The Murdoch Archipelago,” said, “Rupert is a very kind man personally. He bailed out old war correspondents who have hit hard times. He has great charm, in a certain dry way. There’s a lot to be said for Rupert Murdoch the man. There’s nothing to be said for Rupert Murdoch the journalist.”

Murdoch does deserve credit for modernizing England’s newspaper industry and weaning it from wasteful union work rules. When he took over the daily Times, it was losing money; it still is, yet he keeps it alive. The Times is not nearly the paper that it was in 1981—stories are increasingly cursory, there is more crime and celebrity news, and since 2004 it has been printed in tabloid format—but it is still a respectable newspaper, as is the Australian, which Murdoch launched as that country’s first national newspaper, in 1964, and which didn’t earn a profit for twenty years. Neither publication, though, can compare to the Wall Street Journal, one of the best newspapers in the world. And because the Australian and the Times are so unlike typical Murdoch newspapers—tabloids like the Post in New York and the Sun in London—neither really represents his dominant brand of journalism. Some of his tabloids print photographs of topless women. His Fox network pioneered tabloid television, in 1986, with “A Current Affair.” He personally agreed to publish O. J. Simpson’s “If I Did It” (in which Simpson teasingly seemed to confess to a double murder), along with a two-part, two-hour Simpson interview on Fox—and then cancelled it all when the public outcry became too loud for commercial comfort. Fox News’s “fair and balanced” slogan is more marketing ploy than conviction. The Journal “will become more populist,” Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian in London, predicts. “All his papers do.”

The prospect of a Murdoch takeover of the Wall Street Journal has already produced repercussions at the paper. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, Americans consider the Journal their most credible newspaper. Yet a senior executive at the paper says, “Even before anything happens, there has been so much publicity about this that there are issues with our readers and advertisers. . . . We don’t yet know how best to deal with that issue, or how big an issue it is.”

In addition, the departure of some of the Journal’s talent may ensue. There are fewer opportunities in journalism than there once were, but the best writers, reporters, and senior editors will not find it difficult to move elsewhere. Editors at the New York Times, Time, Inc., and Bloomberg have already talked to prospective recruits from the Journal. Murdoch, however, believes that all talent is replaceable. To try to forestall a Murdoch takeover of New York magazine thirty years ago, about forty writers and editors and art directors went on strike. I was at the magazine then, and, with delusions that I was on a diplomatic mission, led a small delegation to visit Murdoch’s outside counsel, Howard Squadron. I was certain that, once Murdoch understood that the staff would leave, he would retreat. Squadron listened politely, and replied, “You don’t understand. If you leave, Rupert will replace you like he replaces furniture.”

Murdoch has said that he wants to improve the European and Asian editions of the Journal, expand the Washington bureau, invest more in marketing the paper, and boost digital ventures in order to locate “new business models to get revenues.” In the interview with Stecklow and Peers, published in its entirety on the Journal’s Web site, he said that he would consider making WSJ.com—one of the few successful subscription models (it has nine hundred thousand subscribers paying up to a hundred dollars annually)—free, because “you’d have ten times as many visitors and let’s say five times as much advertising.” In the interview, Murdoch said of the newsroom, “I’d love to wander around. I’m not going to have much time to do it. I find people quite like it if I show an interest in their work.” He also said, “I’m quite ashamed. I enjoy popular journalism. I must say I enjoy it more than what you would call quality journalism.” Journalists love the sense that the boss cares about their work, but Journal reporters have every reason to suspect that Murdoch’s journalistic sensibility is not theirs.

Murdoch’s offer comes at a time of embarrassment elsewhere in News Corp. Last month, the Post admitted that Richard Johnson, its Page Six editor, had accepted a thousand-dollar gift from a New York restaurateur whose establishment often appeared on Page Six, and had also accepted a fifty-thousand-dollar bachelor party in Mexico hosted by Joe Francis, of “Girls Gone Wild” video fame. Ian Spiegelman, who worked as a Page Six reporter for four years, swore in a recent affidavit that “accepting freebies, graft and other favors was not only condoned by the company but encouraged as a way to decrease” expenses; that he “was ordered to kill a Page Six story about a Chinese diplomat and strip club that would have angered the Communist regime and endangered Murdoch’s broadcasting privileges” in China; and that “Page Six was ordered to kill unflattering stories about Hillary and Bill Clinton on numerous occasions.” A spokesman for the Post said that Johnson had been “reprimanded”; he suggested that some of the charges might be true, but labelled others “a lie,” while refusing to specify which were lies.