Last week, Rupert Murdoch attended The Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles. Lamenting the media’s constant carping at President Bush, Mr Murdoch aimed a conspiratorial aside at Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal. “Apart from your newspaper and mine, there’s a sort of monolithic attack on him every day of the year.” It was an expression of admiration for the Journal, America’s premier business title — but it was more than a brief flirtation and hinted at a deeper courtship by Mr Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, parent company of The Times. Mr Murdoch has never made a secret of his fascination with business news in general, and his admiration for The Wall Street Journal in particular. The newspaper, which has the second-largest circulation of any US paper, is the flagship title of the Dow Jones group, which also owns Barron’s, several leading market indicators, including the Dow Jones industrial average, and a group of community newspapers.

Mr Murdoch’s recent foray into youth-oriented internet sites, such as MySpace, left many assuming his targets lay elsewhere. But his interest in financial news has long roots.

News Corp was a 20 per cent shareholder in Pearson, the owner of the Financial Times, from 1987, and briefly held more than 15 per cent of Reuters in the mid1980s, breaching a company rule aimed at preventing any individual gaining control. However, by the mid1990s, both investments had been sold. In the long period without a stake in Pearson, Mr Murdoch remained an admirer of the Financial Times, and latterly, as the London-based title gradually shifted its politics to the Left, of The Wall Street Journal, whose opinion pages remain a bastion of right-wing, free-market commentary.

Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent, though, was controlled by the Bancroft family, and although there have been signs of division between the generations, Mr Murdoch had long felt that the paper was not for sale. He said as much in an interview with America’s leading financial publication two years ago. At that time, he said that the Journal could become a serious rival to The New York Times as an American national newspaper. Arguing that the New York title suffered from “a tremendous smugness” and that US journalism was “rather monolitic on the Left”, he said that the Journal had “a fantastic opportunity to be the great paper of record in this country”.

The interest in Dow Jones is now broader than the Journal — fuelled also by belief in the long-term value of financial information. Dow Jones, though, has suffered from poor execution and being too focused on the United States, meaning that its efforts to match Reuters or develop overseas have disappointed. In the past two years, Mr Murdoch has also been trying to boost News Corp’s business output, with the Fox Business Channel due to be launched late this year. The $5 billion bid is a final attempt to hurry the Bancroft family along.

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