A key member of the Bancroft family that controls Dow Jones & Co has suggested he will oppose the $5 billion (£2.5 billion) bid for the owner of The Wall Street Journal tabled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

Christopher Bancroft, a Dow Jones director, who together with two siblings controls about one third of the Bancrofts' controlling stake in Dow Jones, has voiced concerns that a sale would endanger the Journal’s independence, the paper reported.

News Corp is the parent company of Times Online.

“I’m open to any situation that benefits The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones and its shareholders. At the moment, I don’t see anything that would do that,” Mr Bancroft told the Journal.

News Corp was last night waiting for a response from the Bancroft family, who met yesterday to consider the bid.

The meeting is understood to have been long, prompting talk of disagreement in the family on how to respond. There was no public statement immediately after the meeting, as News Corp hoped for a signal that would indicate that direct negotiations between the two sides could commence.

The Journal also reported that Mr Bancroft was not at a meeting of family members in Boston yesterday.

Members of the Bancroft family have also reportedly received letters from Dow Jones investors and Journal staff in Beijing opposed to Mr Murdoch’s $60-a-share offer for the company – a 63 per cent premium on the group’s share price ahead of News Corp’s interest being made public.

Mr Murdoch denied allowing political pressure from Beijing to influence the running of the News Corp media empire, the Financial Times reported this morning.

He also denied bowing to Beijing when he dropped the BBC from the Hong Kong satellite broadcaster Star TV in 1993.

Mr Murdoch similarly rejected assertions that Beijing had any influence in his decision to cancel publication of memoirs written by Chris Patten, the former Governor of Hong Kong.

“I had told the HarperCollins editors not to publish the Patten book because I did not think it would sell, but they went ahead anyway,” Mr Murdoch told the FT.

“When I then found out they were publishing it, I told them anyone else could publish it, just not them. In retrospect it would have been better just to publish it."

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