Last but not least: Scandal surrounding Andrew
On Tuesday, Andrew Langhoff, editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, announced his resignation. The British newspaper The Guardian has now uncovered the reason behind it.
The Wall Street Journal has manipulated its readership figures for years with secret deals - according to The Guardian, in January 2008 the newspaper sought contact with European companies that organize seminars for students. While the Wall Street Journal placed the name of the companies in its paper, the companies bought up copies and distributed them to students free of charge. How to Tagesanzeiger.ch the scale of the deal affecting the European edition of the Wall Street Journal was enormous: the circulation fraud is said to have been responsible for 41 percent of the daily sales figures. Scandalous! And it gets even more scandalous: the top management of News Corp. in New York knew about the secret machinations of the European edition, but did nothing about it.
The deal began to falter when the largest sponsor, the Dutch company Executive Learning Partnership ELP, wanted to withdraw from the agreement - not because it had suddenly been struck by a guilty conscience, no, ELP complained that it had not received enough attention in the Wall Street Journal for its investment of 31,000 euros. In order not to lose the backer, ELP promised three exclusive reports. In one of them, the head of ELP was quoted to an exaggerated extent. As a result, resistance within the editorial team began to grow because journalistic ethics were seen to have been disregarded. This ultimately put paid to the deal.
In an internal letter, Langhoff justified his resignation with his agreement to publish the stories about ELP - "because my agreement could leave the impression that news reporting can be influenced by advertising relationships, I think my resignation is the best way forward.". Correct, Mr. Lanhoff, this impression could indeed arise - but only a very small one. Incidentally, neither he himself nor the publisher said a word about the machinations behind the articles about ELP and about the fact that News Corp. management in New York knew everything.
