Murdoch pledges all-out war to topple 'Financial Times' in Europe

Rupert Murdoch has promised to wage an all-out war to topple the Financial Times as Europe's leading business newspaper, if he gets his hands on The Wall Street Journal.

The pledge to bolster investment in the Journal's ailing European edition was one of several new attempts to curry favour with the Bancroft family, which controls the paper's parent company, Dow Jones, as they met to discuss the media mogul's $5bn (£2.5bn) takeover bid.

In a 1,200-word letter sent to family members over the weekend, Mr Murdoch also promised them a seat on the board of his company, News Corp, and an independent editorial board to help protect the Journal's heritage.

"News Corporation would leverage its significant global resources and platforms to drive international growth and expansion of the Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal brands," Mr Murdoch promised. "In Europe, News Corp has such a large presence that anything less than a leading market share for The Journal would be a disappointment."

The Wall Street Journal Europe sells less than 100,000 copies across the Continent and remains a niche product, despite a relaunch in a compact format in October 2005. The FT sells about 250,000 copies and has recently returned to profit for its owner, Pearson, despite continuing sales declines. Mr Murdoch has long eyed ownership of a prestigious financial newspaper, setting his sights first on the FT and more recently on The WSJ.

He finally approached Dow Jones in March, and news of his $60-a-share offer became public at the start of this month. Since then, the Bancroft family, which controls the company's shareholder vote through a special class of shares, has said that four-fifths of their members are opposed to a deal, although they have left the door open to shift their position.

Mr Murdoch's new letter said: "Let me assure you that, first and foremost, I am a newspaper man. I don't apologise for the fact that I have always had strong opinions and strong ideas about newspapers; but I have also always respected the independence and integrity of the news organisations with which I am associated."

In a co-ordinated move, the editor of The Times, Robert Thomson, has fired off a letter to a critic who claimed that Mr Murdoch's newspapers kowtow to communist China to bolster his other media interests in the country.

Last week, Jim Ottaway, a veteran newspaperman, warned that Mr Murdoch could not be trusted to uphold the Journal's tradition of editorial independence.

Mr Thomson rebuked him in a letter circulated to the Bancroft and Ottaway families yesterday, saying his criticisms were "clearly a challenge to the integrity of the journalists at The Times and to me personally". He wrote: "As a Beijing correspondent, I was in Tiananmen Square on the night of the massacre in 1989 and was thrown out of Tibet by heavy-handed Chinese officials, so the explicit allegation that we are pandering to the Communist Party came as rather a surprise."