Wall Street Journal Caught Padding European Circulation By Nearly Half

Shrunken cliche Rupert Murdoch's empire of shit continues to stink, with his "rogue corporation" caught in yet another amoral activity -- this time, managers of hisWall Street Journalhave been caught inflating the paper's European circulation by 41%. So the big corporations paying top dollar to reach the coveted 1% who supposedly read theWSJwhile shopping in Paris or whatever were instead paying to have 31,000 daily copies bought for a nickel apiece and dumped. Worse, the paper printed a bunch of bogus endorsements and features on the shell companies involved in the criminal scheme.

 The Guardian , which started digging around and today claimed the head ofWSJEuropean publisher Andrew Langhoff, has loads of filthy details:  

While these payments were being made, a whistleblower from the Journal in Europe contacted the management of Dow Jones in New York and alerted them to the circulation scam and to the controversial agreement to publish articles promoting ELP. Emails seen by the Guardian indicate that the whistleblower's complaint was seen by New York executives, including Les Hinton – then the chief executive of Dow Jones and a close confidant of Rupert Murdoch. Hinton resigned in July in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World.

The emails show that the chief human resources officer for Dow Jones, Gregory Giangrande, organised a meeting in London on 14 December at which the whistleblower detailed his allegations to a Dow Jones lawyer from New York, Tom Maher, and Dow Jones' European human resources executive Carol Bosack.

After the meeting, Bosack emailed the whistleblower: "You are expected to keep details and your reaction or beliefs about the recent events confidential and not shared with anyone external or internal to the business. This matter is to be kept between us, Andrew [Langhoff], Internal Audit and Corporate Legal." No action was apparently taken at that time on the whistleblower's allegations. The whistleblower, who had worked for Dow Jones for 9 years, was made redundant in January.

Fire the whistleblower. Commonevil corporate behavior, right? #OccupyWallStreet needs to send a Division of a couple thousand protesters to occupy the WSJ/Fox/Murdoch complex and just shut that whole thing down, for the good of humanity.

And speaking of Murdoch's tarnished, used-up stars, forgotten head case Glenn Beck is launching aclothing company, we guess to make Ye Olde Revolutionary MuMuus in size XXXXXXL. [ Guardian ]