Rumors this week of the possible sale of the Dow Jones company to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation have rattled the normally sedate editorial offices of the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Dow Jones.

Over the past few days, long time editors and reporters have allowed that they are worried by the prospect of Murdoch’s deft business acumen but often heavy handed editorial pressure being exerted on their newspaper.

But more worrisome are the reports that several top editors at the Journal knew about the proposed takeover for weeks, but did nothing to get the story into the newspaper until the story broke on CNBC.

This is not the first time that a news organization has been reticent to report on events that shine a light on itself. Newsrooms often debate whether the public will view any reporting on themselves as a self-serving act or an attempt to obscure what’s really going on.

In my experience, news organizations always find it difficult to report on themselves. Sometimes this is because as a culture, journalism prefers to look outside and to avoid the scrutiny it regularly imposes on others.

Senior managers of news organizations can often see the world from a more corporate perspective. This may be normal. Senior management has a legal and a fiduciary obligation to enhance the reputation of the company. But in a news operation, that attitude may also conflict with the assumptions of news managers and editors who see their journalistic obligations as trumping their corporate responsibility.

In the case of the Journal, there were also serious financial implications that caused the balance between the corporate and the editorial obligations to tilt away from the readers and toward the shareholders. The possibility of a buy-out by Murdoch had immediate financial implications and the value of Dow Jones shares rose by more than 50% as soon as CNBC reported the news. There is no indication that anyone inside Dow Jones or the Wall Street Journal benefited from this withholding of the news.

But the public may not have been as lucky.

Keeping this story out of the pages of the paper was a disservice to the readers of the Wall Street Journal. Not only do the readers deserve to know who owns the paper which they read and presumably trust, but the lack of candor about this raises troubling issues for the Journal and for journalism in general.

News organizations have an obligation to report on themselves whenever they become part of the story.

I have known some senior news managers whose usual good journalistic instincts seem to disappear at the prospect of being part of the news themselves.

One news manager at NPR once told me that any report on his organization would only be seen as self-serving. (The story concerned the firing of a longtime host). So he ordered his editors not to assign the story.

But the public saw it differently. The audience suspicions became heightened and they complained about the obvious absence of reporting on a matter of serious concern to them.

It also raised the question of censorship: who had ordered the story not to appear? Were there influences on the news organization? Why was this story suppressed? And most importantly, what other stories was the news organization not reporting?

In short, the absence of news raises questions about credibility, trust and accountability that the public is right to raise.

Some news organizations, caught in a possibly embarrassing situation, have tried to get around this dilemma of reporting on themselves by hiring a freelancer to do the story.

But that only further casts doubt on the ability of the journalists to do a professional job of reporting on their own news operation.

News organizations need to put aside their corporate tendencies and serve the public in the best way they can – by doing a full and frank job of reporting on themselves. If they fail, the public will let them know. If they try to avoid their obligations, the public will let them know about that as well.

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