News Corp. Ignored Wall Street Journal Circulation Inflation (Report)

4:09 PM PDT 10/19/2011 by THR staff

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According to a former employee, the media company was alerted of a plan to falsely boost WSJ Europe's circulation almost a year before publisher Les Hinton resigned.

The news isn't getting better for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

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The scandal-embroiled media company has now been accused of ignoring a plan to inflate circulation numbers at the Wall Street Journal Europe, reports Bloomberg.

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The company's former chief executive officer, Les Hinton, was notified that a Dow Jones business partner was being paid while also buying thousands of copies of the WSJ Europe in Nov. 2010, according to former circulation manager Gert Van Mol who sent Bloomberg News email correspondence as proof.

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Van Mol has also implicated Todd Larsen, president of the Dow Jones & Co. unit and Andrew Langhoff, WSJ Europe's former publisher (he resigned last week), who the employee said approved of the payments.

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"It was a non-ethical practice," Van Mol told Bloomberg. "I didn't want to be part of it so I contacted Hinton and Larsen."

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The news comes while News Corp. is in the middle of a phone-hacking scandal, which led to the shuttering of News of the World and has launched investigations into the media company's practices in both the U.K. and the U.S.

A Dow Jones spokeswoman decline to comment.