Short answer: The Wall Street Journal is owned by Dow Jones & Company, which is a subsidiary of News Corp — the Murdoch family's media empire, run by Lachlan Murdoch since the family's 2025 succession settlement. Rupert Murdoch bought Dow Jones from the Bancroft family in 2007 for about $5 billion. Is the paper conservative? The opinion page, fiercely so. The newsroom, far less than you'd assume — and in July 2025 that exact gap got Murdoch sued for $10 billion by the very president his editorial page usually cheers for. * The single most useful thing to understand about the WSJ is that it is essentially two newspapers stapled together. The editorial (opinion) page is one of the most influential conservative, free-market, pro-business platforms in American media, and has been for decades — long before Murdoch showed up. The news pages, which keep winning Pulitzers, operate under a separate chain of command behind a "church and state" wall. When the Bancrofts sold to News Corp in 2007, they extracted a written promise and set up a special editorial-independence committee precisely to keep the newsroom insulated from its new owner. Whether that wall fully holds is the argument that never ends — but it is a real, structural thing, not a slogan. * Here is the episode that proves the newsroom is not just Fox News in a nicer suit. On July 17, 2025, the Journal's reporters published a story alleging that a letter bearing Trump's signature — its typewritten text framed by the hand-drawn outline of a naked woman — sat in an album assembled for Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday. Trump called it "a fake thing," and the next day sued for no less than $10 billion, naming Rupert Murdoch, News Corp, its CEO Robert Thomson, publisher Dow Jones and the two reporters (CNBC, Washington Post, July 18, 2025). A conservative-owned paper published something so damaging to a Republican president that he tried to bankrupt it. A Florida federal judge dismissed the suit in April 2026, with leave to refile (CNBC, April 2026). * The real power sits in the ownership structure, not the masthead. News Corp runs on a dual-class share setup and a family trust that holds a dominant block of voting stock, so public shareholders own most of the equity while the Murdochs control the votes. That is the same machine that also owns Fox News, the New York Post, The Times and The Sun of London. One family, one voting trust, a stable of outlets that shout in very different registers — and the WSJ is the grown-up, expensive, business-desk voice in that family. * So "is the WSJ conservative" is a question that needs splitting in two. The opinion section: yes, openly and proudly. The news reporting: mainstream, rigorous, and every so often the very thing that enrages the right. The honest way to read the paper is to always know which section you are standing in — a signed piece on the editorial page is advocacy, a bylined news investigation is reporting, and the two halves frequently contradict each other inside the same issue. * On our least-biased-news ranking we grade outlets by who owns them and how openly they admit it, and the Journal scores a strange double. It is opaque about nothing — everyone knows Murdoch owns it — yet split right down the middle in what it actually produces. Read the news pages for facts, read the editorials as the argument they are, and remember that the family behind the calm, pin-striped business paper also owns the loudest cable channel in America.