Top Rupert Murdoch aide Andrew Langhoff quits over circulation scam in WSJ

LONDON: Rupert Murdoch's media empire, recently hit by UK's phone hacking scandal, suffered another setback after one of its senior-most European executives resigned in the wake of an alleged circulation scam at the Wall Street Journal.

Nick Davies of The Guardian, whose series of reports blew the lid off phone-hacking and other unethical news-gathering practices at News of the World, today reported the circulation scam at WSJ, a flagship newspaper of Murdoch's News Corporation.

c, the European managing director of WSJ's parent company, Dow Jones and Co in in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, resigned on Tuesday. Dow Jones and Co was bought by News Corporation in 2007.

Dow Jones said in a statement that Langhoff stepped down "because of a perceived breach of editorial integrity".

The Guardian, however, reported that it found evidence that the WSJ had been channelling money through European companies in order to secretly buy thousands of copies of its own paper at a knock-down rate, misleading readers and advertisers about the WSJ's true circulation.

Terming the scheme 'bizarre', the report said that the scheme included a formal, written contract in which the WSJ persuaded one company to co-operate by agreeing to publish articles that promoted its activities, a move which led some staff to accuse the paper's management of violating journalistic ethics and jeopardising its treasured reputation for editorial quality.