Rupert Murdoch put 125 million dollars into Theranos, so the press itself was invested.
This investment was only public after investors sued: https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/rupert-murdoch-among...
Several people who have worked at Murdoch papers have told me that he isn’t above interceding in editorial matters, but in this case, despite his personal interest, he didn’t. A source who has known Murdoch for years explained it, “He’s a newsman — and a good story is a good story no matter what or who the story is about.”
[1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/john-carreyrous...
On the other hand, it could simply be shrewd businessmanship. It's not like it was the reporting that made Theranos unviable. The tech would never work, it's just a question of time before the walls come crashing down. It's probably illegal for Murdoch to sit on this information while trying to sell his investment on to someone else (at the very least, inviting some nasty lawsuits).
Murdoch might very well have thought "Oh well, the investment is gone, I'll be damned if it isn't my newspaper to be the one to break this juicy news".
Looks to me that Murdoch acted exactly according to his long term goals.
As Carreyrou reports, Theranos definitely tried to pull strings with Murdoch, and apparently got nowhere with it. The WSJ timed the story to hit right before Holmes was set to appear at a major WSJ business conference.
Once the fraud was exposed and the company began winding down, spending would quickly slow down and that might have put investors in a better position to recover something, versus loosing everything.
Murdoch is a very skilled propagandist. He knew that trying to suppress this story would have backfired on him. Especially because the machines don’t work and because Walgreens would have soon learned the truth.
Nothing hurts a propagandist more than being really caught in an obvious lie. To protect his ability to slant the WSJ, Murdoch couldn’t have gotten caught suppressing this story. And he would have gotten caught if he tried.
Those guys were journos, not proprietors, but I'm pretty sure that if you could prove that a proprietor put heavy manners on the journos to do that, they would certainly be up for a criminal conspiracy charge, at least in Britain. Of course, that is typically a pretty big 'if'.
I seriously doubt he allowed Carreyrou to continue for the sake of good journalism.
By letting reporters in his hire just do their jobs, Murdoch probably gets privileged access to a great deal of secrets and speculations. Carreyrou's reporting could very well have persuaded Murdoch not to make further investments in Theranos, thereby saving him billions.
As the rationalists say, if you can explain anything, you can explain nothing.
I'm not saying he did it for good reasons. I'm saying it's plain that nobody here knows why he did it, and lack of knowledge is lack of knowledge, not license to just fill in the blanks with whatever you like. (Our brains are very good at that, and the careful person must be in a constant fight against that tendency.)
But jerf, I already know he's a bad person.
You are justified in using past history to do a certain amount of broad concluding (nothing as specific as the 5+ hypotheses given), yes, but bear in mind you are not justified in "A: Murdoch is bad B: Here's a thing he did C: I bet he did B for a bad reason because A therefore D: Murdoch is even worse than I thought". You are "spending" confidence when you do this, not increasing it. (Another very common cognitive error. Not sure I've seen this on any fallacy lists. Probably needs to be, and given a name.)