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Murdoch Moves Cautiously On Fox Biz Channel

While Rupert Murdoch's $5 billion offer for Dow Jones is seen as audacious, News Corp.'s plans to launch Fox Business Channel are far more cautious. And that may not be such a surprise: The company took the cheap route when it set up Fox News in 1996, and the network now routinely beats far better-financed rival CNN. News Corp. plans to spend just $100 million in initial capital on the channel, set to air in October, according to insiders.

For a company the size of News Corp, such a sum is merely a rounding error, and the outlay suggests the company is wary about wading too deeply into the cable business news, an industry that has seen such high-profile flops as CNNfn and the Financial News Network. "$100 million is not much to launch a typical cable network," says Derek Baine, an analyst at Kagan Research. The company spent $400 million to launch Fox News, and it still took five years for it to break even.

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