Few areas of the public or private lives of people in the news have traditionally been off limits for Rupert Murdoch's aggressive and rambunctious newspapers around the world.

But some of the Australian-born media baron's rivals seem to be getting squeamish about writing about Murdoch and his family. The Sydney Morning Herald, owned by Fairfax Media, long the most important competitor of Murdoch's News Ltd in Australia, had commissioned a prize-winning journalist to write a lengthy story about Wendi Deng, Murdoch's third wife (and former employee of Star TV), who was born and raised in China.