Meet the smallest of Rupert Murdoch's many publications, the Far Eastern Economic Review. With a miniscule circulation estimated at less than 20,000 copies per issue and, by far, the smallest revenue of any News Corp.-owned publication, it's not exactly the Wall Street Journal.

But FEER editor Hugo Restall still refused to publish a review he commissioned of a Murdoch biography. In January, Restall commissioned a review of Bruce Dover's Rupert's Adventures in China: How Murdoch Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife. The reviewer was going to be the Jakarta-based journalist Eric Ellis, whose regular gig is as Fortune's Southeast Asia correspondent.

Then Restall actually began to think... Should a publication owned by News Corp. review a book that's incredibly critical of Murdoch and Wendi Deng? He took the prudent view that he shouldn't. In an e-mail to Ellis, Restall wrote:

"I'm afraid I am getting cold feet on this one - I've just gotten a copy of the book, and it looks more like the work of a disgruntled ex-employee, rather than an analysis of the business. [...] Of course, we will pay you the full fee. Sorry about this, I should have looked at the book first."

Both Ellis and an unnamed FEER employee confirmed the validity of the e-mail. The spiked review has subsequently been republished in other publications, including Danwei and the Asia Sentinel. Ironically enough, this wasn't Ellis' first run-in with having his story cancelled by a Murdoch fearing editor — Australian mag Good Weekend spiked his profile of Wendi Deng last year.

Now, our questions:

1) What was the editor of a Dow Jones/News Corp.-owned title thinking when he commissioned a review of a book that both The Economist and the Financial Times said was critical of Murdoch?

2) What was that editor thinking when he offered the piece to a journalist who a cursory Google search shows has been critical of Murdoch in the past? Rupert's temper is well attested to — we're assuming this editor wanted to keep his job... So why, if he was in charge of the smallest property in the News Corp. empire, would he even think of putting his job in danger like that? And then, even worse, punking out of it?

There are some things we'll never understand.