Five people just signed on for what may be the most thankless task in journalism: making sure that Rupert Murdoch plays fair with his new acquisition, The Wall Street Journal.

Early yesterday, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation and Dow Jones & Company, The Journal’s publisher, named the members of a committee that is intended to prevent the News Corporation from dictating what goes into The Journal, after News Corporation buys Dow Jones.

They are Louis D. Boccardi, former executive editor, and then a president and chief executive, of The Associated Press; Thomas Bray, a columnist and former editorial page editor of The Detroit News; Jennifer Dunn, a former Republican congresswoman from Washington State; Jack Fuller, former president of Tribune Publishing and editorial page editor of The Chicago Tribune; and Nicholas Negroponte, former chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and a founder of Wired magazine.

“I think that at least on paper, this is a good step toward building a firewall around the content of The Journal,” said Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. “I’d have liked to see more experience on the news side, in addition to the editorial side, but we’ll just have to wait and see what its impact will be.”

People briefed on the process said that top Journal editors and members of the Bancroft family, who own a controlling stake in Dow Jones, played a significant role in making the choices.

They said that four of the five committee members were first proposed by Dow Jones, while Mr. Negroponte was proposed by the News Corporation.

The News Corporation has agreed to retain the managing editor and editorial page editors of The Journal, and the managing editor of Dow Jones Newswires, and to remove or replace any of them only with the consent of the new committee. The deal also gives the committee the authority to mediate disputes and go to court to enforce the agreement.

If they are called on to resolve any disputes, the actions and motives of the committee members are sure to be scrutinized as carefully as those of any cabinet nominee.

Mr. Boccardi is the only member with a background primarily in news, rather than opinion. Mr. Bray, a former contributor to The Journal online, is very much in tune with the free-market philosophy of The Journal’s editorial page.

Ms. Dunn was considered a moderately conservative member of the Republican caucus. Mr. Fuller won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his editorials on constitutional issues, which included some liberal positions. Mr. Negroponte has gained attention recently for promoting a low-cost computer for the developing world.

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