A retired Dow Jones executive from upstate New York taking on international media mogul Rupert Murdoch might seem like someone is punching above his weight.

That hasn’t stopped James H. Ottaway Jr., former Dow Jones exec and board member, who controls 6.2 percent of Dow Jones’s voting stock, from publicly denouncing Murdoch’s plan to buy the company for $5 billion.

Ottaway has not been shy about airing his concerns about complete opposition to Murdoch’s plans for Dow Jones, most notably in several letter-writing rounds published in The Wall Street Journal. Curious about why he felt he was the one to pick the public fight, I hopped on a bus and went to see him in New Paltz, New York, where he lives.

Our story about the encounter is on the wire. Here are some other thoughts he shared on the fight:

Q: Why you?
A: I’m no longer an insider… The Bancroft family is so divided… It’s almost impossible to expect them to have one statement they all agree on. Dow Jones directors are insiders, so they are by definition not supposed to talk. The management who know about the offer and terms and discussions are insiders; they’re not supposed to talk about it. It suddenly dawned on me after a week went by that I was the only person who could speak out in public.

Q: Why do you care?
A: I know and care about this company deeply, and thought: Someone has to speak about the larger issues involved.

Q: What about investors who snapped up the stock on news of a bid?
A: Those guys are snakes. Their job is to make money any way they can do it. They don’t care about Dow Jones. Their job and interest is to make a fast buck.

Q: What’s wrong with that? No, seriously.
A: They were willing buyers. Speculators, short-term traders, the arbitrageurs, the hedge fund investors who bought Dow Jones stock after May 1 in the hope of making a fast profit… bought Dow Jones in full awareness that it had two [classes of] stock — that the Bancroft family has always turned down offers to buy the company, that they have the power to stop a sale if they want to. So that’s got to be in their risk formula — that these crazy people could say no! They nevertheless put millions of dollars down on the table.

(Ottaway photo courtesy of International Center for Transitional Justice)