The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board responded this week to demands from its news department with a resounding: Nuts!
Good for them.
“We’ve been gratified this week by the outpouring of support from readers after some 280 of our Wall Street Journal colleagues signed (and someone leaked) a letter to our publisher criticizing the opinion pages,” the editorial board said Thursday evening of apparent hostilities between the newspaper’s opinion and news sections. “But the support has often been mixed with concern that perhaps the letter will cause us to change our principles and content. On that point, reassurance is in order.”
It adds, “In the spirit of collegiality, we won’t respond in kind to the letter signers. Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility in any case. The signers report to the News editors or other parts of the business, and the News and Opinion departments operate with separate staffs and editors. Both report to Publisher Almar Latour. This separation allows us to pursue stories and inform readers with independent judgment.”
The letter co-signed by Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones staffers complains that the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section’s supposed “lack of fact-checking and transparency, and its apparent disregard for evidence, undermine our readers’ trust and our ability to gain credibility with sources.”
The signatories highlight two specific examples of the opinion section’s alleged “disregard for evidence,” including a since-amended op-ed by Vice President Mike Pence, which initially misattributed the total numbers of personal protective equipment delivered through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to Project Air Bridge, and an opinion article, titled “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism,” which the signatories allege “selectively presented facts and drew an erroneous conclusion from the underlying data.” They also mention, almost as an afterthought, two op-eds they say contain “factual inaccuracies” about taxes. The points they dispute are extremely in the weeds and in no way merit a leaked letter to the publisher.
That the strongest examples of the opinion section’s supposed “disregard for evidence” are the Pence and racist police op-eds suggests ulterior motives on the part of the signers. The error in the Pence article was trivial. In fact, the since-corrected error was nowhere near as damaging to the Wall Street Journal’s reputation as some of the falsehoods that have appeared in its news pages. Also, it is hard to overlook that the signatories fail to point to an actual, cut-and-dried error (you know, something that is plain false) in the police racism article. They merely dispute the author’s presentation and dislike her conclusions.
Purity in journalism does not appear to be the point of this letter. The news staffers really seem like they want to rein in a section of their newspaper that is publishing opinions that they cannot handle on a personal level. It seems like no accident that the op-eds singled out for criticism by the staffers involve Pence (strangely problematic for some just on account of his Christianity) and open thinking regarding police brutality that does not just accept the received orthodoxy.
Going forward, the signatories ask, commentary pieces should feature a disclaimer that reads, “The Wall Street Journal’s Opinion pages are independent of its newsroom.” They also want opinion content to be removed from the website’s “Most Popular Articles” and “Recommended Videos” verticals, placed instead in a new “Most Popular in Opinion” column. They also ask that management refrain from reprimanding them “for writing about errors published in Opinion, whether we make those observations in our articles, on social media, or elsewhere.”
Concerns about corrections and alleged inaccuracies normally get hashed out in editorial meetings or even with human resources, not in a group letter in which one department demands the freedom to disparage another publicly. Lord knows the Wall Street Journal’s news side has published inaccurate items before, which, oddly enough, does not seem to have ever compelled the opinion section to leak a list of demands to the publisher. The real purpose of the letter, then, seems to be control. It is as if the Wall Street Journal staffers saw what happened with the fiasco involving New York Times reporters getting an opinion editor fired for publishing a mainstream opinion and figured they could do the same thing. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, however, seems to be made of much tougher stuff than its competitors.
“It was probably inevitable that the wave of progressive cancel culture would arrive at the Journal,” they wrote in response, “as it has at nearly every other cultural, business, academic and journalistic institution. But we are not the New York Times. Most Journal reporters attempt to cover the news fairly and down the middle, and our opinion pages offer an alternative to the uniform progressive views that dominate nearly all of today’s media.”
They conclude: “As long as our proprietors allow us the privilege to do so, the opinion pages will continue to publish contributors who speak their minds within the tradition of vigorous, reasoned discourse. And these columns will continue to promote the principles of free people and free markets, which are more important than ever in what is a culture of growing progressive conformity and intolerance.”
