It is a bad news, good news story about The Wall Street Journal with the good news winning out. Nearly 300 of the Journal’s reporters signed a letter complaining about what they perceived to be a lack of fact checking in the Opinion section of the paper. It requested greater editorial separation between Opinion and News. It echoes what happened at the New York Times. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that the Journal’s management replied, in the most genteel fashion possible, that the signers could go pound sand. Here are excerpts from management’s reply:
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.In today’s media environment of decreasing staffs and closing papers, the disgruntled WSJ reporters are lucky to have jobs in journalism at all. Finding alternate professional employment will be no easy task. Most will have to knuckle under.
It was probably inevitable that the wave of progressive cancel culture would arrive at the Journal, 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.
The WSJ’s bias to the right has been no secret for 60 years at least. If some of the signers can’t stomach it now that they’ve experienced it firsthand, I’m sure there are many on the outside who’d like their jobs.
Mind you, I’d have preferred a mass layoff of the self-identified snowflakes, but I’ll happily settle for what the Journal did.
