civil war at the WSJ
New York Observer - July 17, 2006
Wall Street Rift: Journal Reporters Reject Gigot Line
Newsroom Is Incensed After Editorial Editor Cheers Paper’s Restraint;
‘Captain Bullshit!’; Rabid Reporters Rage at Breach of Editorial Wall
Gabriel Sherman
The Wall Street Journal news staff can live with occasional
opposition from the paper’s editorial page. What it can’t live with
is the editorial page’s support.
“People feel like we’re walking around with knives in our backs,” one
news staffer said. “We rely on our editors to stick up for us.
There’s really a feeling we’ve been left to twist in the wind.”
The initial wound came June 30, when The Journal’s editorial page
praised reporter Glenn Simpson’s handling of the news of the Bush
administration’s secret program of tracking international bank
transfers. The editorial described Mr. Simpson, unlike the perfidious
reporters of The New York Times, as having received the story from
the Treasury Department, which was willing to “offer him the same
declassified information” — because, the editorial conjectured, the
administration “felt Mr. Simpson would write a straighter story than
the Times.”
Journal sources said that editorial-page editor Paul Gigot produced
that characterization of the paper’s news operation without speaking
to Mr. Simpson, Washington bureau chief Gerald Seib or managing
editor Paul Steiger. Instead, Mr. Gigot consulted with a Treasury
spokesperson. Mr. Steiger was not even aware the editorial was
running, according to a Journal source, till he saw a front-page
blurb promoting the piece late in the day on June 29.
A Journal spokesperson said the information in the editorial was
sourced to the Treasury Department, not the newsroom. “[T]he
editorial based its assertion that the Department of the Treasury
contacted Glenn on information attributed to a Treasury spokesman,”
the spokesperson said.
The wall between news and opinion has traditionally been a tall and
sturdy one at The Journal — with missiles lobbed over it. The
editorial side has never been afraid to pick its own facts to support
its arguments, even if those facts conflict with the ones reported in
the paper’s news columns. Nor has it been reluctant to attack Journal
reporters for writing stories that disagreed with its editorial
premises, as when it downplayed the Enron scandal while Journal
reporters were documenting the corrupt energy giant’s downfall.
“They’re wrong all the time. They lack credibility to the point that
the emperor has no clothes,” said one staffer whose reporting has
been at odds with an editorial crusade.
But the current disputed facts concern The Journal’s own news-
reporting practices. And the news staff has viewed the editorial as
an outrageous presumption—made worse by Mr. Steiger’s lack of a
public response.
“To have Paul Gigot as our captain is bullshit,” one staffer said.
“It’s not for real.”
“I’ve been here 16 years, and in my 16 years, this is something
different,” political reporter Jackie Calmes said.
At a July 5 meeting in the Washington bureau, Ms. Calmes urged her
fellow staffers to take action in response to the editorial.
Currently, the staff is drafting a letter of protest to Mr. Steiger.
“It could be one sentence: ‘We object,’” Ms. Calmes said. “It doesn’t
have to go into chapter and verse. But I was just throwing it out
there. I’m not instigating it. I’m not going to take the lead.”
Neither is Mr. Steiger. A Dow Jones spokesperson said that the paper
doesn’t comment on its reporting and editing decisions. In an e-mail,
Mr. Steiger noted that the editorial had explicitly not speculated
about whether or not the news operation would have held a story if
the administration had asked it to. “That said, the edit page is free
to comment on anything it wants to comment on,” Mr. Steiger wrote.
“The news department is free to write about anything it considers
newsworthy, which on rare occasion has included the activities of The
Journal’s edit page. The edit pages expresses opinions. The news
pages do not.”
Mr. Gigot, meanwhile, has continued pushing his message. On July 9,
on Fox News’ Journal Editorial Report, Mr. Gigot repeated the
characterization: “[T]he news side was fed it …. The news side of
The Journal was given the story because … [the administration]
wanted to affect the way that this story was portrayed.”
According to Journal staffers with knowledge of the situation, Mr.
Simpson, who is based in Brussels, had been working for months on a
story about government monitoring of the international banking system
operated by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial
Telecommunication, or SWIFT. On June 22, Mr. Simpson was in
Washington when a Treasury source tipped him that The Times would be
publishing a piece on the subject, according to Journal sources. Mr.
Simpson delayed a flight back to Belgium and raced to put out a piece
on deadline, posting one online minutes after the Times story went
out. The Journal, The Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington
Post all had SWIFT stories in the next day’s papers.
Mr. Gigot forwarded requests for comment to a spokesperson, who said
that The Journal doesn’t comment on editorials.
Mr. Simpson declined to comment on the editorial. “All I’ll say is,
people should make up their minds if I’m anyone’s lackey, or whether
the piece should have run or not, based on what I’ve written during
my last 11 years at The Wall Street Journal,” he said.
“Glenn Simpson brought great insight and context to our account of
the Swift program,” Mr. Steiger wrote. “Mr. Simpson has done this a
number of times in recent years. He has broken a number of stories on
international terrorism finance and tax legerdemain that have won
praise from readers and at times elicited objections from
governments, companies and libel plaintiffs in Washington and around
the world.”
But the news staff isn’t looking for Mr. Steiger’s endorsement — it’s
looking for him to reject the editorial page’s endorsement.
“What I said is, ‘How could any reader take away anything but the
fact that [the editorial page] had talked to people on the news
side?’” Ms. Calmes said. “I’m unhappy. I know a lot of other people
are unhappy. The question is: What do we do about it?”