These are the very types of issues that, with the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, have been thrust to the fore at all of America’s major media organizations. Indeed, each of the Journal’s main counterparts in the American newspaper industry—the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times—has recently been experiencing its own reckoning along these lines. The Journal, as an institution, has historically been more buttoned-up and conservative (both in the literal sense and in terms of its red-blooded editorial board), which makes the recent letter-writing campaigns stand out all the more.
“It’s nothing like the insurrection at the Times, but by WSJ standards, this is pretty interesting,” said Grueskin. Likewise, a journalist who still works there told me, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” I asked this person if it feels like a sea change. “No question.”
As with other newsrooms, the discussion and organizing around these issues has been happening on Slack, the workplace messaging platform about which Digiday last week declared, “Slack is fueling media’s bottom-up revolution.” Journal staffers recently created a private, noncompany Slack channel that people have been invited to join via their personal email addresses. “There’s some prominent reporters in there,” I was told.
The Opinion conundrum is arguably the hottest and most sensitive topic that newsroom folks have confronted so far, partly because of the section’s influence in right-wing media and within the Trump administration, but also because this particular tension had long been coming to a head. As I reported in late 2017, there was immense consternation over the Opinion section’s hostile take on Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, which undermined the Journal’s own news articles. “People are always mad about our editorials undermining our reporting,” a Journal reporter told me at the time, “but it is definitely more infuriating on this topic than anything else since we’ve made good progress on Russia lately. It’s frustrating to have to contend with this, even if smart people recognize the separation between the editorial side and news.”
In a similar vein, journalists in the newsroom were pulling their hair out over Mike Pence’s June 16 op-ed, “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave,’” which reality has since contradicted. “The Washington bureau was enraged,” said someone familiar with the internal reaction. Days later, reporter Rebecca Ballhaus published a news article debunking some of Pence’s claims. The Pence op-ed also featured prominently in Tuesday’s letter to Latour, the publisher. The letter noted that Pence’s op-ed was published “without checking government figures” and that it was later corrected.
The Journal declined to comment beyond the statement Latour issued earlier this week: “We are proud that we separate news and opinion at the Wall Street Journal and remain deeply committed to fact-based and clearly labeled reporting and opinion writing. We cherish the unique contributions of our Pulitzer Prize–winning Opinion section to the Journal and to societal debate in the U.S. and beyond.”
Various Journal staffers I spoke with all made a point of noting that the latest letter to management is different than what’s been going on at the New York Times, where a series of convulsions involving its Opinion pages—culminating in a problematic Tom Cotton op-ed that advocated for sending in federal troops to contain protests—recently led to the ouster of editorial page editor James Bennet. “My takeaway,” one of them said, “is that I’m really happy and impressed our staff has remained so sane compared to the rest of media right now. I was worried a letter on the Opinion stuff would turn into something like the New York Times, where anyone with a conservative thought is awful and should be silenced. But the letter made clear how we respect diversity of views and don’t want to tell Opinion how to run their shop.”
Another journalist at the paper said, “It definitely feels like there’s sort of a moment right now where management is a little more open to hearing concerns. There’s more of a window to make asks for things.” And as a third pointed out, “I suspect this is not the end.”
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