[Note: the lead-in here contains reprinted coverage from one of our previous posts, so if it sounds familiar to some readers, that’s why]
The Wall Street Journal – also known as “Bloomberg for toddlers” – has a Donald Trump problem.
Specifically, they seem predisposed to defending a President whose every word and deed are the very definition of indefensible. And that’s odd, because this is also a President who wants to shut down the free press, something you’d think the Journal would be averse to considering they are part of that same free press.
WSJ’s bias was laid bare earlier this year when Politico got ahold of the full transcript of an interview WSJ editor-in-chief Gerard Baker conducted with Donald Trump.
That interview was the subject of what amounted to a puff piece the Journal ran on July 25.
One of the things Politico notes in their piece introducing the transcript is that Baker took the lead byline on the story about the interview, “an unusual step for the editor in chief of a paper with a large White House reporting staff.”
Of course it doesn’t seem so “unusual” when you consider that Baker has reportedly taken an aggressively defensive stance towards his own employees with regard to what many believe is hopelessly biased coverage of Donald Trump’s presidential trials and tribulations. Consider this excerpt from the Politico article, for instance:
Baker has defended his paper in the past from criticism, both internal and external, that the broadsheet has been too soft on the real estate mogul and reality-television star-turned-45th president of the United States.
In an internal town hall with employees in February, Baker said that anyone who claims the Journal has been soft on Trump is peddling “fake news,” and that employees who are unhappy with the Journal’s objective, as opposed to oppositional, approach to Trump should work somewhere else.
Nope — nothing suspicious about that.
Well as it turns out, Baker was pretty damn frustrated with his staff’s initial draft of a story about Trump’s batsh*t crazy Phoenix rally (the one from August), going so far as to demand the removal of the following largely innocuous phrases from the piece the Journal would eventually run:
The speech was an off-script return to campaign form.
Trump pivoted away from remarks a day earlier in which he had solemnly called for unity.
Those statements are true. That is: that’s just what happened. There’s no bias inherent in the phrasing, and even if you want to say there’s some veiled cynicism in there, it’s so tame as to be virtually meaningless. I mean would anyone (other than Trump) seriously read those two sentences and think “wow, really unfair”?
Well anyway, The New York Times got its hands on some of the e-mails Baker sent to his staff. To wit, from the Times‘ piece on this:
Gerard Baker, the editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, has faced unease and frustration in his newsroom over his stewardship of the newspaper’s coverage of President Trump, which some journalists there say has lacked toughness and verve.
Some staff members expressed similar concerns on Wednesday after Mr. Baker, in a series of blunt late-night emails, criticized his staff over their coverage of Mr. Trump’s Tuesday rally in Phoenix, describing their reporting as overly opinionated.
“Sorry. This is commentary dressed up as news reporting,” Mr. Baker wrote at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday morning to a group of Journal reporters and editors, in response to a draft of the rally article that was intended for the newspaper’s final edition.
He added in a follow-up, “Could we please just stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism?”
Now to be sure, there is nothing unbiased about our Trump coverage. But this is the Wall Street Journal we’re talking about here. Sure, they’ve got a conservative lean, but it looks like Baker is asking reporters to avoid describing the events as they happened.
I mean read the quotes from his e-mail again. What does this even mean?…
Could we please just stick to reporting what he said?
Why not just skip the reporting altogether then? That is, why not just publish a full transcript of the President’s remarks?
Ohhhhhhh, that’s right. Because if you publish the whole transcript, then Trump looks even crazier. Which is why Baker (essentially) threatened to discipline employees who leaked the transcript of his own interview with the President as reported in the linked piece above by Politico.
So basically, the only thing that’s acceptable to Baker when it comes to Trump coverage is transcripts of the President’s remarks edited for craziness and curated by Baker himself, with a byline by Baker.
Got it.
Well on Thursday, WSJ sent the following memo to employees regarding the “proper” way to use Twitter and other social media:
Wow, that’s pretty rich, no?
WSJ is worried that its employees will tweet something that’s “partisan” and undermine their reputation as an unbiased media outlet. Newsflash: Gerard Baker is “undermining your journalism and eroding the hard-won trust of your readers.”
Of course I don’t have to tell Baker’s staff that: they already know.
Also, we wonder if maybe WSJ thought to send this to Donald Trump. Because if anyone would benefit from “good rules of thumb” for Twitter use – rules of thumb like “if in doubt, don’t post it” – it’s the President.
Oh, and Trump would also benefit from the advice in that memo about being judicious with the time one spends on Twitter. As “Matt and Neal” correctly note, “some” folks “are frankly spending too much time tweeting during the day.” And when you fall into that trap, you’re not “serving the best interests” of the people who depend on you. Much like Trump.
So maybe WSJ could do America a big favor and cc: Donald Trump on this one.
