Wall Street Journal staff attack ‘misinformation’ and ‘racism’ in newspaper’s opinion section
Almost 300 journalists at the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal (WSJ) have sent a letter to the newspaper’s publisher lambasting “misinformation” regarding coronavirus and racism in its opinion section.
The letter, signed by hundreds of reporters, editors and video journalists, accused WSJ’s opinion pages of a “lack of fact-checking and transparency” and a “disregard for evidence” and demanded the paper’s parent company Dow Jones make changes.
The letter, sent to Dow Jones chief executive Almar Latour yesterday, said: “Many readers already cannot tell the difference between reporting and opinion. And from those who know of the divide, reporters nonetheless face questions about the Journal’s accuracy and fairness because of errors published in opinion.”
Journalists earmarked a widely-read article headlined “The myth of systemic police racism” published a week after the death of George Floyd by a US policeman, arguing that the article “propelled misinformation”.
The Harvard researcher whose data was used in the article complained in an opinion column in WSJ three weeks later that his work was “widely misrepresented and misused” by the paper and “wrongly cited as evidence that there is no racism in policing”.
The letter added that WSJ’s “employees of colour spoke out about the pain this opinion piece caused them” after it “selectively presented facts and drew erroneous conclusions from the underlying data”.
WSJ staff also highlighted a recent article by US vice-president Mike Pence, headlined “There isn’t a coronavirus ‘second wave’”, which journalists said contradicted evidence-based reporting in WSJ’s own news pages.
The article cited figures that would have been undermined by “no more than a Google search”, the letter to Latour said. It added that figures in Pence’s essay were published “without checking government figures” and noted that the piece was later corrected.
Journalists at the paper also called for a greater distinction between WSJ’s opinion page operations and its news output. The letter proposed more prominently labeling opinion columns on the website and the paper’s mobile apps, to include lines such as “The Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages are independent of its newsroom”.
It comes as the so-called culture war continues to escalate in US newsrooms as the country feels the pressure of both the upcoming presidential election and as the full effect of the coronavirus pandemic.
Last week New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss publicly resigned, claiming she had been “the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views”.
Weiss had been snapped up from WSJ in 2017 following concerns that the New York Times did not fully represent the full US political spectrum after it failed to anticipate the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016.
She claimed the New York Times thrived on an “illiberal environment,” weeks after declaring there was a “civil war” inside the paper.
In a widely-circulated public resignation letter, Weiss said: “A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”