Yahoo Finance US culture wars escalate as Wall Street Journal staff attack their own opinion pages
Hundreds of journalists at the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal have mounted an attack on their own newspaper’s opinion pages, accusing editors and contributors of undermining readers’ trust with misinformation and basic errors on topics including coronavirus and racism.
In what will be viewed as the latest escalation of the so-called culture wars engulfing American institutions, about 300 reporters, editors, video journalists and newsroom technical staff have signed a letter to managers at the Journal's parent company Dow Jones to demand change.
In a copy of the letter seen by The Telegraph, they accuse the Journal’s opinion pages of a “lack of fact-checking and transparency” and a “disregard for evidence”.
The letter, due to be sent to Dow Jones chief executive Almar Latour on Tuesday, 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.”
The signatories singled out a recent article by US Vice-President Mike Pence, headlined “There isn’t a coronavirus ‘second wave’", which they said was contradicted by prior reporting in the Journal’s own news pages. The article included figures that would have been exposed as flawed by “no more than a Google search”, the letter to Mr Latour said.
A widely read article headlined “The myth of systemic police racism” published in early June, a week after George Floyd was killed and as Black Lives Matter protests gathered momentum, “propelled misinformation”, the letter added.
The Journal'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”, Mr Latour was told.
The Harvard researcher behind some of the data the article was based on complained in his own opinion article three weeks later that his work was “widely misrepresented and misused” and “wrongly cited as evidence that there is no racism in policing”.
The complaints also cover articles about tax, the Obamacare healthcare funding scheme and allegations that a white nationalist had written for the opinion pages. A Journal reporter in the Middle East was endangered by a false claim in a tweet by an opinion contributor that she had friends in the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organisation, the letter further alleged.
Journal staff have intensified criticism of their own opinion pages as the media grapples with structural changes driven by the internet that blur in readers’ eyes the traditionally clear divide between news and opinion in American newspapers. Against a politically polarised backdrop, leading US publications are increasingly faced with toxic internal debates that spill over onto social media.
Last week Bari Weiss, an editor on the opinion pages of the New York Times, publicly resigned claiming she had been “the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views”. Ms Weiss had been poached from the Journal in 2017 amid concerns in the senior ranks of the New York Times that it had failed to understand and reflect the spectrum of American opinion prior to the election of Donald Trump.
The Journal’s opinion section meanwhile has traditionally reflected the views of the US conservative establishment. Tensions between its editors and the larger, more liberal news staff are a fixture of life at the newspaper and existed before its acquisition by Mr Murdoch in 2007, but have been raised since and especially in the current US political climate.
The latest letter of complaint comes weeks after staff complained about a column about race carried in the news pages and headlined “The often distorted reality of hate crime in America”. The writer Gerard Baker, the Journal’s former British editor-in-chief, was subsequently moved to the opinion pages, although the newspaper said the switch had been planned before the controversy.
In their letter to Mr Latour, Journal staff proposed a series of changes they said would make the distinction between news and opinion clearer, including prominent labelling and separate “most popular” lists online.
The signatories added: “We also propose that WSJ journalists should not be reprimanded for writing about errors published in opinion, whether we make those observations in our articles, on social media or elsewhere.”
Almar Latour, chief executive of Wall Street Journal, said it remains "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 US and beyond. Our readership today is bigger than ever and our opinion and news teams are crucial to that success," he added.
