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?"