Wall Street Journal To Malcontents: Get Lost.
It’s no secret that I‘ve come to distrust The New York Times. I hope you have too.
In recent years that iconic newspaper has stopped masquerading as an impartial “newspaper of record” and revealed itself to be an instrument of left-wing ideologues. Opinion oozes from almost every story.
When 1,000 Times employees wrote a letter protesting the editorial department’s decision to print a piece by a conservative U.S. Senator last month the publisher crumbled, and the editor of the section was forced to resign.
I nearly cancelled my digital subscription over that act of profound cowardice, but I never want to be part of the cancel culture. Besides, it’s still important to know what the Times is saying. And, to be fair, there are a few journalists in the Times newsroom who continue to do good, unbiased, important work. Far fewer than there were, say, 20 years ago, unfortunately.
The national newspaper I trust most is The Wall Street Journal. While its opinion pages skew right, the paper’s news coverage is relentlessly fair.
Even so, 280 WSJ employees recently wrote a letter to the brass of their paper - and leaked it to the public - objecting to the Journal’s conservative editorial positions.
Unlike the quivering pantywaists running The New York Times, the WSJ editors didn’t collapse.
On Thursday, the editorial board published a firm, “Note to Readers” with a sub-headline that read, “These Pages Won’t Wilt Under Cancel-Culture Pressure.”
In it, the editors pointed out that they are separate from the news-gathering operation and wouldn’t engage personally with the malcontents at the Journal:
In the spirit of collegiality, we won’t respond in kind to the letter signers. Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility in any case. The signers report to the News editors or other parts of the business, and the News and Opinion departments operate with separate staffs and editors. Both report to Publisher Almar Latour. This separation allows us to pursue stories and inform readers with independent judgment.
It was probably inevitable that the wave of progressive cancel culture would arrive at the Journal, as it has at nearly every other cultural, business, academic and journalistic institution. But we are not the New York Times. Most Journal reporters attempt to cover the news fairly and down the middle, and our opinion pages offer an alternative to the uniform progressive views that dominate nearly all of today’s media.
As long as our proprietors allow us the privilege to do so, the opinion pages will continue to publish contributors who speak their minds within the tradition of vigorous, reasoned discourse. And these columns will continue to promote the principles of free people and free markets, which are more important than ever in what is a culture of growing progressive conformity and intolerance.
“We are not The New York Times.”
Ouch. That had to hurt.
