K ILL LIST
Reporting on policy as strategy During protests in the summer of 2020, the phrase “Defund the Police” reverberated across the United States. Political journalists filled their notebooks with quotes from campaign strategists about how the message would play in the upcoming presidential election. (“Defunding police will lead to Republican victory this year,” according to a piece in The Hill.) Few interviewed police abolitionists about their advocacy or history.
CJR
that boiled down the day’s events to a list of blurbs on the left side of the front page: “What’s News.” (The news summary has remained ever since and is one of the most widely read parts of the paper.) All the while, the Journal maintained a dedication to business reporting and free-market-loving opinion pieces. As an ad campaign put it: “Everywhere, Men Who Get Ahead in Business Read the Wall Street Journal.” Under Kilgore’s leadership, the Journal increased its circulation from thirty thousand to more than a million. Many of his ideas remained central through the era of Paul Steiger, who ran the newsroom from 1991 to 2007. (Kyle Pope, now editor and publisher of CJR, worked under Steiger for a decade; Matt Murray previously served on CJR’s Board of Overseers.) During that time, the Journal was marketed as the “daily diary of the American dream,” a second read to complement metropolitan papers, with behind-the-curtain looks at boardroom drama, muckraking investigations into corporate crime, and all the financial news readers could handle. The Journal expanded to four sections, launched a Saturday edition, and won sixteen Pulitzer Prizes. But by the end of Steiger’s tenure, the internet had come to the fore; the newspaper industry faced steep circulation declines and plummeting ad revenue. The Bancroft family, which had inherited Dow Jones & Company from Barron, saw that the Journal was no exception. “Most people were just taking the dividend and not really engaging with the business,” Natalie Bancroft, an early advocate of selling the paper, now a member of the News Corp Board of Directors, told me. “At the end of the day, our number one responsibility was to keep the company going and not to have to lay off thousands of people.” When Murdoch offered himself as a buyer, the Bancrofts were interested, but they knew of his political predilections and were wary that he might infringe upon the paper’s editorial independence. The division between the newsroom and the opinion section had always felt sacrosanct: In the office at the World Financial Center, reporters were relegated to shabby quarters; the opinion staff occupied the rarefied realm of the executive suites. On the page, editorials were consistently libertarian-conservative; reporting aimed to hold the business world accountable. Before the Bancrofts were willing to hand Murdoch control, the family sought to safeguard the integrity of the Journal’s newsgathering through the creation of an independent committee that would meet at least four times a year, operate in strict confidence, stay in touch with the staff, and continue in perpetuity. Most important: committee members would be empowered to go public with concerns on the pages of the Journal at any time. Murdoch agreed. “What is on the Opinion pages will never be allowed to flow into the news pages,” he promised Steiger in an email. “The two must be kept distinct and while I sometimes find myself nodding in agreement with the comment and commentators, even I occasionally find the views a little too far to the right.” In a note to staff the day the Murdoch sale was approved, Marcus Brauchli, who had recently been appointed Steiger’s successor, tried to reassure a jittery newsroom: “A change of ownership won’t change our understanding of what’s important; our ability to
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