Reporting on policy as strategy

KILL LIST

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. 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

compellingly explain the world, politics, and business; or our commitment to reporting that is accurate, honest and free of slant,” Brauchli wrote. But within four months, he resigned and went to the Washington Post. He was replaced by Robert Thomson—a jovial, stooped Australian who had served as US editor of the Financial Times before moving to News Corp, where he rose to become the editor of Murdoch’s Times of London. Word leaked that the Bancrofts’ committee had not been properly consulted ahead of Brauchli’s departure. “Under the agreement, we have to be brought in to that process, and we weren’t,” Thomas Bray, a former Journal staffer who serves as the committee’s chair, recalled. The events stirred members to act. “We got some amendments to the agreement that make it crystal clear that they’ve got to consult with us if they plan to change the role of the editor in chief or the editorial page editor,” Bray said. “And we have to agree to that.” It was a small victory—and only the first of many battles to be fought as the newsroom became fully absorbed into the political life of the Murdoch empire.

Under Murdoch and Thomson, the Journal was reengineered. Reporters were told that lengthy analyses and off-the-news features bred “complacency and indulgence,” Sarah Ellison, a former Journal employee, writes in War at the Wall Street Journal (2010), an exhaustive chronicle of the News Corp takeover. Stories in a newspaper were not like those in magazines or books—they had to be “more direct and less complex,” Murdoch advised the staff. “This is true for the New York Times and I’m sure that most of you can see the need for some streamlining at home right here.” He said, too: “We must entice, engage, and excite readers or else we will lose them.” Instead of being a “second read,” the Journal of Murdoch would aim to lead the pack. “The New York Times sets the national agenda and we should,” he declared. He called a meeting to “figure out how to cripple, really cripple the New York Times.”

Thomson staffed up the Washington bureau—it is now more than twice the size it was in the Bancroft days—and began giving politics stories more prominent placement. “There was a desire to make it broader, more comprehensive, to step it up in terms of volume and in terms of ambition,” Gerald Seib—a longtime Washington bureau chief, currently the executive Washington editor—recalled. “It was clearly in service of the idea that the Journal wanted to be a national newspaper, with not just a broader reach geographically, but a broader report every day that essentially put us on a par with the Times and the Post.”

The Journal also widened its coverage of national and foreign affairs, making the front page newsier and more concise. In December 2009, David Carr, who wrote the media column for the Times, took stock of the paper two years after Murdoch’s arrival—when, he wrote, “a chorus of journalism church ladies (I was among them) warned that one of the crown jewels of American journalism now resided in the hands of a roughneck, and predicted that he would use it to his own ends.” Carr praised the Journal for remaining “one of the nation’s premier newspapers” but observed “growing indications” that Murdoch didn’t just want to cover politics; he seemed to want to use the paper to “play them as well.” Carr described reflexively pro-business, anti-government coverage shaped by heavy intervention from the Journal’s leaders; conflict between the Washington bureau and the New York headquarters; and ideology “baked into the coverage through headlines, assignments and editing in a way that had never occurred in the past.”

By this time, a key influence in the paper’s political voice was Gerard Baker, who had been hired that year to serve as Thomson’s number two. An Oxford-educated Brit who had worked at the Financial Times and the Times of London, Baker was known for writing arch neoconservative commentary; he had recently appeared on Fox News narrating a parody montage called “Obama (the Messiah).” In 2012, Thomson was elevated to become the chief executive of News Corp, and Murdoch baptized Baker as the new editor of the Journal, dumping a bottle of champagne on his head and blessing him with the sign of the cross. The bright line between the news and opinion departments suddenly

“We cover race insofar as it’s not a comparison and it won’t offend our white readers.”

seemed dimmer than ever. As Neil King Jr., a twenty-one-year veteran of the Journal who served as global economics editor and deputy Washington bureau chief, told me, “It was pretty clear that Baker had a kind of visceral loathing for a lot of the political reporters at the paper.” (Baker declined to comment for this story.)

In an email chain, reporters began to exchange complaints about Baker’s editorial interventions—how he policed their language and watered down accountability journalism. When Trump announced his candidacy for president, top editors heavily scrutinized story topics and word choices, treating finished articles like raw copy. King recalled “a quest to find negative stories on the Hillary side to balance what seemed like a profusion of negative Trump stories.” Reporting deemed unflattering to Trump or his followers was sometimes killed or delayed until it had appeared elsewhere. “The Journal wrote a lot of very exculpatory stories, basically, enhancing the Trump cause during the summer and fall of 2016,” King said. “And they wrote a whole lot of Hillary email stories that were pretty silly.”

When Trump won, Baker projected proud defiance. In a memo to reporters a few days after the election, he wrote, “While many other news organizations seem to have largely abandoned any last effort to be fair in their coverage, ours has been conspicuously objective, penetrating, intelligent, and, yes, fair.” From then on, editors existed to “sand down the edges,” to dull copy, Journal reporters told me; pointing out Trump’s lies would get them in trouble. One person compared the editing process in the early days of the Trump administration to a scene in the Robin Williams movie Good Morning, Vietnam in which a military public

information officer takes a red pen to any item that might make the US war effort look bad. There were some exceptions: the Journal managed to break news on Jared Kushner’s business dealings, Paul Manafort’s ties to a Russian oligarch, and the Robert Mueller probe. But overall, the Journal’s coverage of Trump veered on fawning.

In the summer of 2017, Baker bigfooted his staff at an Oval Office interview with Trump. Along with Murray, who was then his deputy, he headed to Washington; at a meeting to prepare, he shot down the bureau’s toughest questions. Once the story was published, Baker took the lead byline. Worse: within a week, a full transcript of the interview was leaked to Politico, much to the embarrassment of everybody involved. Readers learned that Trump had thanked the Journal for a positive editorial and fielded genial questions from Baker, who dominated the interview and whom Trump called “Gerard.” At one point Ivanka Trump stopped by to say hello; Baker told her how nice it was to have seen her recently in the Hamptons and recalled a conversation about their daughters, both named Arabella.

As the transcript circulated online, Murray, back in New York, summoned almost two dozen members of the Washington bureau to gather in a conference room; over speakerphone, he upbraided them for the leak—a “breach of trust”—and suggested, according to people present, that he would fire the person at fault. (Murray, through a Journal spokesperson, denied vowing to fire anyone: “No investigation or even a discussion of an investigation into the source of the leak took place.”) On the other end of the line, there was shock and disappointment: instead of reflecting upon what had made the interview problematic, Murray apparently felt the need to threaten his staff. (Later that year, when the bureau scheduled another interview with Trump, the reporters involved went to elaborate lengths to hide the time of the meeting from Baker so he wouldn’t find his way there.)

That August, Baker fired off a series of latenight emails criticizing reporters for, among other things, their coverage of a Trump rally in Phoenix, accusing them of writing “commentary dressed up as news reporting” and instructing them to “stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism”; the messages were soon leaked to rival publications. During a newsroom town hall meeting, he dismissed observations by other outlets that the Journal was soft on Trump as “nonsense” and “fake news,” then suggested that anyone unhappy with the paper’s approach should find a job elsewhere. Many took his advice. In the months that followed, at least nine members of the Washington bureau decamped to the Post; several more left for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. King took a buyout. “There was a lot of seething discontent,” he said.

By June 2018, after more revelations— including that he killed a graphic about the 2008 financial crisis because he found it too liberal—Baker stepped down to become an editor at large. The newsroom staffers I spoke with weren’t sure what the last straw had been, but in the months before his tenure ended, a number of them had been contacted by members of the paper’s special committee. When I asked Bray about it, he said only: “We operate more or less behind the scenes.” The consensus among reporters was that the committee likely played a role in deposing Baker.

Murray ascended. Despite his reputation as Baker’s right-hand man, he was a Journal lifer, around since the pre-Murdoch days, who was seen as reasonable and diplomatic. A relative calm came over the newsroom. For the first time in a while, mid-level editors loosened their grip, and reporters felt free to do their jobs. That year, the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles uncovering Trump’s secret payoffs to women and the network of people who helped carry out the transactions during the campaign, including Michael Cohen. The authors’ work triggered criminal inquiries and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

In his new role, Murray promised to set a “positive tone” for the newsroom. “We want great work and encourage great work,” he said in a November 2018 interview. “We need to take risks, but we need to be rigorous and push ourselves.” A few months later, he told NBC that he believed

the Journal should be exhaustive in its coverage of Trump: “Our distinct mark, I hope, will be writing about the full range of the presidency in as clear and fact-based and unbiased a way as we can.” The newsroom’s emphasis, he said, would be economic reporting, and he remarked that the paper had “dominated” coverage of the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes. (“That’s a classic Wall Street Journal story.”) He highlighted his plans to grow the paper’s audience; to the staff, he announced his intention to hire more journalists of color, including in leadership roles. He was off to a promising start.

But the honeymoon didn’t last. In 2020, an astonishing set of pressures tested journalists across the industry, and the Journal’s newsroom again became agitated. In February, when the “Sick Man of Asia” op-ed was published, Murray told the staff that he agreed with their complaints but said that there was nothing he could do, since the opinion section was outside his purview. Within weeks, however, the piece had direct consequences on the news operation: as part of a larger battle with the United States, China revoked the visas of three Journal reporters and gave them five days to leave the country. Fifty-three reporters and editors, most in the China and Hong Kong bureaus, sent a letter to Journal executives asking that they change the offensive headline and apologize; anything less, they warned, would “cause lasting damage to our brand” and undermine reporters in China. The opinion page never delivered; the newsroom continued to stew. The letter assailing Baker was more effective: his columns were being published in the news pages even as he blasted out incendiary takes, including the one about Arbery, in violation of newsroom rules. Staffers demanded that Baker be expelled from the newsroom; the next day, he was reassigned to opinion.

Still, politics reporters had to contend with a degree of editorial oversight that some found demoralizing. One called the process “insane.” Several groaned that Murray was personally line-editing their stories, far more often and aggressively than anything they’d experienced before. Many staffers focused their criticism on Jason Anders, one of Murray’s deputies, whose adversarial style, they said, made him the subject of widespread resentment. (Anders declined to comment.) In a few cases, reporters said, stories went up online only to be reopened, challenged, and revised by a top editor hours later. In one widely circulated anecdote, a finished piece—on Catholic nuns refusing to sell land that Trump wanted for his border wall—made it all the way up to Murray, who declined to run it because he didn’t want a story about “Trump bullying a bunch of sweet old nuns.” The article was rewritten to focus broadly on “the challenges in building a border wall, even if funding is available.”

Many in the newsroom felt they were being punished for their letters of protest against the opinion section. They found, too, that the level of scrutiny rose after the murder of George Floyd, as leaders at the Journal seemed determined to avoid confronting the realities of white supremacy. “We cover race insofar as it’s not a comparison and it won’t offend our white readers,” a staffer said. “We’ll write a story that says Latinos are buying more homes. But we won’t write a story saying sellers are more willing to sell to white buyers.” Seib, who started at the Journal in 1978, assured me that there has always been tension between the Washington bureau and the bosses in New York, but said the mood feels different lately. “The political climate that we’re in now, in the United States of America, is much more fraught than it ever has been in my life,” he told me. “So the kinds of tensions and suspicions that are always there, to some extent, are probably magnified by the environment that we’re in.”

In the weeks before the 2020 election, the conflict between the newsroom and the opinion section was again put on public display, when the Journal ran two pieces on Hunter Biden that contradicted each other: one by Kimberley Strassel, a columnist, claiming that a new trove of emails and text messages suggested that Joe Biden had been involved in shady business dealings with his son; the other a reported article by Andrew Duehren and James T. Areddy, concluding that the emails indicated no such thing. After the inauguration, the newsroom was instructed to be tougher on the Biden administration.

“That’s a one-eighty from the first year of Trump, when they were tying our hands behind our backs,” a reporter told me. In the early days of the Biden presidency, the Journal was the only national newspaper not to cover the reunification of families separated at the US-Mexico border. Editors have since been reluctant to allow White House reporters to garner goodwill with sources in the administration by covering anything seen as too “PR like.”

Murray, for his part, denied any aggressive monitoring of political coverage. He suggested that the impression I’d been getting from reporters might be owed to the strains of working remotely during the pandemic and to an “incredibly polarized election with emotions running very high everywhere.” Editorially, he told me, “we’ve got a very strong culture. We discuss. We debate. We talk about issues of fairness. We talk about issues of balance.” He felt that the Journal’s standards were strong, even as “some other publications have gone too far off the rails,” and said that the newsroom “works pretty well.”

When I reached out to Paul Beckett, the Washington bureau chief, he declined to speak, then sent an email to his team “reminding” them that, before they answered my calls, all interviews would have to be cleared by the corporate communications department. (A reporter who requested permission to speak with me on the record never got an answer; another, in New York, was warned by her editor that if she spoke openly, she would be labeled a troublemaker.) One person from the DC bureau, who talked with me under the condition of anonymity, said that Beckett had been editing all copy—after the White House and Congress editor had gone through it—to approve, or sanitize, the text before it went to New York, where it entered another round of hacking.

In recent months, tensions have only worsened. In April, when the Journal broke news that dozens of CEOs had met on Zoom and prepared a statement opposing state-level legislation that restricted voting rights, an editor initially placed the story on A-1; but when Murray reviewed the page, he pushed the story inside, saying: “We don’t need to give this publicity.” In July, when Trump sued to restore his social media profiles—several months after Facebook, Twitter, and Google banished him from their platforms—the Journal published a report that minimized any connection to his fundraising efforts and the fact that the suit was, as a First Amendment lawyer put it, “irredeemably frivolous.” At meetings with the Washington bureau, Beckett addressed concerns about obtrusive top editing by suggesting that reporters were submitting copy that wasn’t “camera ready.” Some of his staff were so upset that, the following week, he offered a mea culpa. But that wasn’t sufficient. “There’s this culture in the Journal of not being a liberal, not having any slack,” a reporter told me. “Just having rigor about it and not having lefty commentary that masquerades as journalism.” The reporter continued, “There’s an awareness among a significant chunk of reporters that we’re not the New York Times. We’re not going to cover these issues in the way the New York Times does.”

Consistent throughout the Murdoch years has been a fixation on the Times: the Journal seeks both to compete with it and not to be anything like it, in equal measure. When, last summer, a team led by Louise Story—a news strategy chief and executive in product and technology who spent more than a decade at the Times—conducted an internal survey that argued the Journal placed too much emphasis on its traditional audience at the expense of attracting new digital subscribers, including people of color, young people, and women, detractors on the masthead dismissed its central conceit. Critics in the newsroom labeled the report a “woke New York Times strategy”; Murray described it to me as “a draft.” Yet that response overlooked pained observations from within the Journal’s newsroom: more than 70 percent of staffers said that they thought coverage of race, gender, and identity did not reflect “the diversity of the general public and changing demographic trends” and that they felt powerless to change anything. Emily Nelson, the US news editor, was quoted as saying “reporters self-censor.” She continued, “There are