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Setting absurd expectations for complex problems
KILL LIST
Setting absurd expectations for complex problems
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Political change is a slow brew, but news outlets tend to suggest otherwise in headlines, as in June, when the Washington Post summed up the first meeting between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin like this: “Biden, Putin hold ‘positive’ summit but divisions remain over human rights, cyberattacks, Ukraine.” See also last year, when the Post asked, atop a story on Black Lives Matter, “America convulses amid a week of protests, but can it change?” currently no mandates that assigning editors, for example, think at all about whether they are selecting stories that reflect the diverse population of the country, much less if they’ll be stories that will be of interest to diverse audiences.” The report also described how Ebony Reed, the new-audiences chief at the Journal, met with the National Bar Association, the largest group of Black legal professionals in the country, and followed up by sending story ideas to editors; none was acted upon. Weeks later, similar stories ran in other major news outlets—including the Times.
Story’s team advocated transforming the paper’s coverage and culture. The recommendations were presented as a means of securing the Journal’s financial future. “In the past five years, we have had six quarters where we lost more subscribers than we gained,” the report stated. The bottom line: “If we want to grow to 5.5 million digital subscribers, and if we continue with churn, traffic and digital growth about where they are today—it will take us on the order of 22 years.” Within a few months, the findings were leaked to BuzzFeed. Story did not comment for that article or for this one, but a Journal employee, seeing the audit for the first time, gave BuzzFeed a direct reaction: “Oh fuck, wow,” the employee said. “It seems like the organization is having a come-to-Jesus moment.”
A person who worked on the survey told me, though, that the Journal’s leaders didn’t seem eager to self-reflect. “We were genuinely surprised by the level of hostility we encountered,” the person said. “The recommendation wasn’t to change the focus of the Journal, or to water down content, or to pander. The recommendation was to be more inclusive and representative while telling the same stories we are telling. We had data that shows there are plenty of business reasons to support content that is more reflective of the population of the world. There was no political or social agenda. So to have it labeled as a ‘woke strategy’ was surprising.”
To be sure, other outlets have struggled with matters of editorial judgment, objectivity, and race, and there have been plenty of conflicts between news and opinion departments—including at the Times, where things came to a head last year when reporters took a stand against an inflammatory op-ed and James Bennet, the section’s editor, was forced out. But for the most part, where leaders at those news organizations have engaged with employees (however unsatisfying or incomplete those discussions may have been), the Journal masthead has largely resisted. On a call with staff last summer, Murray told them he found it “inappropriate” to talk about the opinion page and said, “I don’t think my personal views of it or my political opinions are relevant.” When I asked Murray how he steers news coverage, he replied, “I always think of objectivity as being like salvation. It’s always a good thing to strive for, but it’s a hard thing to achieve. So I like words like fairness, balance, a certain sense of neutrality.” He continued, “You’ve got to reflect as accurately as you possibly can the situation as you see it. We’re not to be advocates. We’re not to push our hand or have opinions. I don’t think that’s the role of a news article.”
Emma Moody, the Journal’s editor of standards and ethics, told me that editors are trained in “neutral language” and encouraged to take out “loaded” modifiers. “We want to be impartial,” she
said. “Both sides should have their say.” Her team, which consists of seven senior editors, reviews the “most sensitive” stories and is charged with upholding the values of the newsroom, which she described as being rooted in objectivity and fairness. “It’s been a really challenging five years,” she said, with a lot of “hard questions.” Readers, she explained, have served as a guide. “They like to have their point of view reflected, but they also want to be challenged in many ways,” she told me. “Something that we found, just in correspondence from readers, is that they’re really appreciative of what we’re doing because we’re presenting news in a very factual way and not trying to preach and not trying to inject our own opinion.”
As for how bomb-throwing editorialpage pieces might affect readers’ perceptions, Moody said that was not her mandate: “We are out there, willing to ask hard questions of either side,” she said. Besides, things couldn’t be too bad, she argued: the Journal touts that, according to a recent report by the Reuters Institute, it is the most trusted newspaper in America. Murray, too, seemed complacent. “We do have very discerning readers,” he told me. “I think that they understand that there’s a lot of different kinds of content for them in different ways. And they don’t have to read everything that we do. Some people love our markets coverage, some people love the opinion page. We’ll find different ways in.”
Still, it’s hard to deny that audiences often find it hard (online, especially) to distinguish between news and opinion as newspapers define them. When, in 2018, the Pew Research Center provided five thousand American adults with a series of statements and asked them to label which were facts and which were opinions, almost 75 percent failed to identify all the facts; two-thirds were unable to identify the opinions. (The study concluded that the participants’ biases were at fault.)
“Everybody agrees we need labeling,” Murray said. In February, the Journal announced that, as part of a “news literacy initiative,” it would set display copy in distinct colors: blue for news, gold for opinion. The plan was met with skepticism by reporters, however, once they saw that Strassel, the author of the inaccurate Hunter Biden piece and one of opinion’s most partisan columnists, had started appearing on panels to discuss the paper’s news literacy efforts. Several commented on the irony of selecting a person many in the newsroom consider the “queen of disinformation and propaganda” to represent them in educating the public. (Strassel and members of the opinion team declined to comment.)
Renee Hobbs, the director of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island, is doubtful that the labeling initiative will have much impact. “The idea that you would color-code gold for opinions and blue for news is trivializing the genuine complexity of the interplay between news and opinion,” she said. Howard Schneider, a former editor of Newsday and the current executive director of Stony Brook University’s Center for News Literacy, agreed: “I don’t think labeling or a different typeface for the headlines on opinion versus news is remotely sufficient to make these things clear.” He added, though, that there is only so much the Journal—or any newspaper—can do. (The Washington Post also color-codes news and opinion.) “The only true way to solve the problem,” he argued, “is to do a better job as educators, getting students to recognize the difference between a factual statement or a statement of opinion.”
Until then, a news environment beset by confusion and distortion seems inevitable. And under Murdoch, the Journal has demonstrated its willingness to reflect a version of reality that its core right-leaning audience wishes to see: according to an internal survey, 85 percent of the paper’s readers say they hold “traditional” or “conservative” economic views, with 69 percent maintaining traditional or conservative social values. (In a statement, the Journal told me those numbers provide an incomplete picture of the current subscriber base.) “If they’re only giving readers on the news side information that they think will reinforce their worldview and not alienate them,” Schneider said, “then I think they’re failing their readers.” Which, as Hobbs pointed out, is something newspapers have done forever: “People in power have always used whatever means they have at their disposal to present their
worldview in a persuasive and compelling way, which means it often includes falsehoods and inaccuracies.”
To me, at least, Murray projected optimism about the Journal’s future. In March 2019, the paper signed on to the paid subscription service run by Apple News (which the Times, feeling “leery,” declined to join); executives crowed that the partnership would help the Journal reach millions of new readers. (“We’ve got hundreds of thousands of college students now reading us, and people starting out in their careers,” Murray said.) This past February, after a long campaign by Murdoch and Thomson, News Corp inked a three-year deal with Google that promised “significant” payments when Journal stories (and those from other company properties) were featured in Google News. The same month, News Corp announced that Journal subscriptions were up; by August, the total number of subscribers had risen nearly 10 percent, to 3.45 million, with digital subscriptions at 2.72 million. But a newsroom digital leader told me that those numbers were misleading—and unsustainable—because they included “corporate subscriptions and student subscriptions and things done at an institutional level” that offered discounts of as much as 90 percent to inflate readership.
Murray said the Journal’s growth strategy was developed in collaboration with Latour, the publisher, who believes that the mission of Dow Jones should be to help people make decisions in “business, finance, and life.” That philosophy, Murray told me, drove newsroom leaders to “think as broadly and expansively of how we can bring it to more people, and what a decision-maker is.” He continued, “A decision-maker isn’t just a CEO. A decision-maker isn’t just the senior
vice president. A decision-maker is: Do I buy a new car or not? Do I buy a house or not? How do I want to move in my career?” Murray is now spearheading more “decision maker” stories—service journalism, explainers, and approachable financial reports, under a coverage area called “Life & Work”— that he expects will expand the paper’s audience. “Everybody’s interested in their job, everybody’s interested in their career, everybody’s interested in money,” he said. “Everybody who understands the world knows that those things drive an awful lot of what happens in the world. And being as aggressive as we can on those things in our coverage, I think, informs our success. So I think we are seeing more women come in. We are seeing younger readers.”
The Story team’s recommendations on tone and coverage have been permanently set aside. In fact, they were dead on arrival: According to someone who contributed to the report, Murray called Story when the survey was almost done and expressed “strong regrets” at having commissioned it; he contemplated killing the project, but allowed her to finish what she’d started. Her team interpreted the message as Murray trying to keep his head down and avoid stirring conflict with Latour—the two have historically had a tense relationship, and the survey seemed like it would be a strain. In the spring, Edmund Lee, of the Times, reported that Murray and Latour “hate each other.” Murray denied that to me; Latour declined to comment. The company told me in a statement: “Almar Latour and Matt Murray have built a strong and productive working relationship that is yielding many dividends.” A person who has worked with both men told me that they have different styles, and have never much liked each other, but “hate” is probably too strong a word. Story left the Journal in July to work on a book about race and money in the United States.
To her former team, Murray and Latour’s “decision maker” plan sounds a bit like code, something for elite readers, or at least those who identify as such. It’s not a given that “Life & Work” stories will exclude certain demographics—“This strategy should feature people of color and young people as decision-makers, of course, and invite people to recognize that they are part of ‘Team Capitalism,’ ” Hobbs told me—but some Journal staffers still feel disappointed that their bosses seem unwilling to evolve as other news outlets have. “People are heartbroken,” the person from Story’s team said. (Besides, “Team Capitalism” isn’t where everyone following the global economy wants to be.)
Even if subscription rates grow, the Journal remains a Murdoch enterprise, and the opinion section has only become bolder in advancing his political agenda. (In June, Baker published another whopper, on “Jeffrey Toobin, the ‘1619 Project’ and the Journalistic Reign of Error,” in which, among other complaints, he bashed the Pulitzer Prizes as “Hero of the Soviet Union–like ribbons for full-time advocacy of approved causes.”) Digital audiences may be too put off by sexist and racist op-eds to pay for the paper’s reporting. “The question is: Will their readers—and will their future readers—understand the division and the separation and be able to live with it?” Schneider wondered to me. “Can they have that split personality?” The combination of news coverage and a Trump-supporting opinion page may have worked fifty years ago, he said. “Is that possible now?” He wasn’t sure.
Hobbs sees Murdoch’s vision manifesting exactly as intended. “He bought the Journal so that he could influence elites, and now he is continuing to push elites into the paradigm that he thinks is going to be the winning play, which is Trump in 2024,” she said. “A lot of people like to see journalists in pain. Some part of this is deliberately baiting journalists by pushing rightward on the editorial side of the house to outrage journalists—it’s like, part of that is a strategy.”
If that’s the case, Murray wasn’t going to say so. But it’s hard to deny that the politics of the Journal have always come down to money. “At this moment in the United States, we are on the cusp of the biggest business boom any of us have seen in our lifetimes,” he said. “It’s also one facing some challenges—like the cost challenge, the inflation risks, wage issues. We’re trying to cover the hell out of all of those things. And we’re seeing readers flock to those stories. So I think that we’re really right smack in the moment of relevancy right now.” cjr
