WSJ news staffers: Gigot, editorial page stabbed "knives in our backs"

[DeepModem Mom]

New York Observer: Wall Street Rift: Journal Reporters Reject Gigot Line
By Gabriel Sherman

....“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....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....

http://www.observer.com/20060717/20060717_Gabriel_Sherman_pageone_offtherec.asp

[kenny blankenship]

1. You're just now realizing?

It just clicked for you? You just NOW realized that the editorial page of the paper you work for is manned by not-just-kidding-around-anymore Fascists and authoritarian psychos?
In other words, the people who you work for and whose ends you've been serving all along by practicing journalism...