Former WSJ reporter Armour sues paper for discrimination

Stephanie Armour

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Stephanie Armour has sued the paper, accusing of seeking to shed staffers who incur significant health care costs by invoking “trumped up performance issues,” reports NPR’s David Folkenflik.

Folkenflik reports, “Armour, one of the paper’s lead reporters on the pandemic, left in May and subsequently took a job with KFF Health News. (KFF Health News has a reporting partnership with NPR.)

“‘I believe that The Wall Street Journal, in this instance and perhaps in others, trumped up fraudulent false performance metrics and assessments as a means to fire an individual who had seniority, who was relatively well-paid and who had accommodations,’ says Rob Housman, Armour’s attorney. ‘It seems to me that that’s the pattern that’s occurring with this case and potentially – probably – with others.’

“A spokesperson for The Wall Street Journal said: ‘The complaint is filled with baseless allegations, and the legal claims are entirely without merit. We will vigorously fight this lawsuit.'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.