Tension growing between WSJ’s newsroom, editorial page

Joe Pompeo of Vanity Fair’s Hive writes about the growing tension between The Wall Street Journal’s news staffers and its editorial page.

Pompeo writes, “Journal reporters, who have long accepted the paper’s role in the conservative-thought ecosystem, aren’t generally fazed by the writings of the editorial page. But several current reporters told me that the recent Mueller commentary—particularly the call for him to resign—has been a source of frustration. That frustration partly stems from the fact that the Journal, which was left eating The New York Times’s and Washington Post’s dust during the early part of the Trump administration, has been breaking through in its coverage of the White House and the Russia probes.

“Over the weekend, for instance, it didn’t go unnoticed that the Journal, unlike the Times and the Post, was able to corroborate CNN’s explosive reporting that Mueller’s first indictments were imminent. In the preceding weeks and months, the Journal landed scoops about a grand jury being convened; about the details of the suicide of a Republican activist who had been trying to get his hands on Hillary Clinton’s e-mails from Russian hackers; and about a concurrent Manafort investigation by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office.

“‘People are always mad about our editorials undermining our reporting,’ a Journal reporter told me, ‘but it is definitely more infuriating on this topic than anything else since we’ve made good progress on Russia lately. It’s frustrating to have to contend with this, even if smart people recognize the separation between the editorial side and news.’ As another reporter told me, ‘We could disprove half the stuff’ the opinion writers ‘are saying if they just read our own reporting. It’s like living in some alternate universe.'”

Read more here.