The pickle that was the WSJ

Bloomberg News columnist Joe Mysak reviews “War at The Wall Street Journal,” the book by former Journal reporter Sarah Ellison about how News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch acquired the paper’s parent company, Dow Jones & Co.

Mysak writes, “Based on her original reporting for the newspaper (and re- reported here), the book is as scrupulously documented as the Journal’s ‘tick-tocks,’ which Ellison defines as ‘often riveting reconstructions of significant events that had occurred months earlier.’

“The author, who spent 10 years at the paper, clearly bought into the whole Journal myth, which is as complicated as misty Camelot’s. In essence, it boils down to: Once there was a magical place where journalists of independence and integrity ran everything and produced ‘stellar’ work, including a front page that was ‘a quiet haven for reflective storytelling.’ The newspaper was a ‘temple,’ its pages ‘sacrosanct.’

“Then the bad man came and swept it all away. Or something like that.

“Ellison, who joined the paper as a 24-year-old news assistant in Paris, doesn’t really explain how the paper got into such a pickle.”

Read more here.