Trump’s letter to editor upsets WSJ reporters

Former President Donald Trump’s letter to the editor, published in The Wall Street Journal, that mistakenly claims the 2020 election was stolen has upset some reporters at the paper, reports Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy of CNN Business.

Stelter and Darcy write, “The Journal’s opinion folks are separate from the newsroom and sometimes downright oppositional. Several reporters grumbled to me about the decision to publish the letter, but none were surprised, given the Opinion section’s right-wing and contrarian bent.

“‘I think it’s very disappointing that our opinion section continues to publish misinformation that our news side works so hard to debunk,’ one of the reporters said. ‘They should hold themselves to the same standards we do!’

“Another WSJ reporter retweeted the Beast’s Matt Fuller: ‘Newspapers don’t exist so that powerful people can publish whatever lies they want. In fact, that may be one of the very opposite reasons newspapers exist.’

“So what was the justification for publishing it? WaPo’s Jeremy Barr inquired, but ‘Steve Severinghaus, a spokesman for the Journal, declined to comment about the decision to publish the letter. When asked specifically about the newspaper’s standards for publishing a letter, he did not respond.'”

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.