Wall Street Journal’s top editor accused of killing a story over “political views”

March 29, 2018

The Wall Street Journal earlier this week published a striking piece of graphics journalism, detailing what the financial world looked like after the 2008 crash–and what may be in store for the future. It was a somber look at the recovery and why it hasn’t improved the lives of many Americans.

If you missed it, it may be because the Journal hasn’t been promoting the piece. Jesse Eisinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning senior reporter at ProPublica, tweeted today that the newspaper’s editor-in-chief Gerard Baker tried to kill the story entirely “because it didn’t conform to his political views.”

The story ultimately did get published, but it then was removed from the front page. There’s talk that editors may try to redo the piece to make it less political.

According to a memo being sent among colleagues, which Eisinger uploaded online, many Journal staffers consider this “de-surfacing” very troubling. “This is censorship and it is beneath the standards of the Wall Street Journal,” according to the memo. Sources familiar with the situation have confirmed this sequence of events.

The memo proposes that the article be re-promoted, since traffic to it has collapsed over the last few days.

You can read the Journal‘s piece about the financial crisis here.

Update: Steve Severinghaus of the Wall Street Journal‘s communications team provided me with this statement:

This project first published Tuesday morning and has been online ever since. The team will be adding additional reporting and analysis on the crisis and its aftermath. The current version can be found here: https://graphics.wsj.com/how-the-world-has-changed-since-2008-financial-crisis/ .

 

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