Dozens have left the paper in the past year and interviews with current and ex-staffers show outrage over pressure from management to normalize Trump
.. “Instead of clearing the air about the legitimate concerns of editors and reporters about balanced coverage of Trump, Baker led off with a 20-minute scolding about how we were indeed covering Trump correctly, and anybody who disputed that was wrong and wrong-headed,” a recently departed Journal staffer told the Guardian. “That pretty much took the air out of the room. I and most of my colleagues were disgusted by his performance.”
.. Concerns about the way in which the paper was covering Trump spilled over into public view earlier this year, when newsroom emails began leaking out showing Baker criticizing his staffers for language he deemed unfair.
.. Political editors and reporters find themselves either directly stymied by Gerry’s interference or shave the edges off their stories in advance to try to please him (and, by extension, Murdoch).”
.. Meanwhile longtime observers like Sarah Ellison, a former Journal reporter and author of the book War at the Wall Street Journal about Murdoch’s takeover of the paper, is not entirely surprised to see what has happened to Murdoch’s paper under Trump.
This is the most access he has had to a sitting president ever – that is something he’s tried to do and has done in other countries particularly with British prime ministers,” Ellison said. “He’s choosing his own personal access over having any journalistic clout.”
.. With Trump in the White House, he and the Australian-born media mogul have grown closer than ever, with Murdoch topping the New York Times’ list of the president’s outside advisers.
.. Trump liked Baker’s handling of the debate, especially compared to that of Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, who had grilled Trump on his treatment of women at an earlier debate in August. During Baker’s debate, the future president largely evaded tough questioning and enjoyed more airtime than anyone else on stage. “He was unbelievably charming afterwards,” Baker said of Trump at the time. “He came up to me and said, ‘That was an extraordinarily elegant debate. You handled it incredibly well.’”
.. After Trump’s surprise victory in November, Baker landed Trump’s first post-election interview. And he wrote a column in the Spectator, the conservative British magazine, deriding US publications for pro-Hillary Clinton bias, accusing them of having “lovingly compiled their historic ‘first woman president’ editions.”
In early January 2017, Baker upped the ante, publicly expressing reluctance to accuse Trump of “lying” amid a bout of national media soul-searching over how to cover the incoming president’s false statements, and lashing out at critics in a column mocking a “fit of Trump-induced pearl-clutching among the journalistic elite”.
“If we are to use the term ‘lie’ in our reporting, then we have to be confident about the subject’s state of knowledge and his moral intent,” Baker explained of his approach.
.. staffers leaked a memo to BuzzFeed in which Baker asked them to stop using the “very loaded” description of countries included in Trump’s travel ban as “majority-Muslim,” and suggested they use wording that hewed closer to White House talking points instead.
.. the full transcript revealed a number of lines embarrassing for Trump that the paper had ignored, from Trump’s inquiry about Scottish independence – “What would they do with the British Open if they ever got out? They’d no longer have the British Open” – to his claim that the head of the Boy Scouts had called him to say he had delivered “the greatest speech that was ever made to them” the day before. (The Boy Scouts denied that.)
.. said of countries with large populations: “You call places like Malaysia, Indonesia, and you say, you know, how many people do you have? And it’s pretty amazing how many people they have.”
.. The full transcript also showed that the Journal’s White House reporters were sidelined during the interview by Baker, who dominated the questioning, speaking familiarly with Ivanka Trump about their children and a party they had both attended in the Hamptons in New York.
.. Baker highlighted what he viewed as the Journal’s best recent work, with lengthy lists of stories singled out for praise.
None of them were critical of Trump, and his top examples were not reported news but pieces of commentary flattering to Trump’s worldview
.. When he did mention reporting, he seemed more interested in highlighting soft-focus pieces on lunch trends that he noted performed well online, rather than anything about the president.
.. conservative exceptionalism of Baker, who still sometimes writes opinion columns – as he did after Brexit and the US election – in addition to his duties as the paper’s top editor.
.. “The Times and the Post have decided we’re in a unique historical moment, and a different tone or stance are required,” a current Journal staffer told the Guardian. “The Journal is not adopting that attitude.”
.. 48 Journal employees had accepted buyouts ..
.. The departures include two top White House reporters, well-respected political and policy reporters, veteran foreign correspondents, and virtually the entire national security team, some of whom were poached by the Washington Post.
.. his preferences are internalized by reporters who avoid pitching stories they expect he won’t like or who tone down language in their copy before turning it in.
.. “The main way he influenced the coverage in a political way was not by saying you can’t write about X subject,” one former staffer said. “It was more that there were certain stories that could get into the paper very easily and other stories you knew would be a fight.”
.. Others said reporters, in the DC bureau especially, have had to fight to get their harder-hitting Trump stories published, if they get published at all. “Almost everyone in the newsroom has a story about their story or a story of a colleague’s getting killed,” said a reporter. “That happens in all newspapers, but the killings run in one direction.”
.. a direct attack on the New York Times for suggesting that Hillary Clinton had the election sewn up. “On November 9, readers woke up to the difference between a New York newspaper and an American newspaper,” the ad for the Wall Street Journal said.
.. “It was really striking how any time we were writing something about News Corp they would go over it very carefully,” he told the Guardian. “With the New York Times they’d say we weren’t being hard enough on them.”
.. “The whole culture of the Journal for decades has been to be fair and accurate but also convey analysis and perspective and meaning,” another ex-Journal person said. “Gerry’s saying ‘just report the facts’, but there’s a difference between journalism and stenography.”
Every country does have ideals. But the specifics matter. It’s a bit like saying every human has talents — sure, but some talents are greater than others. A great composer and a great armpit-farter may be equally rich in their degree of talent, but not in the quality or desirability of their talents. I
Are our ideals really no better than any other country’s? Are they worth defending only because they are ours?
.. And Rich was of course a full throated yes. He then went on to say that he’s coming around to the idea that “there’s no such thing as a bad nation, only bad governments.”
.. What if America just had the social and political priorities of Sweden or Norway? It’s fine to say you’d still love her, but you know what? It’s also fine to say you wouldn’t.
.. He went on to explain that as an immigrant from a decent country, what appealed to him about America most is its culture and its system of law. He conceded, grudgingly, that if we changed our ideals we’d lose some of the stuff he loves. But at the end of the day he’d still love America regardless of her ideals.
.. Rich argued for the “everybody’s special” school of patriotism and nationalism.
.. If National Review had completely different editorial positions — pro-choice, pro–gun control, etc. — would the cast of The Editors not be less in the love with National Review? The question answers itself.
.. Imagine one person tells you that his ideal form of government would be to get rid of the Constitution and make Kim Kardashian queen. You’d think that person is silly, probably even deranged. Now imagine that 270 million Americans believed that and, having the necessary supermajority to pull it off, voted away our Constitution. As the coronation of Queen Kim, First of Her Name, unfolded on every channel, would you not change your view of America, her culture, and her people? Might you not fall out of love with America as it is?
.. My hunch is Rich et al. would still love America, but you know what America they would love? The America That Was. They might even join the resistance to the regime of Queen Kim
.. They’d be fighting against the American nation in the name of that great and glorious cause, the American Idea. And that’s the crucial difference.
Americans use patriotism as a political cudgel. Lincoln had an answer to that problem.
There has long been an argument, roughly along the axis of conservatism and progressivism, about whether to love America for what it has been or what it should be. The right inclines to American exceptionalism, and the sense that our nation’s roots in self-evident moral truths render it a unique force for good in the world and make its politics distinctly elevated. The left inclines to a more redemptive hope in America — the idea that our country has been working from its birth to overcome its unique sins, and that it has made some progress but has much more to make.
.. Liberals argue that the conservative form of patriotism sanitizes history and descends into jingoism. Conservatives say the left’s form of patriotism isn’t so much a regard for America as for liberal political ideals, which progressives hope our country might increasingly come to resemble.
.. What stands out about America, Trump argues, is not its ideals or its gradual self-improvement but the simple fact that it is our country. So America’s leaders should do what the leaders of all other nations do and put their own nation first.
.. Each camp understands its adversaries as speaking somehow from outside that tradition and perhaps against it. So patriotism itself becomes a source of disunity.
.. One man’s life and thought were a testament to all three forms of patriotism. Abraham Lincoln .. his thinking on that subject offers a model of genuine statesmanship, because it tended to build bridges where others, in his time and ours, could see only chasms.
.. Our idealistic exceptionalism is, if anything, a restraint on self-congratulation because it always compels us to confront the fact that we fall short of our ideals. The American creed, Lincoln argued in one speech, should form “a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all and revered by all
.. progress toward justice involves vindicating rather than repudiating our founding principles.
.. Memory is both conceptual and visceral. It lets us take pride in our ideals and our experience — our origins and our progress — and the fact that both are ours.
.. America is not itself an ideal but a real nation, full of real people who deserve leaders who put them first.
Steve King’s dangerous belief that demographics are destiny undermines American exceptionalism and the integrity of conservatives.
.. They think that the influx of Hispanics from Mexico and Central America or immigrants from the Middle East — whether they arrive legally or illegally — is a threat to the fabric of American culture and values.
.. an American culture rooted in ideas about liberty, democracy, and the rule of law not only survived but flourished as the population of the nation was eventually transformed from a WASP majority into one in which the descendants of the Scotch Irish and English settlers became a minority.
.. Irish, German, Italian, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants were each branded in turn as aliens from a culture with no history of supporting democracy. Even as each group took its place in American society, other Americans feared that the newcomers could never assimilate.
.. He might claim he was talking about culture, but the mention of “babies” is a not-so-subtle attempt to say that the survival of Western values requires white children to outnumber those who are not white.
.. By asserting that preserving “our civilization” cannot be accomplished by “other people’s babies,” King is promoting a view of American identity that is at odds with the country’s basic principles. To believe that Hispanic or Muslim immigrants — or those of any other ethnicity or faith — can’t fully accept the values about liberty that King claims to cherish is to ignore two centuries of U.S. history and ideas. “Other people’s babies” have been fighting and dying to defend American values since before Iowa was a state.
.. At the heart of King’s statement is not only a prejudicial mindset but also a profound pessimism about the strength of the values the congressman says he wishes to preserve. The country thrived because those values were not the preserve of a specific ethnic or religious group but could be embraced by anyone regardless of his background or faith. It is not naïve to assert that this hasn’t changed even while the skin color of immigrants is darker today than it was in the past. That is the essence of American exceptionalism.
.. If conservatives wish to continue governing in the future, they must reject talk about “other people’s babies” and promote their ideas with enough confidence that Hispanics and other minorities will eventually embrace them.