Eat The Press

Will The Wall Street Journal Editorialize Against Itself?

E&P |  Joe Strupp |  Posted Wednesday June 28, 2006 at 12:13 AM

Amidst all of the criticism of The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times for running stories on the government's secret terrorist finance-tracking program, it's been easy to forget that one other newspaper — The Wall Street Journal — also published an original story on the program involving SWIFT. As this story from Editor & Publisher notes, the editors of the NYT and LAT (respectively, Bill Keller and Dean Baquet) have both offered up explanations to their readers about their decision-making processes, while the Journal has been conspicuously silent about why it chose to publish its story. All of this makes this little tidbit from the E&P story rather funny:

The paper's Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot declined to comment when asked if he planned to editorialize on the Journal's decision to publish the story, saying in an e-mail message through [the paper's spokesman] that he does not discuss pending editorial subjects. Whatever he produces will be interesting, given the paper's conservative and pro-Bush editorial line.

Perhaps Gigot will just stay quiet about the issue, opting not to run an editorial. But it would be remarkably hypocritical, given how his page has lashed out at the Times and The Washington Post about printing other stories about national security matters. After Mary McCarthy was fired from the CIA for allegedly leaking sensitive information to the media, the Journal editorialized that "this would appear to be only the latest example of the unseemly symbiosis between elements of the press corps and a cabal of partisan bureaucrats at the CIA and elsewhere in the 'intelligence community' who have been trying to undermine the Bush Presidency.'"

So, is Paul Gigot prepared to say that reporters on the news side of his own paper are now out to undercut the Bush presidency? Or was the paper's McCarthy editorial simply motivated by the editorial board's desire to score some easy political points?

We'll be waiting for Gigot's SWIFT editorial any day now...

— Ankush Khardori