Here’s another point of view regarding the WSJ‘s editorial — that of the WSJ‘s newsroom. Or at least, of one voice in the newsroom. You may have noticed that Mary Rosh referred to the existence of this exchange, in her own sweet way.
Anyway, I just got the link from Romenesko.
This may help answer kc’s question about why I was so interested to see the editorial board of that paper "wrestle" with the issue. They were the ones who published the story, kc reasoned, so what did they have to struggle about?
The thing is, they were NOT the ones to publish the story. As at The State, there is a high wall (as there should be) between news and editorial. So one commenting on the other is a pretty delicate matter. Though both represent the same overall institution, there can be considerable tension since they don’t interact on content decisions.
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Interesting piece but extremely onesided. Here we have 5 journalists reassuring each other that everything is just peachy. Whistling past the graveyard, seems to me. Yes, since its Meet The Press we should expect a bunch of journalists yakking at each other but one or two Joe Citizens would have been nice. They might have gotten those self-satisfied journos to look at what people in the real world think.
This explains a lot:
When it comes to celebrating America’s independence, there is a huge division down party lines, the poll shows. Sixty-five percent of Republicans say they use the Fourth for that purpose, while just 30% of Democrats say the same. Almost half (48%) of independents agree. SOURCE
The WSJ editorial page wasn’t “wrestling” with the issue of whether to comment on what their newsroom had done. They were mischaracterizing what the newsroom had done, in order to draw a false contrast between what the WSJ did and what the NYT did. They did this in order to pretend that the attacks by Bush apologists on the NYT were principled, which of course they weren’t, and that what the NYT did damaged national security, which of course it didn’t. The Bush apologists attacked the NYT and not the WSJ not because what the newspapers published was any different, but because saw the NYT as a less stalwart ally of the Bush administration than the WSJ.
But that is somewhat different from my main point, which has to do with Warthen’s laziness and lack of integrity. Warthen wants information to be mediated through people like him. He resents live coverage of unfolding events on television, because it allows people to receive unmediated information, and he resents the ability of persons close to news stories to communicate with the public in a way that does not allow him to act as a gatekeeper.
This is why Warthen took the astonishing step of referring to an editorial in a newspaper as a source of insight into a news story appearing in that newspaper. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal is completely worthless as a source of insight into the content of an article in that paper, and it is completely worthless as a source of information as to how that story contrasts with a story about the same issue appearing in another newspaper. The way you find out what’s in a story is, you REFER TO THE STORY. And the way you find out how that story compares to another story is, you COMPARE THE STORIES.
The closer a source of information is to an event, the better the information that can be obtained from it. We don’t NEED the WSJ editorial board to tell us what a WSJ article says, and we don’t NEED Warthen to tell us that what the WSJ editorial board says about a WSJ article.
A comparison of the stories shows us that they are basically the same, and that they present the same “sensitive” information. This leads us to an insight that those who are attacking the NYT for the story, and who are claiming that the stories are significantly different, and that the WSJ had pure motives, while the NYT had evil motives, are lying.
A comparison of the stories helps us to that conclusion, and comments from a guy who actually works in the WSJ news division helps us to that conclusion.
Warthen’s reference to the WSJ editorial boards biased and secondhand perspective on what the news story says helps us to understand what the WSJ editorial board wants us to believe, and it helps us to identify the sources from which Warthen wants us to take our perspective on issues, but it doesn’t help us to understand what is really going on.
This may help answer kc’s question about why I was so interested to see the editorial board of that paper “wrestle” with the issue. They were the ones who published the story, kc reasoned, so what did they have to struggle about?
To be precise, I was responding to something you said about the editorial staff “wrestling” with something. I thought you meant that they had wrestled with the decision whether to publish the info. My point was, what did they have to agonize over, since the story was being fed to them?
Obviously I misunderstood you (and I don’t really know much about the internal workings of newspapers, either). This post of yours clarifies things for me.
Btw, that MTP transcript was fun, huh?