On Monday, Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker held a town hall-style staff meeting to address growing dissension within the organization. During the meeting Baker demanded objective and unbiased reporting from his writers, adding that anyone who doesn't want to cover the Trump administration fairly is free to find work somewhere else.
Baker has no tolerance for biased reporting
The New York Times reports that a source who attended the WSJ meeting said Baker was irritated by accusations that his paper is too "soft" on Donald Trump. During Monday's meeting Baker strongly defended his paper's objective reporting, rejecting claims made by some employees that WSJ hasn't been aggressive enough in its coverage of Trump.
Baker declared that he had no intention of abandoning objective reporting and suggested rival news outlets had discarded objectivity in favor of confrontational and provocative headlines. To prove his point, he read aloud from a list of recent WSJ headlines. Baker then told his staff that if they wanted to work for an organization with a more "oppositional" stance, they were free to leave.
During the ninety-minute-long meeting Baker addressed the WSJ reporters and editors who felt that the paper was holding them back from aggressively covering the trump administration. “We can’t allow ourselves to be dragged into the political process, to be a protagonist in the political fight,” said Baker, according to some of the staffers who attended the meeting.
Baker then blasted the peddlers of sensationalized Trump coverage, and said that it was that sort of "oppositional" tone that has led Americans to distrust the news media.
According to a recent Emerson College poll, 53 percent of Americans believe the news media to be untruthful.
Unhappy WSJ reporters say objectivity is 'absurd'
The meeting comes in the wake of months of internal bellyaching and tension inside the Wall Street Journal newsroom. Last year a source from within the newsroom, who was evidently opposed to journalistic objectivity, complained to Politico that WSJ's coverage of Trump was “neutral to the point of being absurd."
