Wall Street Journal Editorial Board Blames ‘Progressive Cancel Culture’ for Employee-Signed Letter Calling Out Opinion Section
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The Wall Street Journal editorial board blamed “progressive cancel culture” for a letter signed by 280 of its reporters calling out the paper’s opinion section for spreading misinformation.
In a note to its readers published on Thursday night, the editorial board said it wouldn’t respond to the original letter which called for better fact-checking, more transparency, and a clearer divide between news and opinion divisions, according to a draft of it obtained by Mediaite on Tuesday. The board writes:
In the spirit of collegiality, we won’t respond in kind to the letter signers. Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility in any case. The signers report to the News editors or other parts of the business, and the News and Opinion departments operate with separate staffs and editors. Both report to Publisher Almar Latour. This separation allows us to pursue stories and inform readers with independent judgment.
It was probably inevitable that the wave of progressive cancel culture would arrive at the Journal, as it has at nearly every other cultural, business, academic and journalistic institution. But we are not the New York Times. Most Journal reporters attempt to cover the news fairly and down the middle, and our opinion pages offer an alternative to the uniform progressive views that dominate nearly all of today’s media.
In the original rebuke, employees attacked the paper for an op-ed from Vice President Mike Pence, published June 16, that declared there would be no “second wave” of coronavirus. Since then, the daily coronavirus rates in the country has more than doubled and the daily death toll has surpassed 1,000, a level last seen months ago.
The reporters’ protest letter also mentioned a story that ran in June entitled “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism.” The letter said the piece “selectively presented facts and drew an erroneous conclusion from the underlying data” from several studies. It ended proposing specifics to differentiate the news and opinion divisions of the Journal and “making this divide clearer.”
The paper’s op-ed tries to shake off newsroom comparisons to the New York Times, where James Bennet resigned after a controversial op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) led employees to speak out against the paper’s opinion section.
“These columns will continue to promote the principles of free people and free markets,” the WSJ editorial board concludes. “Which are more important than ever in what is a culture of growing progressive conformity and intolerance.”
