US: NYT and WSJ at loggerheads
Dec 15
A public row has broken out between the prominent American newspapers The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, after the former accused the latter of “tilting rightward” under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
In an opinion piece yesterday Times journalist David Carr described the Journal, the largest-circulation newspaper in the US, as a publication increasingly used to advance a conservative agenda. Carr said that there had been a “pro-business, anti-government shift in the news pages” in the two years since News Corporation acquired the Journal as part of its takeover of the publishing and indexing firm Dow Jones.
Carr cited examples of what he argued was evidence of the editorialisation of the Journal’s news pages, pointing to the Journal’s obituary for the late US senator Ted Kennedy, which contained critical comments about Kennedy made by the conservative polemic Rush Limbaugh. He also quoted several current and former employees of the Journal, suggesting that there was a developing view among many working at the publication that “ideology was baked into the coverage through headlines, assignments and editing”.
The Journal has long held conservative positions on its opinion pages, but maintains that it remains objective in its general news reporting.
In a short statement released last night, the Journal’s managing editor Robert Thomson fired back, accusing the Times of becoming bitter about “the rise of an increasingly successful rival” and describing the attacks as “unsubstantiated”. He said that the Times was interested only in pursuing a vendetta against the Journal.
“The attack follows the extraordinary actions of Mr Bill Keller, the Executive Editor, who, among other things, last year wrote personally and at length to a prize committee casting aspersions on Journal journalists and journalism. Whether it be in the quest for prizes or in the disparagement of competitors, principle is but a bystander at The New York Times.”
Keller later responded that he regarded the initial Times article as “scrupulously fair”.
The Journal has a circulation of 2.1 million, a figure which includes 400,000 online subscribers. The Times has a circulation of approximately 900,000, but by a considerable distance has the highest online readership of any newspaper in the US.
Cyril Washbrook December 15th 2009