Separation of church and state

Although newspapers are constantly attacked for their politics, very few people outside the newsroom actually understand how American newspapers work. The key concept is referred to as the separation of church and state. The editorial pages are the church and the news pages are the state. Institutionally, there is a wall between them which cannot be breached. Those on one side o the wall cannot tell the other what to think or write. They are completely independent entities. Thus it’s not unusual for facts presented in news stories to be uncomfortable for the pundits on the other side of the wall. This is true whether the editorial pages lean to the right or to the left.

In today’s New York Observer, Gabriel Sherman writes an excellent and informative article about a church/state conflagration at the the Wall Street Journal. His description of the way a newspaper actually operates is enlightening:

The wall between news and opinion has traditionally been a tall and sturdy one at The Journal—with missiles lobbed over it. The editorial side has never been afraid to pick its own facts to support its arguments, even if those facts conflict with the ones reported in the paper’s news columns. Nor has it been reluctant to attack Journal reporters for writing stories that disagreed with its editorial premises, as when it downplayed the Enron scandal while Journal reporters were documenting the corrupt energy giant’s downfall.

The current dust-up occurred when the editorial page all but accused one of the news side’s top reporters of being a White House toady:

The initial wound came June 30, when The Journal’s editorial page praised reporter Glenn Simpson’s handling of the news of the Bush administration’s secret program of tracking international bank transfers. The editorial described Mr. Simpson, unlike the perfidious reporters of The New York Times, as having received the story from the Treasury Department, which was willing to “offer him the same declassified information”—because, the editorial conjectured, the administration “felt Mr. Simpson would write a straighter story than the Times.”

True, the editorial side went a bit beyond the pale in this case, but these minor turf battles between church and state are not all that unusual. But from my experience in newsrooms, which is considerable, the contempt that the WSJ’s news side holds for the editorial side is unprecedented.

“They’re wrong all the time. They lack credibility to the point that the emperor has no clothes,” said one staffer whose reporting has been at odds with an editorial crusade...
“To have Paul Gigot as our captain is bullshit,” one staffer said. “It’s not for real.”

So there you get the straight story from objective reporters at the highest level of the traditional journalism. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and by extension, the idiots in the White House, are “wrong all the time. They lack credibility to the point that the emperor has no clothes.” And Paul Gigot is full of shit.

Yep.