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Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Gerard Baker can empathize with President Trump — and I’m not even talking about shared political views. Both men have a leak problem.
Baker on Wednesday had the pleasure of reading excerpts of his own emails in the New York Times, the latest instance of internal documents or discussions related to Trump being disclosed to rival news outlets.
In the messages obtained by the Times, Baker complained about a draft of the Journal’s front-page report on Trump’s Tuesday night rally in Phoenix.
“Sorry. This is commentary dressed up as news reporting,” Baker, formerly a conservative columnist at Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London, wrote in one email. “Could we please just stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism?” he added in a follow-up.
Just a few weeks ago, Politico obtained and posted the previously unpublished, full transcript of an interview between Trump and Journal reporters, led by Baker. The leak of the transcript seemed designed to embarrass the editor; in one exchange, Baker told Ivanka Trump, “It was nice to see you out in Southampton a couple weeks ago.” At another point, Baker accepted the president’s gratitude for a positive editorial, though he did note that “colleagues write those.”
Newspapers’ news and editorial departments are separate — a division that Baker said he was enforcing in the emails published on Wednesday.
An earlier Baker email leaked to BuzzFeed in January. In that message, he told other Journal editors not to describe countries subject to Trump’s travel ban as majority-Muslim nations.
“It’s very loaded,” Baker said of the label. “The reason they’ve been chosen is not because they’re majority Muslim but because they’re on the list of countries Obama identified as countries of concern.”
Baker quickly backtracked, under criticism from journalists inside and outside his newsroom. Perhaps fomenting pressure to get Baker to change his mind about use of “majority-Muslim” and the other issues was the whole point of the leaks. White House aides seem to use leaks as one way to influence the thinking of their media-obsessed boss.
President Trump on Aug. 10 said there are two kinds of leaks plaguing his administration. Some leaks are “serious” while others happen because staffers “are fighting for love.” (The Washington Post)
Anyway, Baker hosted a town-hall-style meeting with staffers a couple weeks later, using the occasion to defend the Journal’s Trump coverage as sufficiently tough while suggesting other publications have become overly adversarial.
We know what happened at the meeting because details leaked to multiple news outlets.
Softer phrasing appears to be a common thread in Baker’s editing. Recall he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on New Year’s Day that he would “be careful about using the word ‘lie’” to describe false statements made by Trump — a declaration of caution that struck some journalists as flimsy and perhaps set the stage for the scrutiny and leaking that has followed.
The New York Times’s Michael M. Grynbaum described how Baker changed the Journal’s report on Trump’s Phoenix rally:
The draft, in its lead paragraph, described the Charlottesville, Va., protests as “reshaping” Mr. Trump’s presidency. That mention was removed.
The draft also described Mr. Trump’s Phoenix speech as “an off-script return to campaign form,” in which the president “pivoted away from remarks a day earlier in which he had solemnly called for unity.” That language does not appear in the article’s final version.
The rally article, as published, was a straight recounting of the president’s remarks that differed slightly from accounts published in the Times and The Washington Post.
The Post, for example, called Trump’s address “freewheeling” — an adjective that resembled the “off-script” description Baker struck from the Journal’s report.
Offering background on Charlottesville, the Journal reported that Trump “initially oscillated between condemning the white supremacists and saying that ‘both sides’ were to blame.” The Times, meanwhile, reported that the president’s response had been characterized by a delay in condemning white supremacists, rather than an oscillation, writing that “Trump on Tuesday glibly ticked off a list of racist groups that he had been urged to explicitly denounce, and ultimately did two days after the clashes.”
Here are the first few paragraphs of each paper’s report, side by side.
Phrasing matters, but consider, also, what James Warren wrote in an article about the scoop-for-scoop rivalry between The Post and the Times for the September issue of Vanity Fair: “You have to wonder what ever happened to The Wall Street Journal, which ought to be in the same league when it comes to covering Trump but is not even close.”
If the Journal were breaking news about the Trump White House at the rate of its biggest competitors, Baker’s quibbles with reporters’ word choices might seem less significant.