THE DUAL PERSONALITY OF WALL STREET JOURNAL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403630007-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 27, 2012
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: October 1, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403630007-2
ARTICLi..
ON PAGE t4
WASHINGTON TIMES
1 October 1985
MEDIA ANALYSIS / Don Kowet
The dual personality
of Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
seems the picture of per-
fect health.
Nearly 2 million Americans
purchase the newspaper every day.
Eager advertisers queue up weeks
in advance.
But behind that ruddy-cheeked,
reassuring front page (still six col-
umns, no photographs), critics say
that The Wall Street Journal is suf-
fering from a severe case of
schizophrenia, one that threatens to
blur its identity as a newspaper.
The Journal, they argue, has
become a confusion of contradic-
tory voices, its traditional
Keynesian cant colliding against
the syllogisms of supply-side edito-
rials. Critics even claim to hear
Karl Marx babbling in the back-
ground. In mid-September, the
Soviet news agency'Ihss was crow-
ing over a Journal article alleging
that members of the Nicaraguan
resistance were committing
atrocities on unarmed Nicaraguan
civilians.
The seed of this schizophrenia
charge, said Journal editor Robert
Bartley in an interview, was sown
at "an acrimonious dinner I had
with the Washington bureau in
1980. The way I handled that was a
mistake, and it's spawned this end-
less series of stories."
At that dinner, members of the
Washington bureau accused Mr.
Bartley of heavy-handed editing of
their columns and keeping them
from his editorial pages.
Now, said Mr. Bartley, "We run
pieces by the Washington bureau
on our editorial page. You don't see
that inmost newspapers.'
Mr. Bartley called the
"schizophrenia" charge "one of the
most overdone stories in the history
of journalism."
Yet others insist that the tension
between various parts of the news-
paper existed long before 1980 -
and persisted long after it. Earlier
this year, for instance, several Jour-
n7 editors and writers reportedly
wanted the newspaper to punish-
Gregory A. Fossedal, after the
young conservative editorial writer
had turned up ',across the tatite" at
a White House Star Wars briefing,
helping White House staffers.
As late as last week, a front-page
Journal headline blared "Military
Secrecy Rises, With Pentagon Hid-
ing Billions of Outlays:' The article
charged that the Pentagon's "black
budget" (alleged secret expendi-
tures) "has shot up at least 50% for
fiscal 1986. . :'
The specific source of this rev-
elation was The Center for Defense
Information, which Journal writers
Roy J. Harris Jr. and Robert S.
Greenberger identified as "an inde-
pendent research group often
critical of administration policies
:" Critics contend that if The Cen-
ter for Defense Information is an
"independent research group,' then
so is The Institute for Policy Stud-
ies. The Center is a spinoff of the
institute, which is putative father of
the fanatic Mother Jones and a
family of left-Wing propagandists.
M r. Bartley and The Institute
for Policy Studies are
about as compatible
philosophically as Jack Kemp and
Fidel Castro.
Mr. Bartley, hired by the newspa-
per in 1962, worked as a reporter in
Chicago and Philadelphia, and as
an editorial writer in New York,
before being assigned to Washing-
ton, D.C.
At the time, recalled a former
Washington-based Journal staffer,
"everybody in Washington loved
everybody in New York. There
were no turf problems, mainly
because the editorial page never
left New York:'
Both Washington and New York
shared a common world view,
added the source, - "the old guard
Republican view of the world:'
Robert Bartley changed all that.
In 1971 Mr. Bartley moved to
New York. In 1972 he became edi-
tor of the Journal's editorial page.
He surrounded himself with con-
servative writers who were seeking
fresh solutions to the problems
plaguing the American economy. A
young Bartley protdgb named Jude
Winniski started shuttling between
New York and Washington.
"That was the first conflict that
Bartley had with Al Otten, the
Washington bureau chief;' Mr. Win-
niski recalled. "Otten protested that
'Winniski is going to Washington
once a month at least, and intrud-
ing on our turf.' "
These rumbles over turf soon
turned ideological.. Mr. Winniski
was discovering, through the work
of others, supply-side economic
theory. At first Mr. Bartley was
skeptical. It took Mr. Winniski two
years to convince him, Mr. Bartley
said later, at the rate of "an inch a
day.?
But once Mr. Bartley was con-
vinced that supply-side could be
the savior of America's sagging
economy, he would become its most
resolute prophet in print. The
Washington bureau refused to swal-
low the new editorial sacrament.
The schism was also aggravated
by Watergate.
(~~ artley decided that the
Washington establishment
was not giving Nixon a fair
shake, and more or less appointed
me to be Nixon's defense attorney
on the editorial page;' said Jude
Winniski. "That upset the guys in
the Washington bureau:'
The special prosecutor's office
stopped leaking stories to the Jour-
nal's Washington bureau, reserving
its tips for the rival Washington
Post and The New York Times.
Mr. Bartley became editor of the
newspaper in 1979.
In 1983, Peter Kann became
associate publisher and Norman
Pearlstine his new managing editor.
The Journal's internal structure
only added to the confusion. Unlike
other periodicals, such as The New
York Times, where A.M. Rosenthal
is editor-in-chief of all the newspa-
per, "Bartley and Pearlstine are on
the same level of the organizational
chart;' a source noted. "They can't
pull rank on one another. If they
have a conflict they have to take it
outside of the Journal to Dow-Jones
[owners of the Journal] and of
course that almost never happens:'
Worse, under Mr. Kann and Mr.
Pearlstine The Wall Street Journal
was about to assume a brand new
persona, swelling, say the critics,
the symptoms of psychosis.
Cofltlnu
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403630007-2