The Wall Street Journal defended publishing a letter by Trump full of obviously false claims about the 2020 election
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
- The WSJ hit back at critics after it published a letter by Trump that included several falsehoods.
- Its opinion section published, without challenge, Trump's assertion the 2020 election was rigged.
- After considerable backlash the WSJ defended the gesture, saying Trump's "monomania is news."
The Wall Street Journal defended itself from critics after it published a letter from former President Donald Trump containing a slew of false statements about the 2020 election.
Trump's letter was published Wednesday by the paper's opinion section and ran to nearly 600 words. It falsely claimed that "the election was rigged" and listed numerous supposed irregularities, which the Journal published without correction.
The letter was itself a response to a Wall Street Journal editorial discussing the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's decision on ballot counting rules, which mentioned how President Joe Biden convincingly won in the state.
There was an immediate backlash to Trump's letter. The next day, the paper defended the move in an editorial titled "The Facts on Trump's Fraud Letter."
It argued that that the letter was inherently newsworthy, and hit out at its critics as "the progressive parsons of the press" and "media clerics."
The backlash came from media and ethics commentators, as well as, according to CNN's Reliable Sources newsletter, some of the paper's own reporters.
"I think it's very disappointing that our opinion section continues to publish misinformation that our news side works so hard to debunk," one unnamed WSJ reporter told the outlet.
The comment continued a longstanding animosity towards the paper's opinion section from its news staff, members of which have accused the opinion section of lax standards and a willingness to echo Trump talking points.
Walter Schaub, the former director of the Office for Government Ethics, encouraged his Twitter followers to cancel their subscriptions, calling the paper a "dangerous fascist propaganda outlet."
-Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) October 27, 2021
Also on Twitter, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen saw the letter as an example of how, in his view, "the WSJ opinion section is one of the leading institutions of the [Republican] Party," which he says functions by "flooding the zone with shit."
-Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) October 28, 2021
The paper did not respond to requests for comment from media reporters such as the Washington Post's Jeremy Barr.
But it came out swinging in its Thursday response.
"[Trump's] 2020 monomania is news, and it reflects on his fitness for 2024," the editorial read.
"We trust our readers to make up their own minds about his statement," it continues. "And we think it's news when an ex-President who may run in 2024 wrote what he did, even if (or perhaps especially if) his claims are bananas."
It went on to debunk many of Trump's claims, saying "it's difficult to respond to everything" due to the rate at which Trumpworld produces falsehoods.
Bill Grueskin, a journalism professor and former WSJ managing editor, told the Washington Post that opinion editors do not normally just publish letters containing known falsehoods without intervention.
"If someone is going to spout a bunch of falsehoods, the editor usually feels an obligation to trim those out, or to publish a contemporaneous response," Grueskin said. In this case, the Wall Street Journal waited until after considerable backlash.
Ultimately, the paper concluded, there is no evidence backing up Trump's claims of having won the election.
The paper did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment
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