A scoop that raises questions

The prospect of war makes people edgy.

So Thursday, when the Wall Street Journal scored a significant coup in its coverage of the ongoing slide toward conflict with Iraq, eyebrows arched and critical throats were cleared. Fingers almost automatically began typing, “In an event that raises disturbing questions.... “ (That’s the higher punditry’s equivalent of “Round up the usual suspects.”)

Why this, instead of the usual mixture of admiration and envy that greets another news organization’s success? It all had to do with the novel nature of the story that led the Journal’s front page that day.

Under the headline, “European Leaders Declare Support for U.S. on Iraq: Letter From Eight Countries Isolates France, Germany, Smooths Path for a War,” Marc Champion of the paper’s London bureau reported, “In a broad statement supporting the U.S. in its effort to strip Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, eight European leaders signed an op-ed article publicly calling for unity with the U.S. position, further shifting the global political calculus toward support for war.”

By any measure that’s an important story -- so important, in fact, that it also led the New York Times’ Friday editions. But Champion’s second paragraph began with a sentence that some felt pushed the Journal’s scoop into the realm of the problematic: “The article, published in today’s Wall Street Journal, was signed by the leaders of Spain, Britain, Italy, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Denmark and Portugal.”

While op-ed page articles sometimes come in over the transom, most are solicited by the section’s editors. As Champion also reported in his news story, that was the case with the Journal’s statement by the European leaders.

So, the instant question became: Had the paper orchestrated a declaration of support for a Bush administration policy its own editorial page has unstintingly supported, and then reported the event as news?

“It reminds one of the old adage: If you don’t like the news, go out and make some yourself,” said Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. “It’s a little funny that it’s such a Bushy paper and this turned out to be such a nice little coup for the Bush administration. The Journal’s editorial page, which is so demonstrably pro-Bush, must be highly gratified by their own instrumentality in this matter.”

Conversations with Paul E. Steiger, the Journal’s managing editor, and Paul A. Gigot, its editorial page editor, revealed that what occurred Thursday was one of those unforeseen collisions between journalistic enterprise and good fortune.

“I think we’re being accused of having good news judgment,” Gigot said. “It’s true. We’ve committed news and I plead guilty to practicing journalism.”

Steiger recalled that “the world knows that famous line about the Wall Street Journal -- you get two newspapers for the price of one. Our edit page and our news columns go their own separate ways. But this is simply a case where the edit page did exactly what they’re supposed to be doing.”

According to Gigot, the unusual op-ed piece originated with an idea by Mike Gonzalez, the deputy editorial editor of the Journal’s European edition. “After the flap about France and Germany opposing the U.S. on Iraq,” Gigot said, “Mike acted as a journalist and called the offices of two other heads of state, [Italy’s] Silvio Berlusconi and [Spain’s] Jose Maria Aznar, offering them the opportunity to do separate pieces on their positions. Aznar’s office apparently got the idea that they should see if they could get other prime ministers and heads of state on board. They took it from there and got [Britain’s] Tony Blair involved and it all snowballed. At that point, our only concern was to make sure it ran in our paper.”

In fact, the signatories decided they wanted the piece published simultaneously in their own countries, and thus, it also appeared in Thursday’s Times of London. “They got a freebie from Downing Street after we’d done all the heavy lifting,” Gigot chuckled ruefully.

Steiger said he first became aware of the statement early Thursday, when he received a call from Fred Kemp, the Journal’s European editor. “He said that the edit page had this and that he thought it would make news. It took us about a nanosecond to conclude that we should do a news story.”

According to Steiger, “The only issue raised by our edit page’s involvement for me was the obvious one that we had to convey that in the story, which we did in an appropriate way. There are many ways something like that could happen, but at the end of the day how it happened is not as important as that it did happen.”

The disclosure of the editorial pages’ role was a given from the start, Gigot said. “This was hardly a covert operation,” he added. “We intended from the beginning to inform our readers. The fact is, we solicit op-ed pieces all the time from the most newsworthy subjects possible in every field. If Jack Welch wants to tell our readers how he plans to solve his ethical problems at GE, it’s news and we’ll run it.”

Other newspapers face the same issue: Last Saturday, for example, the Los Angeles Times published a front-page news story about the Pentagon quietly considering the use of nuclear weapons in Iraq that was based on a piece by analyst William Arkin that was published the next day in the Opinion section.

Former Times editor Michael Parks, who now directs the journalism program at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications, said many analogous situations immediately come to mind.

“If somebody from the administration gets on one of those invited Sunday-morning chat shows on the networks, what they say is fair game for news reporting, including by the network that hosts the show,” Parks said. “Did the person go on intending to make news? Yes, but the person hosting the show was hoping to get news and not just to illuminate their audience. It just gets a little messy when they make more news than you expect, as happened here.”

Even with disclosure, Berkeley’s Schell said, “you wish they’d commissioned the piece and let somebody else report it. It’s a bit odd to call a press conference and then write about it. Still, there is a value in a catalytic question that galvanizes a collective answer. More than anything else, this signals the new power of a globalized media.”

If that creates new risks, Gigot is willing to take them.

“If any media critics want to give us credit for orchestrating the views of eight different European leaders,” he said, “we’ll take it.”