The Right Stuff   

Robert Bartley and his Wall Street Journal editorial page staff are out to save the world from lily-livered liberals. They don't mind if they hurt a few feelings along the way.

The facts are by now familiar. On June 17 the Wall Street Journal published an editorial titled, "Who Is Vincent Foster?" Although the first Journal editorial to cite the deputy White House counsel by name, it was one of a series focusing on the influence of the members of the Rose Law Firm, Hillary Clinton's former employer, in the new administration.

The editorial focused on the narrow question of whether Foster was honoring the Journal's Freedom of Information Act request for his picture. A silhouette with a question mark in its middle appeared in the editorial. The point? To illustrate Foster's supposed contempt for the law or, perhaps, his penchant for anonymity.

Four more Journal editorials over the next four weeks played up Foster's circumstantial connections to Jackson Stephens, an Arkansas businessman involved in the BCCI scandal, and the White House travel office imbroglio. Foster's integrity, the editorials suggested, was very much in doubt.

On July 20, Foster put a gun to his head and killed himself. "The editors of the Wall Street Journal," he wrote in his suicide note, "lie without consequence."

No one would go so far as to blame Foster's tragic death directly on the Journal. But few would deny that the Journal's "Review & Outlook" page has the power to make or break careers. Pressuring the New York Times to pull reporter Raymond Bonner out of Central America for his coverage of the 1981 El Mozote massacre in El Salvador is only one well known example of the Journal's influence. More recently, Journal editorial writers shot down Lani Guinier's nomination for the top civil rights post at the Justice Department. More striking, Journal editorialists also have the power to make or break government policy. Their most stunning accomplishment was introducing supply-side economics in the mid-1970s, but they have had other, smaller, victories since then. Last summer, for example, they forced the House of Representatives to reform a key committee procedure.

The Journal's recent victories have come during a time of change for the page. After four years of tempering its criticism of a barely tolerable Republican president, it is free to rear back and bash the liberal interlopers running Washington. During the presidential campaign, the Journal, which was at best lukewarm about George Bush, gave tentative but strategically important support to candidate Bill Clinton's economic ideas. But it wasn't long after Clinton took office that the Journal joyfully noted the new administration's failure to live up to even the paper's modest expectations. It has been hammering at the new administration ever since.

?iberal pundits have noted with growing horror the editorial page's recent show of strength. Syndicated columnist Michael Kinsley derided the paper's "hysterical response to the election of a Democratic president." Newsweek media critic Jonathan Alter complained that the Journal editorial page "resembles nothing so much as the rabidly partisan 19th-century newspapers that routinely – often brilliantly – slandered anyone on the other side of their barricades." And in a recent Washington Monthly, Bill Gifford, an associate editor for Washington's City Paper, offered this assessment of the page's standards: "[T]o ever greater degrees, the Journal steps past being obstreperous and into the realm of intellectual dishonesty; it has all but abandoned any pretense to participating in a rational argument. More and more, the page now traffics in unseemly nastiness backed by flimsy reasoning."

Far from repentant, the Journal's longtime editorial page editor, Robert L. Bartley, decided to fight back. At a September meeting of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, Bartley complained that he and the editorial page are being criticized unfairly. He said he was particularly angered by the harsh words of Kinsley and columnists Molly Ivins and Sidney Blumenthal. "These people are trying to ruin me," he protested, his voice quivering with indignation.

Some of the criticism does seem to reflect a lack of perspective. This is, after all, the Wall Street Journal editorial page. It's aggressive, unabashedly – nay gleefully – politically incorrect. It pushes its conservative world view hard. It vilifies its enemies with colorful, no-holds-barred language. While many newspapers seem content to fill their editorial page columns with balanced if bland analysis, the Journal has a more ambitious agenda: It wants to change the world.

Sensitive souls – and liberals – may be appalled, but some other editorial page editors salute Bartley and his shock troops. "Sure they are mean," says Carol R. Richards, the deputy editor of Newsday's editorial page, "but mean is good. Other papers are too civil and can be deadly dull to read."

In fact, faced with irrelevance, other editorial pages are starting to emulate the Journal's slash-and-burn style. Howell Raines, for example, has won a small mountain of praise – and criticism – for injecting some bite into the New York Times' editorial page. In recent examples of its relatively new fire-breathing style, the Times called Sen. Robert Dole (R-Kan.) "the Dark Prince of Gridlock," referred to Bill Clinton as the "populist-posing" president, and maintained that it has "long known that Potomac sleaze is a way of life for some residents of the capital."

If the Journal is seen by some as a model, perhaps the pertinent question is not "What's wrong with the Journal's editorial page?" but, "Why aren't more editorial pages as aggressive?"

Firepower

"If I had to select the one newspaper [editorial page] that has had the most impact on policy in the United States in the last 15 years, it would be the Wall Street Journal," says Joseph Sterne, the editorial page editor of Baltimore's Sun. He is not alone in his estimate. The Journal, whose daily circulation approaches two million – second only to USA Today – is widely considered to publish the best read and most influential editorial page in America. A recent poll shows that almost half of the paper's readers say "Review & Outlook" is one of the main reasons they read the Journal.

Over the years the editors have developed a style of editorial writing that sets the Journal apart. The most obvious difference is length. Journal editorials generally are twice as long as those in other papers. The page can thus offer not only opinion but new information. Journal editorial writers pride themselves on doing their own reporting, occasionally even contradicting stories found in the paper's news section.

More text also gives the editorial page more room for creative flights of fancy. In a recent editorial, "Halloween for NAFTA," the page used ghoulish imagery of hybrid creatures to spoof what it saw to be the alarmist populism dragging the treaty down. One animal features "the head of a Buchanan conjoined to the tail of a Nader," while another combines "the head of a Perotian billionaire and the flapping wings of a hundred unions."

Long-windedness does have its drawbacks. Often enough, Journal editorial writers seem lost without a compass and self-indulgently raise pet causes in editorials whose subjects are only tangentially related. In early October the New Republic published a riotous satire of the Journal editorial page that included a column titled "Who is Scoop Cohen?" The piece starts out by remarking on a possible connection between Cohen, an obscure, young White House staffer, and a plot to undermine the constitutional order. Along the way, it links Cohen with Hurricane Emily, Michael Jackson and Robert Bork's failed Supreme Court bid, and calls for a cut in the capital gains tax.

The Journal's other weapon in its battle for attention is sheer pugnacity. Many editorial pages shroud themselves in pious civility and balance. But whether it is calling the president's wife "Queen" Hillary or charging that Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's "ethics [are] festering off in a corner of the Clinton presidency," the Journal does not shy away from the pointed barb. "Put it this way," says Phil Gailey, the editorial page editor of the St. Petersburg Times, "the Journal isn't edited by Miss Manners." All of which adds up to entertaining reading, an attentive audience and the power to persuade.

And persuade it does. On April 30 it fired its first salvo at a then-obscure Clinton nominee for the Justice Department, Lani Guinier, under the banner "Clinton's Quota Queens." It was an op-ed piece by a frequent contributor, Clint Bolick, litigation director at the Institute for Justice, who said Guinier "sets the standard for innovative radicalism." In the next week the Journal followed up with a similarly disparaging editorial and column.

Reacting in large part to the Journal, editorial writers at papers across the country, talk radio hosts and senators exploded with fears and questions about Guinier. On July 4 the president withdrew her nomination. In a recent interview, Guinier said she has no doubt that without the "resources and credibility of the Journal, my opposition would never have gained the steam needed to defeat my nomination."

The Journal editorial page's real influence lies in its ability to set the agenda for conservative intellectuals and Republican politicians. "From 1978 on," says Burton Pines, the former head of the American Enterprise Institute, "the single most important intellectual influence in America's conservative community has been the Wall Street Journal editorial page." Edwin Feulner, the president of the Heritage Foundation, another right-wing Washington think tank, calls the Journal "the real standard bearer for what is conservative orthodoxy."

The most famous example of the Journal's leadership is, of course, supply-side economics. In the mid-1970s, the Journal discovered, popularized and named the theory. Originally developed by University of Chicago economist Arthur Laffer and later embellished by Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski, supply-side cut against the grain of traditional economics. Its basic tenet was simple: Cut taxes on the wealthy and their investments would stimulate the economy. The Treasury would not sustain a loss because the subsequent economic growth would generate more tax revenue, not less.

Throughout the latter years of the decade the Journal zealously promoted supply-side. In 1980, presidential candidate George Bush called it "voodoo economics," but his soon-to-be boss Ronald Reagan recognized the popular appeal of a no-pain, only-gain solution to the federal deficits that had grown during the Carter years. After Reagan was elected he embraced supply-side economics as administration policy. The Wall Street Journal had pulled off a palace coup. "The creation and implementation of the supply-side economic theory is unprecedented in journalism editorial history," says Eric Alterman, the author of "Sound & Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics." "To ask what else the Journal has done is like asking what else Einstein did besides the theory of relativity."

The Journal also has been successful in drumming up grass-roots support – with a little help from talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Last summer, for example, the Journal got excited about discharge petitions. An arcane bit of congressional procedure, the petitions work like this: a House committee can kill a piece of legislation simply by withholding it from consideration – unless a majority of members sign a discharge petition to free it. But the names on a discharge petition remain anonymous until a majority has signed, which many Republicans argued denied them their only tool for freeing legislation: shaming the Democrats.

Earlier this year Rep. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) introduced legislation to make discharge petitions public information, but he needed 218 signatures to force a vote on his proposal. Pressure from the Democratic leadership kept members from signing and the proposal stagnated. The Journal weighed in behind Inhofe on August 5 by publishing the names of members who hadn't signed his petition. This cued Limbaugh, who urged his 20 million listeners to contact those legislators who hadn't signed. On September 28 the House passed Inhofe's legislation by an overwhelming margin of 380 to 40.

Off Balance

In last summer's issue of the American Prospect, a liberal quarterly, James Fallows, the Washington editor for the Atlantic Monthly and a longtime Japan watcher, chronicled his futile efforts to get the Journal to print his response to an op-ed piece. The piece, "The Industrial Policy Hoax," by Karl Zinsmeister, argued that Japan's current economic woes proved that its centralized industrial policy was a complete failure.

Considering the Journal's devotion to free market solutions, Fallows was not surprised by the column, which was a summary of an essay that had appeared in the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review. Nevertheless, its logic seemed clearly flawed to Fallows because it failed to account for Japan's trade surplus and other economic achievements; he wanted to point out some of the advantages of Japan's planned industrial policy to the Journal's influential business readers.

Despite numerous attempts, Fallows, along with 32 academics and journalists who signed his letter, was rebuffed. This left him to conclude that the Journal's "editorial pages daily reinforce the importance of free minds, free markets, and free debate. I now know what I have long suspected: that the commitment to free debate actually means, 'as long as you agree with us.' "

Fallows' complaint against the Journal editorial page is a common one. But it's also misconceived. Journal editorialists are the first to admit they make no attempt to tell both sides of an issue. Their function, they say, is to provide a bully pulpit for conservatives. Paul Gigot, a page board member, says liberals have plenty of other places to hawk their views. Says Bartley, "Without us, the conservative community would be very poorly served indeed."

And, say some observers, the paper's unwillingness to offer significant space to opposing views is a welcome policy. "The balanced editorial page," says Everette E. Dennis, executive director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University, "is a real snore." Newsday's Carol Richards, who used to work at USA Today, which does run opposing views, says newspapers that strive for perfect balance usually end up with "a mushy middle."

Now that more and more cities have only one daily paper, many editors feel compelled to present more than one viewpoint. "If you run out of a big city with a lot of papers like the Journal does, you have a different psychological obligation," says Los Angeles Times Editorial Page Editor Tom Plate. "In a one-newspaper town like mine, if you write that so-and-so is doing a bad job, you could blow that guy away. You have a sense of responsibility. You are constrained."

The Journal's audience – mostly white, college-educated, middle-aged men whose household incomes average $169,500 – is national, and therefore Bartley has no such constraints. He has staffed his crew with nine men and women who, like him, lean starboard. Four are based in New York, including Dorothy Rabinowitz, the Journal's political correctness watchdog, and Dan Henninger, the deputy editorial page editor, who worked for the New Republic and the National Observer before joining the page. The other five are scattered. Gigot is in Washington, D.C., Tim Ferguson is in Los Angeles, Cait Murphy is in Hong Kong, and George Melloan and David Brooks are in Brussels. There also is a board of contributors, known informally as "the brain trust," which includes neoc?nservative godfather Irving Kristol and liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Over the years the Journal has published liberal columnists – Michael Kinsley, who stopped writing for the paper in 1987; Hodding Carter III and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, who were phased out in 1991; and now Journal Executive Washington Editor Albert R. Hunt.

All of the Journal's nine editorial page staff members are white. Considering the preoccupation with the diversity issue at other editorial boards – the Los Angeles Times is 50 percent minority and 50 percent female, USA Today boasts representatives from almost every U.S. ethnic group, and the New York Times just hired a black columnist – the makeup of the Journal's editorial page is stubbornly out of step.

According to Gigot, the writers are so philosophically aligned that – unlike editorial boards at other prestigious papers that take pride in the often intense level of debate – there are rarely any fundamental disagreements. "We all agree on first principles," Gigot says. (These first principles are neatly summarized in the motto of the paper's founding editor, Charles Dow: "Free men and free markets.")

This harmony makes it unnecessary for the writers to attend daily editorial board meetings. Instead, they gather in a common area in Henninger's office as events warrant, brainstorm and divide up the work. Writers are given a great deal of independence – but all editorials must pass Bartley's inspection.

If the page has a major weakness, say even its fans, it's that it's too predictable. "All you need to do is figure out what the subject matter is, and you'll know what they are going to say," says a deputy editorial page editor at a large midwestern paper who requested anonymity. Says Richard Aregood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Philadelphia Daily News' editorial page, "Just once, I'd like to pick up their page and read, 'Oh, yes, [liberal Ohio Democratic] Sen. [Howard] Metzenbaum came up with a good idea the other day.' " Aregood shouldn't hold his breath. "Sen. Metzenbaum is as capable of coming up with a good idea as my dog is," retorts Rabinowitz.

Too Far

In the Journal's centennial edition in 1989, Vermont Connecticut Royster, Bartley's predecessor and mentor at the paper, complained that the editorial page had assumed too "rough" a tone. Bartley readily admits he took Royster's already tart page in 1972 and made it meaner. "I added what I call muzzle-velocity," he explains. Tough talk, he says, is the only way to attract attention to the page.

Bartley's critics say he goes too far.

In his widely read dissection of the Vincent Foster editorials, Michael Kinsley, perhaps the page's most persistent foe, accused the Journal of using a "viciously unfair and hypocritical" standard for its editorials. St. Petersburg Times editor Gailey echoes such sentiments. "My God," he says, "I would have let [Foster] have a burial and let the family mourn before I kept raising new questions and dragging his reputation through the dirt." The deputy editor at the midwestern daily says the Foster example is one of many. "They are mean, and mean about little things," the editor says. "They pick targets that are too small for the level of harshness."

The Journal editorial page's relentlessness is perhaps exemplified by its strident series on the April 1992 Los Angeles riots. An editorial written while the embers were still smoldering in South Central begins by tearing apart apologists for the rioters, those who argued that the youths' violent actions were natural (read: forgivable) outgrowths of poverty and frustration. But the piece then goes manic, blaming, in a disjointed litany, the page's traditional nemeses:

"One important root of the drug problem in the lowlands of Los Angeles today, we have not the least doubt, lies in the glorification of drugs centered in the same city's uplands in the pop culture of the 1960s. Similarly, the proliferation of fatherless children by mothers who trace their lineage to Baptist and AME churches is in no small part explained by the casual attitude toward sexuality harbored in and proselytized from the same precincts. Nor is this trend likely to be reversed by an easy line on condoms and abortion, or for that matter by militant feminism or government funding for the Mapplethorpes among us."

The Journal published a half dozen editorials on the riots. Nowhere did it convey any revulsion over the beating of Rodney King, a man the page called a "lowlife."

Tom Plate of the Los Angeles Times says that such lack of compassion comes from Bartley's practice of hiring only like-minded thinkers. "If you are driven by ideology," Plate says, "you are wearing tinted glasses and you cannot really see the true panoply of American life."

Some critics argue that the Journal's editorial positions are driven more by political expediency than any coherent set of principles. In early 1990, for example, the Journal frequently applauded Annette Polly Williams, a liberal, black state representative in Wisconsin, and supported her reelection. Williams, state chair for Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns, is an unlikely person to be lionized by the Journal. However, because she had pushed an experimental private school voucher program through the state legislature, Journal editorialists decided to overlook her politics. They have continued to do so – even though Williams recently became the "general of education" for the Black Panther Militia, a radical separatist group, in Milwaukee.

Bill Gifford's recent Washington Monthly essay, which summarizes the most commonly made arguments against the page, charges Bartley and his staff with hypocrisy. Some of the evidence he presents is damning. For example, writes Gifford, when Anita Hill passed a lie detector test during Clarence Thomas' confirmation fight, the editorial page duly noted, "Lie detector tests are so unreliable they are rarely allowed as evidence in court." But less than a year later, when Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh was preparing to seek the indictment of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, the Journal said that Weinberger was not involved because he "has taken and passed a lie detector test on the matter."

Ben Bagdikian, the former dean of Berkeley's graduate school of journalism and a former Washington Post ombudsman, rejects the idea that the Journal editorial page is two-faced. The page, he says, can be caught dancing on different sides of procedural questions, but when it comes to long-term policies and principles, it is steadfast. For example, it has praised the Clinton administration for its work on NAFTA and for supporting Boris Yeltsin. Says Bagdikian, "The page fights a strategic battle. It wants to defeat social legislation and liberal ideas and it uses any tool it can. Switching positions is completely consistent for them."

When asked about the issue, Bartley responds, "Of course, if you go over everything that has been published in a daily newspaper for 20 years you'll find some discrepancies, but we've tried to be as consistent as possible. "

The risk of hard-line opinion-making is that in attempting to provoke, the Journal can fall short and make itself a target for ridicule. Last March, for example, after the assassination of abortion doctor David Gunn by a right-to-life advocate, Deputy Editor Henninger wrote an editorial titled "No Guardrails." Henninger linked the murder to a general decline in American civility and blamed one of the Journal's favorite culprits: the 1960s. "We think it is possible to identify the date when the U.S., or more precisely when many people within it, began to tip off the emotional tracks," he wrote. "A lot of people won't like this date, because it makes their political culture culpable for what has happened. The date is August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention found itself sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam War movement."

The Wall Street Journal considered the editorial important enough to take out a full page advertisement in the New York Times, reprinting it with the comment, "The views expressed are relevant to our times and our troubles, and merit thoughtful consideration for all who seek solutions." While "No Guardrails" elicited an outpouring of response from Journal readers, it barely drew a yawn from liberals. The editors of the New Yorker sniffed, "It is a sad day for American conservatism when the editors of the Wall Street Journal are reduced to buying space in somebody else's newspaper to plead for abuse."

But is the Journal partisan to the point of irresponsibility? Gifford and Newsweek's Alter may equate the Journal with William Randolph Hearst's inflammatory and unscrupulous yellow journalism, but many maintain that the paper is well within its bounds.

"When you talk about the 19th century era, it comes with a lot of baggage," says Ed Jones, president of the National Conference of Editorial Writers and managing editor of the Free Lance-Star in Fredricksburg, Virginia. "In the old days papers were partisan representatives of the parties and that whole view spilled into the news columns. The Journal is old-fashioned in the sense that they have a particular viewpoint, but you will never find it on their news pages."

William Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute agrees. "The strong opinions of the editorial page would only be a problem," he says, "if they influenced the paper's news coverage – and they don't." l