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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged The Wall Street Journal

1. December 14, 2010 11:12 AM

   “Uncertainty” Trotted Out in the Journal

   Business code for "we may not get our way"

   By Ryan Chittum

   If there's one thing our titans of industry can't stand, it's uncertainty. We've seen that excuse trotted out over and over again to explain why they're not hiring and why they ought get their way politically. The Journal goes page one today with a story on the hash that our increasingly sclerotic political system has made of the tax code,...

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2. April 6, 2011 12:05 PM

   “Don’t Call it a Paywall”

   A panel discussion with NYT’s Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Janet Robinson

   By Lauren Kirchner

   On Tuesday night, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and New York Times Company president and CEO Janet Robinson spoke at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in a panel discussion titled “The Future of Media, Publishing, and Paid Content.” The title was perhaps a bit too grand, as the discussion, not surprisingly, mainly focused on the Times’s new...

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3. August 10, 2011 06:17 PM

   SmartMoney Makes a Hash of the Downgrade

   Says borrowers face higher rates, despite sinking Treasury yields

   By Ryan Chittum

   Speaking of the Journal overhyping the S&P downgrade of U.S. Treasurys, its sister magazine SmartMoney has a doozy of a personal-finance piece out today that trips all over itself. Here's the headline: Post-Downgrade, Higher Rates for Borrowers Treasurys have fallen sharply since the downgrade, so why would borrowers rates be going up? The story can't even make it to the...

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4. October 12, 2011 06:19 PM

   The Guardian Unearths a Wall Street Journal Scandal

   The paper claims the scalp of a Journal publisher and points to deeper problems

   By Ryan Chittum

   Read this Wall Street Journal story from this morning on the resignation of its European edition's publisher. What the Journal reports is bad enough: That the publisher, Andrew Langhoff, "personally pressured two reporters into writing articles featuring" a Journal customer. But, now read The Guardian from this afternoon. The problems at the Journal, we find, are much worse than the...

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5. August 10, 2011 02:44 PM

   The Journal Hypes the Downgrade

   A three-day-old story gets the overkill treatment

   By Ryan Chittum

   That Standard & Poor's downgraded the U.S. from AAA to AA+ is a big story no doubt. But The Wall Street Journal on Monday went overboard, devoting almost all of the first seven pages of the paper and a good chunk of the Money & Investing section to the downgrade, which happened three days earlier. Bannered across six columns atop...

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6. September 1, 2011 08:17 PM

   The Wall Street Journal and the Waffle House

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal has a terrific ahed today on the Waffle House and how the company goes all out during natural disasters to stay open. The company, which stays open 24 hours a day 365 days a year, doesn't like being shut down, even when a tornado or hurricane has ripped through. The Journal reports that in the aftermath...

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7. August 31, 2012 11:07 AM

   The Wall Street Journal lets Paul Ryan go all but unchecked

   Misleading claims get ignored or given he said-she said treatment

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal's coverage of Paul Ryan's speech to the Republican National Convention Wednesday, which was packed with one hypocrisy and misleading claim after another, has been awfully weak. On page one the day after, its story doesn't bother to fact check a single one of Ryan's claims, though even Wolf Blitzer knew immediately that many were bogus. Worse,...

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8. January 10, 2011 01:43 PM

   The Wall Street Journal Plays Stenographer to Chris Christie

   By Ryan Chittum

   Is this a news story in The Wall Street Journal or a press release from the Office of the Governor of New Jersey? You make the call: Gov. Chris Christie took New Jersey by storm in his first year as governor, thrilling Republicans by taking on entrenched Democratic power centers in the name of fiscal responsibility. But with the state...

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9. November 4, 2011 07:22 PM

   The Wall Street Journal Pooh-Poohs Bank Transfer Day

   By Ryan Chittum

   This Wall Street Journal story on Bank Transfer Day, the push to get people to move their money out of fee-gouging, too-big-to-fail banks and into credit unions and small local banks, is an exercise in point-missing. It says that it's not so easy to move your money to a credit union, and you can't really do it in one day,...

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10. August 2, 2011 10:06 PM

    The Wall Street Journal: Murdochification Watch

    The paper runs a thinly sourced, and quickly denied, scoop on non-News Corp. bribes

    By Ryan Chittum

    Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, unsurprisingly, hasn't done a whole lot of digging on the News Corp. hacking scandal. Or perhaps it has dug, but it's been so far behind on the story that it hasn't been able to advance it. But today it has a scoop on the hacking scandal—one that implicates a non-News Corp. paper, suggests in the...

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11. October 12, 2011 06:35 PM

    Wall Street Journal Europe Sourcing Was Unusual

    And the CEO of the firm involved is a former Journal executive

    By Ryan Chittum

    We now know, thanks to reporting in the both The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal itself, that Andrew Langloff, recently resigned publisher of The Wall Street Journal Europe pressured Journal reporters to write about a company called Executive Learning Partnership that bought cheap copies of the paper to boost its circulation. We also know that the WSJE subsequently ran...

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12. October 13, 2011 11:10 AM

    WSJ Backs Up The Guardian on European Scandal

    Its reporting disputes its parent company's denials

    By Ryan Chittum

    Last night, Dow Jones slammed The Guardian's report on wrongdoing at The Wall Street Journal Europe, calling it "replete with untruths and malign interpretations" and claiming that someone The Guardian called a whistleblower wasn't one because "that employee was first investigated by the company because of concerns around his business dealings." This morning, The Wall Street Journal's news side redeems...

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13. April 19, 2011 10:40 AM

    WSJ Column Raises Ethics Issues

    By Felix Salmon

    Last week, Ira Stoll took issue with Dennis Berman's column on SharesPost and SecondMarket, on the grounds that Berman lied about his own identity: he pretended to be his late grandmother. Stoll likened Berman's behavior to Project Veritas's entrapment of NPR—something the WSJ itself said failed to "meet the ethical standards of elite journalistic institutions, including of course The Wall...

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14. August 3, 2011 06:38 PM

    WSJ Fronts Amazon’s Tax Avoidance Strategy

    Color-coded maps tell employees which states are safe, bad, and neutral

    By Ryan Chittum

    It's nice to see The Wall Street Journal take a page-one look at Amazon's aggressive tax avoidance, something I've written about quite a bit here at The Audit. Its story establishes even more clearly that avoiding sales taxes is a core part of the company's business and has been from the beginning. The Journal reports that Amazon went to great...

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15. December 2, 2011 11:49 AM

    WSJ Gives Minimum Info on Front Group

    An astroturf group gets a hit on the minimum wage

    By Ryan Chittum

    Here's how The Wall Street Journal framed its report yesterday on several states raising the minimum wage next year: Small businesses, already on a tight budget, are looking for new ways to cut costs as they brace for minimum wage increases in several U.S. states next month. The Journal's first anecdote is from a Vermont businessman who was one of...

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16. April 22, 2011 03:09 AM

    WSJ Goes Page One With Another Gold “Record”

    But in real terms the price is more than a third below its peak three decades ago

    By Ryan Chittum

    It's time for another round of hyped and misleading "gold hits a record" stories. Gold closed at $1,500 for the first time yesterday, and The Wall Street Journal puts it on page one under the headline "World Is Bitten by the Gold Bug." Here's the lede: Gold continued its upward march in a time of global financial tumult, closing above...

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17. January 5, 2011 01:48 PM

    WSJ Keeps an Eye on Bank Fees

    Annual fees for debit cards could be next

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Wall Street Journal does a good job today on how banks are plotting new fees to get around the clampdown on their old ones, which included abuses like the overdraft racket and interchange-fee gouging that made them tens of billions of super-high-margin money a year. The biggest eye-raiser here is that the banks are talking about charging an annual...

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18. May 2, 2011 12:11 PM

    WSJ Notes That Commodities Go Down, Too

    By Ryan Chittum

    The business press is much more sensitive to signs of price increases than it is to signs of price decreases. So it's good to see The Wall Street Journal take note of the fact that some critical commodities have been plunging in recent weeks. The months-long rally in commodity prices has sparked fears it could ignite inflation or cripple consumer...

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19. February 3, 2011 12:04 PM

    WSJ on Harry Markopolos’ Whistleblowing Shell Companies

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting scoop this morning on a lawsuit accusing banks of gouging pensioners and state governments on foreign-exchange trades. This lawsuit has whistleblowers, shell companies in Delaware formed to profit on the suits, and Harry Markopolos—of Shoulda Listened to Me About Madoff fame—is behind it all. California, Florida, Virginia, and Tennessee are investigating whether...

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20. November 4, 2011 05:25 PM

    WSJ On MF Global and Window Dressing

    By Ryan Chittum

    It looks like Jon Corzine's MF Global tried to hide how much risk it was taking on by temporarily lowering borrowing at the end of each quarter, a good Wall Street Journal story shows. This isn't a source-driven story. It's based on the paper's own analysis of financial filings, which shows that MF Global's end-of-quarter debt levels were significantly below...

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