Once Ad Age issued a press release on its scoop, GM issued a statement of its own objecting to the publication “of statements and particularly sketches which have as their source confidential information and material divulged in breach of a confidential relationship and in violation of our property rights.” The statement continued,

While we have no advertising policies as such based on a situation such as this, we certainly do not believe that we should be placed in the position of impliedly approving or condoning such a practice by permitting our paid advertising to appear on one page of a publication which might at any time on another page of the same issue publish information involving our property rights and trade secrets, which have been obtained from sources in a confidential relationship with us.

The statement concluded, “To the extent that news releases are issued to the press for general publication, our practice is to make them available to everyone.”

The New York Times gave the story wider circulation. Just ten days after attorney Joseph Welch’s televised condemnation of Senator Joseph McCarthy with the historic put-down, “Have you no decency?,” the Times headlined its account “G.M. Blacklisting Wall St. Journal.”

Kilgore did not flinch. He issued a statement that concluded, “I find it hard to believe that this represents the policy of General Motors top management, because I do not think that General Motors would use this sort of pressure to express disapproval of editorial or news policies of any newspaper.”

On Monday, June 21, rather than report on the matter itself, the Journal reprinted The New York Times news story on the dispute on its own editorial page, with an introductory note that said, “Since The Wall Street Journal is one of the subjects of this story we wanted our readers to have an independent news account.”

On the Journal’s news pages, the same day’s paper carried the weekly article by reporter Williams on automobile production figures. In a tone of modest triumph, Williams’s story noted that, “While General Motors declined to give this newspaper its weekly production figures, The Wall Street Journal obtained estimates of the motor company’s output figures which it believes to be accurate. These statistics indicate that Chevrolet, Buick and Pontiac registered relatively minor declines last week from the previous week while Oldsmobile and Cadillac displayed modest advances.”

Two days later, the Journal’s editorial page again entered the fray, with an editorial headlined, “A Difference of Opinion.” In a tone following Kilgore’s lead, more in sorrow than in anger, the newspaper declared “we regret our present differences with General Motors Corporation.” The editorial said that GM’s statement “has, perhaps without realizing it, raised some very basic questions about the business of the press.” It canvassed these questions before concluding,

We do not intend to suggest that a newspaper has the right to demand that a company disclose trade secrets or that it advertise. But our business is publishing information, not withholding it. When there is news available about so vital a segment of our economy as the automobile industry we intend to be free to use our own best judgment about publishing it, undeterred by the fact that it may not be ‘authorized.’

And the fact that a company happily chooses to advertise with us cannot be allowed to put the newspaper under any obligation to the advertiser which breaches its obligation to all its readers.

We are sorry there is a difference of opinion about this. But for us to follow any other course would, we believe, make it impossible for us to fulfill our function as a newspaper.

Kilgore thus drew the lines clearly between himself and Curtice. For him, and for the Journal, this was a matter of high principle, a matter of essential institutional identity. For GM, as the Journal saw it, it was just a matter of business. The implication: there would be no compromise. Kilgore was prepared to wait out GM, confident that waiting would bring results. He wrote to his father back in South Bend, Indiana, that he thought the controversy “will blow over and I think a big company makes a mistake by getting mad and doing such things.”

But he was not unaware of the short-term cost, and, as if to underline the point, the Journal ran a brief story two days after the editorial setting out the American Newspaper Publishers Association’s annual statistics on the largest advertisers in newspapers. GM, of course, was first. Kilgore also told Time, “The Journal is not mad at anybody. I have a General Motors car—and I certainly don’t intend to sell it.”

Others were less kind to GM. Ralph Ginzburg, who later gained fame for his prosecution on obscenity charges but was then a reporter at LOOK magazine, wrote to GM’s Public Relations Department from his home in Brooklyn “[a]s an owner of a General Motors car… to express my indignation”; he stated that, “By pulling your advertising out of that paper, you’ve demonstrated that your own integrity does not measure up to that of The Wall Street Journal.”

A letter from the publisher in Tide magazine, an advertising trade journal, was even tougher on GM. Tide’s publisher called GM’s reaction “one of those backward steps in the gradually improving behavior of business”, and attributed it to “red-headed temper” a thinly-veiled swipe at Curtice personally. Tide contrasted GM’s behavior unfavorably with that of Ford Motor, which had been angered at a Journal story on its finances in late 1953, noting that in Ford’s case “no one cancelled any advertising.” Tide called for an end to the boycott. A Tide news story concluded that “Eventually, say some automotive public relations men, GM will have to back down.”